Having completed his prep-school education in
America, Van Veen goes up to
Chose
University in
England. (Ada,
1.27)
In French chose means what
veshch' means in Russian: "thing". As I pointed out before,
Mayakovski's poem "The Brooklyn Bridge" (1925) ends in the
exclamation:
Bruklinskiy most - eto
veshch'!
The Brooklyn Bridge is a
thing!
VN's alma mater, Cambridge, has "bridge"
in it.
The Brooklyn Bridge in the poem
of VN's "late namesake" is across the Hudson (instead of East
River). "Goodson River" is mentioned by Lucette as she dines with Van
and Ada at 'Ursus':
...please, don't let me
swill (hlestat') champagne any more, not only because I will jump into
Goodson River if I can't hope to have you, and not only because of the physical
red thing - your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen'ka
('darling,' more than 'darling'), it looked to me at least eight inches long
-'
'Seven and a half,'
murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired. (2.8)
Things and bridges are part of Ada's metaphysics:
An individual's life consisted of certain classified
things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which
formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such
as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things
occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate
succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys
of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture;
it almost never happened, though.
...Her plump, stickily glistening lips
smiled.
(When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I
always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine
au miel; so much better in French.)
The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale,
translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love's bread and
butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.
'Real thing?' he asked.
'Tower,' she answered. (1.12)
After the dinner at 'Ursus' and the debauche à trois on the following
morning:
She was soon ready, and
they [Van and Ada] kissed tenderly in their hallway,
between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
'Tower,' she murmured in reply to
his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in
the past, when checking up on happiness: 'And you?'
'A regular ziggurat.' (2.8)
Ursus is Latin for "bear". In
his poem Pro eto ("About It," 1923) Mayakovski imagines that he is a
Polar bear drifting on an ice floe through St. Petersburg.
In his letters to Louise Colet Gustave
Flaubert (who famously said: "Madame Bovary, c'est
moi") called himself a bear ("I'm a bear and I shall stay in my den").
On Antiterra, Flaubert's Madame
Bovary is known as Floeberg's Ursula (1.20).
In his Parizhskaya poema (The Paris
Poem, 1943) VN says:
A mosty... Eto schast'ye
naveki, schast'ye chyornoy vody
"And the bridges. This is happinness forever,
the happinness of black water".
In Chapter Four of The Gift VN
mentiones the role that, according to Bouvard et Pécuchet (the eponymous
characters of Flaubert's unfinished novel), the bridges played in the life
of the Duke of Angoulême: "thus Bouvard and Pécuchet, when undertaking a
description of the life of the Duke of Angoulême, were amazed by the role played
in it... by bridges."
Aqua, in her turn,
repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard's trick, namely, opting for the making
of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. (1.3)
The twin sister of Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother), poor mad
Aqua commits suicide by taking poison. Eleonore Bonvard reminds one of Flaubert's Bouvard, but
also brings to mind Eleonora Marx (the first English translator of
Madame Bovary), whose father is known on Antiterra as
Marx père, the popular author of 'historical'
plays (2.5). Like Karl Marx's unfortunate daughter, V. V. Mayakovski
committed suicide because of unrequited love. As to Lucette, she eventually
jumps into the Atlantic Ocean, not Goodson River.
Alexey
Sklyarenko