Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is set on Antiterra,
Earth's twin planet also known as Demonia. Demon is the
society nickname of Dementiy Dedalovich Veen, Van's and Ada's father who
is linked to the eponymous hero of Lermontov's poem:
With white-bloused, enthusiastically
sweating Andrey Andreevich, he [Van] lolled for
hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian
writers - and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary
allusions to his father's volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov's
diamond-faceted tetrameters. (1.28)
His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his
hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His
long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze.
Lyudi oglyadïvalis' (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all
kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her
daemon lover more - just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging
bluebeard's virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her
Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.
(1.29)
Ada to Demon: 'How lovely to see you!
Clawing your way through the clowds! Swooping down on Tamara's
castle!'
(Lermontov paraphrased by Lowden).
(1.38)
Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by
Lucette's death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the
tacit sanction of Demon:
And o'er the summits of the Tacit
He, banned from Paradise, flew on:
Beneath him, like a brilliant's
facet,
Mount Peck with snows eternal shone. (3.7)
According to Van (who, according to Cordula de Prey's mother,
is himself a young demon),
Our enchanters, our demons, are noble
iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in
the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our
splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious
monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of
serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of
the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra,
restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with
rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and
divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
(1.3)
In his poem Nochnoe nebo tak ugryumo... ("The
nocturnal sky is so gloomy..." 1865) Tyutchev compares sheetlightnings to
deaf-mute demons talking to each other. Maximilian Voloshin is the author
of Demony glukhonemye ("The Deaf-mute Demons," 1917) and Rus'
glukhonemaya ("Deaf-mute Rus," 1918). Sending the former poem to A. M.
Petrova, Voloshin wrote her in a letter:
Ведь Демон не непременно бес — это среднее
между Богом и человеком: в этом смысле ангелы - демоны и олимпийские боги - тоже
демоны. В земной манифестации демон может быть как человеком, так и явлением. И
в той и в другой форме глухонемота является неизбежным признаком посланничества,
как Вы видите по эпиграфу из Исайи. Они ведь только уста, через которые вещает
Св. Дух. Они только знак, который сам себя прочесть не может, хотя иногда
сознаёт, что он только знак. (According to Voloshin, Demon
is not necessarily a fiend, he is half-God, half-man. In this sense angels and
the Olympians are demons, too. In earthly manifestation demon can be a
human being, as well as a phenomenon.... Demons are only the mouth by which
the Holy Spirit speaks. They are only a sign that can not read itself, even
if sometimes it is aware that it is only a sign.)
It is unlikely that VN would see this letter but, I
suspect, he was familiar with this anthroposophic wisdom. Let me also quote
from Bunin's memoir essay on Voloshin:
Он антропософ, уверяет, будто “люди суть ангелы
десятого круга”, которые приняли на себя облик людей вместе со всеми их грехами,
так что всегда надо помнить, что в каждом самом худшем человеке сокрыт
ангел...
According to the commentators, Voloshin borrowed this idea
("human beings are angels of the tenth circle") from the French writer Léon
Bloy (1846-1917).
Btw., in his garland of sonnets Corona astralis
(1909) Voloshin mentions Icarus (the son of Daedalus, the legendary architect
who built the labyrinth for Minos and made
wings for himself and Icarus):
Мы правим путь свой к солнцу, как
Икар,
Плащом ветров и пламенем одеты.
Like Icarus, we move toward the sun,
clothed in a cloak of winds and in fire.
For the flight from Man (as Manhattan is shortened on
Antiterra) to France Demon Veen wears a scarlet-silk-lined black
cape (2.1). Icarus flew so high that his wings of wax melted from the heat of
the sun, and he plunged to his death in the sea. Van's father perishes in a
mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7).
Ada's husband Andrey Vinelander calls Demon "Dementiy
Labirintovich:" 'And then, one day, Demon warned me that he
would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey's poor joke (Nu i
balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy,
l'impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought
of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from
lions.' (3.8)
According to Voloshin (Cosmos in "The Paths of
Cain"):
Нет выхода из лабиринта знанья,
И человек не
станет никогда
Иным, чем то, во что он страстно верит.
There is no exit from the labyrinth of knowledge,
and man will never become anything else
than that in what he passionately believes.
Alexey Sklyarenko