The males of the firefly, a small luminous
beetle, more like a wandering star than a winged insect, appeared on the first
warm black nights of Ardis, one by one, here and there, then in a ghostly
multitude, dwindling again to a few individuals as their quest came to its
natural end. Van watched them with the same pleasurable awe he had experienced
as a child, when, lost in the purple crepuscule of an Italian hotel garden, in
an alley of cypresses, he supposed they were golden ghouls or the passing
fancies of the garden...
In this our dry report on Van Veen's early, too
early love, for Ada Veen, there is neither reason, nor room for metaphysical
digression. Yet, let it be observed (just while the lucifers fly and throb, and
an owl hoots - also most rhythmically - in the nearby park) that Van, who at the
time had still not really tasted the Terror of Terra - vaguely attributing it,
when analyzing his dear unforgettable Aqua's torments, to pernicious fads and
popular fantasies - even then, at fourteen, recognized that the old myths, which
willed into helpful being a whirl of worlds (no matter how silly and mystical)
and situated them within the gray matter of the star-suffused heavens,
contained, perhaps, a glowworm of strange truth...
'Ada, our ardors and arbors' - a dactylic
trimeter that was to remain Van Veen's only contribution to Anglo-American
poetry - sang through his brain. Bless the starling and damn the
stardust! (1.12)
From Lord Byron's Cain (Act Two, scene
I):
CAIN: Why, I have seen the
fire-flies and fire-worms
Sprinkle
the dusky groves and the green banks
In the
dim twilight, brighter than yon world
Which
bears them.
LUCIFER: Thou hast seen
both worms and worlds,
Each
bright and sparkling—what dost think of them?
CAIN: That they are beautiful in their
own sphere,
And that
the night, which makes both beautiful,
The
little shining fire-fly in its flight,
And
the immortal star in its great
course,
Must both
be guided.
Ada was the name of
Lord Byron's daughter.
On a picture in
Marina's bedroom her brother Ivan Durmanov wears a bayronka:
it [Kim Beauharnais's photograph
of Van and Ada] was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up
in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a
bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed
hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a
vivisectional alibi. (2.7)
According to Chekhov
(whom critics compared to a vivisector), "Byron was as smart as a hundred
devils; nevertheless, his talent has survived intact".* Avel' i
Kavel' (Abel and Cain, as twisted by a child) are mentioned in
Chekhov's story Tri goda (Three Years, 1895). One of the characters in
"Three Years" is Zhozefina Iosifovna Milan (Panaurov's second
wife). Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother, Marina loved to identify herself with
famous beauties - Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.
(1.5)
Zhozefina Milan's
husband, Panaurov explains love as a manifestation of electric
force:
Panaurov expounded
didactically what being in love was, and what it was due to:
'We have in it
an example of the action of electricity,' he said in French addressing the lady.
'Every man has in his skin microscopic glands which contain currents of
electricity. If you meet a person whose currents are parallel with your own,
then you get love'. (chapter IV)
After the L disaster in
the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity is banned on
Antiterra (1.3).
*a letter of Nov. 25,
1892, to Suvorin
Alexey
Sklyarenko