Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a
large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been
carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but
still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor
activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having
also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs
(as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker).
(1.40)
It was Pushkin who "carried an iron club to strengthen and steady his
pistol hand in view of a duel he intended to have with Fyodor Tolstoy
[Count Tolstoy the American] at the first opportunity." (EO
Commentary, vol. II, p. 458)
"Oddly enough, Tolstoy became Pushkin's spokesman in the days
of Pushkin's courtship of Natalia Goncharov." (ibid., p. 429)
In a letter of October 30, 1833, from Boldino to his
wife in St. Petersburg Pushkin praises Natalia Nikolaevna for having her hair
dressed à la Ninon (Ninon de Lenclos, 1620?-1705, a courtesan whom Pushkin
calls staraya kurva,* "the old whore"):
Ìî÷è íåò, õî÷åòñÿ ìíå óâèäàòü òåáÿ ïðè÷¸ñàííóþ à la
Ninon; òû äîëæíà áûòü ÷óäî êàê ìèëà. Êàê òû ïðåæäå îá ýòîé ñòàðîé êóðâå íå
ïîäóìàëà è íå ïåðåíÿëà ó íåé å¸ ïðè÷¸ñêó? I can't wait to see your hair
dressed à la Ninon; you must look marvelously pretty. Why haven't
you thought of that old whore and copied her hair-do before?
Count Tolstoy the American was the first cousin of Leo Tolstoy's father. In
Tolstoy's Anna Karenin
And Kitty is just the same: if not Vronsky,
then Lyovin. And she envies and hates me. And we all hate one another: Kitty me,
and I Kitty! Now that is true.
“Tyutkin, Coiffeur.”
...Je me fais coiffer par Tyutkin. ...I shall tell him that when he
comes back,’ she thought and smiled. But just then she recollected that now she
had no one to tell anything funny to. (‘What was the
last thing I thought of that was so good?’ She tried to remember it. “Tyutkin,
Coiffeur”? (Chapter XXX).
As he leaves Ardis forever, Van recalls Anna's inner
monologue and suicide:
‘The express does not
stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’
‘I’ll take you five
versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’**
His vulgar Russian
word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot!
Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the
huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused
with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s
novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and
the Irish. (1.41)
In a letter to Van
Percy proposed to meet him "where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbière
Lane:"
Dear Veen,
In a couple of days I must leave for a spell of
military service abroad. If you desire to see me before I go I shall be glad to
entertain you (and any other gentleman you might wish to bring along) at dawn
tomorrow where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbière Lane. If
not, I beg you to confirm in a brief note that you bear me no grudge, just as no
grudge is cherished in regard to you, sir, by your obedient
servant
Percy de Prey*** (1.40)
Percy, whom Van did not desire to
meet, went off to the Crimean War and perished on the second day of the
invasion (1.42).
The author of The Sebastopol
Stories (1855), Leo Tolstoy participated in the heroic defence of
Sebastopol during the Crimean War of 1853-56.
According
to Demon (Van's and Ada's father), his aunt Kitty was married to that dreadful
old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer:
'Your dinner jacket is very nice - or,
rather it's very nice recognizing one's old tailor in one's son's clothes - like
catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism - for example, this (wagging
his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother
did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I've seen it in my
hairdresser's looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald
spot; and you know who had it too - my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker
Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.'
(1.38)
The gene that missed Van was inherited by Ada (officially, Daniel
Veen's daughter):
'Oh, no,' said Ada, wagging her finger at
the height of her temple in a way she had. 'Oh, no. That pretty word [Kremlin] does not exist in Russian. A Frenchman
invented it. There is no second syllable.' (1.36)
Demon and Ada have other mannerisms in common:
Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend,
the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate
professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855–1954), used to say that the
only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets
tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto
of Eugene Onegin. 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)
"Richard Leonard Churchill" blends Sir Winston Leonard
Spencer Churchill (1874-1964), a British politician, with Richard I
("Richard the Lion-Hearted," "Richard Coeur de Lion," 1157-99), king of England.
In Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs (1928) the voice of Klavdia
Ivanovna Petukhov (Vorob'yaninov's mother-in-law) is even louder than that of
Richard the Lion-Hearted:
Her voice was so strong and fruity that it might well
have been envied by Richard the Lionheart, at whose shout, as is well known,
horses used to kneel. (Chapter One "Bezenchuk and the Nymphs")
Ilf and Petrov's novel begins as follows:
There were so many hairdressing establishments and
funeral homes in the regional centre of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be
born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up
their heads with toilet water and then die. (ibid.)
After Marina's death her body is cremated (3.1). In his poem
Tlennost'**** (Mortality, first published with the title
Violet and Rose, 1815) Pushkin's schoolmate and friend Delvig mentions
zephir playing with the lock of a girl who picks a violet
(cf. Marina's hairdresser Monsieur Violette):
Òàì ôèàëêó, íàêëîíÿñü,
Äåâèöà ñðûâàåò,
Çåôèð, â âîëîñû
âïëåòÿñü,
Ëîêîíîì èãðàåò...
Pushkin married Natalia Goncharov on February 18, 1831, a
month after Delvig's early death on Jan. 14 (Delvig died in
St. Petersburg and Pushkin in Moscow learnt of his friend's death on Jan.
18). "By a marvelous coincidence, Delvig died on the anniversary of
fictional Lenski (who is compared to him here on the eve of his fatal
duel); and the wake commemorating Delvig's death was held by his friends
(Pushkin, Vyazemski, Baratynski, and Yazykov) in a Moscow restaurant, on Jan.
27, 1831, exactly six years before Pushkin's fatal duel." (EO Commentary, vol.
III, p. 23). In his poem Chem chashche prazdnuet Litsey... ("The more
often the Lyceum celebrates..." written in October, 1831, for the Lyceum's
twentieth anniversary) Pushkin says:
È ìíèòñÿ, î÷åðåäü çà ìíîé,
Çîâ¸ò ìåíÿ ìîé Äåëüâèã
ìèëûé...
And so, it seems, my turn has come,
My dear Delvig is calling me...
According to Ada, at Marina's cremation Demon promised not to cheat
the poor grubs (3.8). But he breaks his promise perishing in a mysterious
airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Ilya Ilf's friend and co-author,
Evgeniy Petrov (penname of E. Kataev) died in an airplane crash on July 2,
1942. A memoirist describes his walk with Petrov along the wall of the
Moscow Kremlin and how Petrov said to him: "I think the Americans would
not begrudge the money to have a Kremlin like this one somewhere in
Washington" (The Collection of Reminiscences about I. Ilf and E.
Petrov, Moscow, 1963). Ilf and Petrov are the authors of Odnoetazhnaya
Amerika ("One-storied America," 1937), translated as Little Golden
America (an allusion to The Little Golden Calf).
*The violent dance called kurva or 'ribbon boule'
(1.2) is a part of the hilarious program in which Marina
participates as an actress who plays the heroine (Pushkin's Tatiana Larin who
got mixed up with Pasternak's Lara Antipov). In his poem "Net, ne
spryatat'sya mne ot velikoy mury..." ("No, I can't hide myself from the
great nonsense...") Mandelshtam mentions kurva-Moskva ("Moscow the
whore" mistranslated by Lowell as "the curved streets of Moscow").
Onboard Tobakoff Lucette wears ninon stockings: He could describe
her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches),
accentuating as it did the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon
stockings. (3.5)
Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander whom she betrays with Van) wears
her "lenclose:" 'We'll vroom straight to my place as soon as
you wake up, don't bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose...'
(3.8)
**The name comes from volosy, Russ. pl., "hair."
***Depre, a Moscow wine-merchant, is mentioned in Anna
Karenin.
****Tlennost' comes from tlen, "decay." Derzhavin's last
poem "The river of time in its flow..." (1816) is sometimes published with
the title Na tlennost' (On Mortality).
Alexey Sklyarenko