The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the
19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution
of Dostoevski on 3 January 1850 (NS).
In his best poem, Rossiya (Russia, 1924),
Voloshin mentions - among other tragic events of the second quarter of the
19th century (the execution of the Decembrists, Griboedov's, Pushkin's
and Lermontov's early deaths) - the mock execution of
Dostoevski:
Пять виселиц на Кронверкской куртине
Рифмуют
на Семёновском плацу;
Волы в Тифлис волочат «Грибоеда»,
Отправленного на
смерть в Тегеран;
Гроб Пушкина ссылают под конвоем
На розвальнях в
опальный монастырь;
Над трупом Лермонтова царь: «Собаке -
Собачья смерть»
- придворным говорит;
Промозглым утром бледный Достоевский
Горит свечой,
всходя на эшафот... (2)
Van and Ada are the children of Demon Veen and Marina
Durmanov. Marina's poor twin sister Aqua (who married Demon
Veen) was a victim of the Great Revelation caused by the L
disaster:
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her
nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of
her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and
although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion,
statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more
insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in
medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than
Revolution. (1.3)
In Russia Voloshin affirms that our Revolution was but a
lump of religious hysteria:
Вся наша революция была
Комком религиозной
истерии:
В течение пятидесяти лет
Мы созерцали бедствия рабочих
На
Западе с такою остротой,
Что приняли стигматы их распятий. (5)
According to Voloshin, we had been so keenly
contemplating for fifty years the sufferings of Western workers that
we received the stigmata of their crucifixions.
Ada's phantasmata and Lucette's stigmata are mentioned by
Van:
'Oh, I know,' cried Van (quivering with
evil sarcasm, boiling with mysterious rage, taking it out on the redhaired
scapegoatling, naive Lucette, whose only crime was to be suffused with the
phantasmata of the other's innumerable lips). 'Of course, I remember now. A foul
taint in the singular can be a sacred mark in the plural. You are referring of
course to the stigmata between the eyebrows of pure sickly young nuns whom
priests had over-anointed there and elsewhere with cross-like strokes of the
myrrherabol brush.' (2.5)
'Actually,' observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope
which a drop of soda had stained, 'Bergson is only for very young people or very
unhappy people, such as this available rousse.'
'Spotting Bergson,' said the assistant lecher, 'rates a
B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a
kiss on your krestik - whatever that is?' (ibid.)
Lucette's krestik (not quite "little cross" as Van believes)
brings to mind emalevyi krestik v petlitse, the little enamel cross is
the tab of Prince Alexey's uniform (in the opening line of Ivanov's famous
poem). The execution of the royal family in Ekaterinburg is described by
Voloshin in Rossiya:
И где-то на Урале средь лесов
Латышские
солдаты и мадьяры
Расстреливают царскую семью
В сумятице поспешных
отступлений:
Царевич на руках царя, одна
Царевна мечется, подушкой
прикрываясь,
Царица выпрямилась у стены...
Потом их жгут и зарывают
пепел.
Всё кончено. Петровский замкнут круг. (5)
"All is over. Peter's circle is closed."
"The Arctic no longer vicious Circle" is mentioned by
Van:
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! But (even more absurdly), if, in
Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its
components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than
poetical, notions of 'America' and 'Russia,' a more complicated and even more
preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time - not only because the history
of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart
in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or
another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of
directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers
of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other.
(1.3)
In his poem Voloshin says that in three centuries Russia has
covered the distance from the shores of Livonia (i. e. Kurland) to Alaska (known
on Antiterra as Lyaska):
Есть дух Истории - безликий и
глухой,
Что действует помимо нашей воли,
Что направлял топор и мысль
Петра,
Что вынудил мужицкую Россию
За три столетья сделать перегон
От
берегов Ливонских до Аляски.
И тот же дух ведёт большевиков
Исконными
народными путями.
Грядущее - извечный сон корней:
Во время революций
водоверти
Со дна времён взмывают старый ил
И новизны рыгают
стариною. (5)
According to Voloshin, the future is izvechnyi son
korney ("a perennial dream of roots"). Korney (Gen. pl. of
koren', "root") brings to mind Korney Chukovski (the author of
Tarakanishche, etc.) - but also Kuz'ma Prutkov's advice zri
v koren' ("get at the root"), Chekhov's von Koren and Van's
"tribadic" dream of Indian corn (2.4). After the dinner in Ursus and the
debauche à
trois in his Manhattan penthouse flat Van promises to Ada that from now on
life will be "corn in cans:"
'You cried over my unseemly scar, but now
life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans.'
(2.8)
Van's scar (left on his body by Tapper's bullet) is even
longer than his male organ (that Van compares to "a drained root" before
Lucette's suicide):
He went back to whatever he was eating, and
cruelly stroked Lucette's apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian 'I'm
drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore
more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably
(ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, 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.
'- but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing
but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life,
Van, Van, Van.' (ibid.)
Lyaska (the Antiterran name of Alaska) rhymes with
plyaska (dance) - but also with kolyaska (carriage).
Kolyaska (1836) is a story by Gogol. In a letter of beginning of May,
1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that Gogol's Carriage alone is worth
two hundred thousand roubles. In Rossiya Voloshin blends the February
Revolution of 1917 with the October coup and points out that the
Martober was forseen by Gogol (the author of Notes of a
Madman, 1835):
До Мартобря (его предвидел Гоголь)
В России
не было ни буржуа,
Ни классового пролетариата:
Была земля, купцы да
голытьба,
Чиновники, дворяне да крестьяне...
Мы бредили, переломав машины,
Об
электрофикации; среди
Стрельбы и голода - о социальном рае,
И ели
человечью колбасу.
We raved, after we had broken the machines,
about electrification, in the midst of shooting
and famine - about the social paradise,
and ate the human sausage. (5)
Small wonder that after the L disaster electricity was banned
on Antiterra!
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