The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean
Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular
effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known
historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book
addressed to young laymen and lemans - and not to grave men or gravemen.
...Ved' ('it is, isn't
it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym
of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious
Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country,
transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled
ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary,
from Kurland to the Kuriles! (1.3)
Like many Russian liberals, VN viewed the
Soviet regime of Lenin and Stalin as a new Tatar
yoke. Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds in Demon's
duel with Baron d'Onsky, 1.2), Khan Sosso (on Antiterra, the ruler of the
ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, also known as Tartary, 2.2) and Uncle Joe
(a politician in forgotten comics, 5.5), all of them are Joseph
Stalin's representatives on Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which
Ada is set). But we would vainly look for Stalin's predecessor,
Lenin, in Ada. Although V. I. Ul'yanov (Lenin's real
name) was born in 1870 and came to power in 1917, it seems
to me that L in the name of a mysterious catastrophe that
happenned on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th century hints -
among other names - at Lenin.
Demon's rival and adversary in a sword duel, Baron
d'Onsky brings to mind Dmitry Donskoy (1350-89), the Prince of Moscow and Grand
Prince of Vladimir. His nickname alludes to his great victory against the
Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) which took place on the Don
River. But on Demonia (Antiterra's name before the L disaster) the
Russians must have lost this battle to the victorious Khan Mamay and
migrated, crossing the ha-ha of a doubled ocean, to America. Interestingly, in his poem O pravitelyakh
("On Rulers", 1944) VN compares Lenin and Stalin to Khan Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth
century"):
людоеды, любовники, ломовики,
Иоанны,
Людовики, Ленины,
всё это сидело, кряхтя на эх и на ых,
упираясь локтями в
колени,
на престолах своих матерых.
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем
все тот же Мамай.
cannibals, loverboys, lumbermen,
Johns, Lewises, Lenins
emitting stool grunts of strain and release,
propping elbows on knees,
sat on their massive old thrones.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Note that, except Ioanny (Johns), all
words in the first two lines of the original begin with an L. As
to Ioanny, they remind one of Ioann III, the Grand Prince of
Moscow, and his much more cruel grandson Ioann IV (known as "Ivan
the Terrible"), the first Russian tsar. Nurse Joan the Terrible is mentioned by Aqua in her suicide note:
Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this
eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr
Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring
bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels,
Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble
one day, no doubt. (1.3)
Unlike Lenin, Stalin is not mentioned by name in "On
Rulers". But he is repeatedly alluded to in VN's poem that ends as
follows:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в
полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы
дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на
"переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake
who used to write verse, in rank
and in files, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon,
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as "praline"
or "air chill",
and others of the same kind.
VN's footnote: "praline"... "air chill." In the original,
monumentalen, meaning "[he is] monumental" rhymes pretty closely with
Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning "[he] put in too much
pepper" offers an ingenuouse correspondence with the name of the British
plitician in slovenly Russian pronunciation ("chair-chill").
Sir Winston Churchill is known on Antiterra as Richard
Leonard Churchill: But then 'everyone has his own
taste,' as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite
French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel
about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, 'A
Great Good Man' - according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume
Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of
one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in
the same graceful fashion. (1.38) Guillaume de Monparnasse is a
penname of Lucette's governess, Mlle Larivière (who is referred to by
Ada as "poor Mlle L.": Hm! Kveree-kveree,
as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada's hand. 1.3) Mlle
Larivière's penname hints at Guy de Maupassant who was born (in our
world, for he did not exist on Antiterra) in 1850, in the beau milieu
of the 19th century.
VN's "late namesake" is Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski
(1893-1930), "minor Soviet poet, endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but
fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served." One of Mayakovski's poems
is entitled "Vladimir Il'yich Lenin" (1925). In Yubileynoe (The
Anniversary Poem, 1924) Mayakovski, whose name begins with an M, addresses
Pushkin, whose name begins with a P, asking the poet "who is between us [in
the alphabet]: Nekrasov? We'll ask him to move toward the end of the
alphabet, to the letter shch." Alphabetically, Mayakovski (and
Mamay, and Marx, and Maupassant, and Maykov, the author of Mashen'ka,
and Merezhkovski) is between Lenin and Nabokov: L, M, N.
After Lenin's death, Petrograd (St. Petersburg's name in
1914-24) was renamed Leningrad. In November of 1917 VN's family flew from
Petrograd to Crimea and one and a half year later they left Russia
forever on a small Greek ship Nadezhda (Hope). Not sure that VN
knew this, but after Mayakovski's death the Nadezhdinskaya street in
Leningrad was renamed Mayakovski Street. In Chelovek ("Man", 1917)
Mayakovski confesses that he had suicidal thoughts and wanted to shoot
himself when living in Petrograd, in the Nadezhdinskaya
street.
Lenin and the Bolshevist coup were predicted
by Lermontov, the author of prophetic Predskazanie
("Prediction," 1830) whose name also begins with an L.
L + Arbenin = rab + Lenin (Arbenin is the hero of Lermontov's drama in
verse Masquerade who poisons his wife and goes mad; rab - Russ., slave)
Ada calls muzhiks in Tartary "poor slaves": 'Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep
(which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else
Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.' (1.10)
Nemoe rabstvo (silent servitude) is mentioned
in another Russian poem written by VN after he had moved to
America:
Каким бы полотном батальным ни
являлась
советская сусальнейшая Русь,
какой бы жалостью душа ни
наполнялась,
не поклонюсь, не примирюсь
со всею мерзостью, жестокостью
и скукой
немого рабства -- нет, о, нет,
еще я духом жив, еще не сыт
разлукой,
увольте, я еще поэт.
No matter how Soviet
tinsel glitters
Upon the canvas of a
battle-piece,
No matter how the soul dissolves in pity,
I will not bend, I will not cease
Loathing the filth, brutality and
boredom
Of silent servitude. No, no, I
shout,
My spirit is still quick, still
exile-hungry,
I’m still a poet, count me out!
Sovetskaya susal'neyshaya Rus' (the
Soviet Sugary Rus) on Terra is known (according to Theresa, the
heroine of Van's novel Letters from Terra) as a Sovereign
Society of Solicitous Republics (SSSR):
Eastward,
instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia,
dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign
Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the
Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. (2.2)
Alexey
Sklyarenko