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.
...It was owing, among other things, to this
‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangès
(not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and
deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token
of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time
of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the
deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of
Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that
there existed' a distortive glass of our distorted glebe' as a scholar who
desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree,
as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada's hand.)
...But her [Aqua's] real destination was Terra the Fair and
thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her
poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes
signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’).
(1.3)
Ada is set on Demonia (or Antiterra), the twin planet
of Earth (or Terra). Letters from Terra is Van Veen's first
novel:
Ada's letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van's
Letters from Terra, ‘a philosophical novel,' showed no sign of life
whatsoever.
(I disagree, it's a nice, nice little book!
Ada's note.)
He had written it involuntarily, so to speak,
not caring a dry fig for literary fame. Neither did pseudonymity tickle him in
reverse - as it did when he danced on his hands.
...Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer
of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and
carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened
with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking
name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua's last
doctor. When Leymanski's obsession turned into love, and one's sympathy got
focused on his enchanting, melancholy, betrayed wife (née Antilia Glems), our
author found himself confronted with the distressful task of now stamping out in
Antilia, a born brunette, all traces of Ada, thus reducing yet another character
to a dummy with bleached hair. (2.2)
The writer of the letters from Terra is a namesake
of "Tereza" (a Finnish woman whose real name we never learn), a
character in Dostoevski's first novel (written in the epistolary form)
Bednye lyudi ("Poor Folk," 1846). "Tereza"* is the old
servant woman who acts as a postman bringing Makar Devushkin's letters to
Varen'ka Dobrosyolov and Varen'ka's letters to Makar. In the old Russian
alphabet the letter L was called lyudi. The Antiterran L disaster in
the beau milieu of last century seems to correspond to the mock
execution of Dostoevski (the author of The Double, 1848) and the
Petrashevskians on 3 January 1850 (NS) in St. Petersburg. January 3, 1876, is
Lucette's birthday.
Letters from Terra, by Voltemand,
came out in 1891 on Van's twenty-first birthday, under the imprint of two bogus
houses, ‘Abencerage' in Manhattan, and ‘Zegris' in London.
(Had I happened to see a copy I would have
recognized Chateaubriand's lapochka and hence your little paw, at
once.) (ibid.)
The Abencerages and Zegris are the famalies of Granada Moors
whose feud inspired Chateaubriand (Darkbloom, "Notes to Ada"). In
Don Juan's Last Fling, the movie Van and Lucette watch - just
before Lucette's suicide - in Tobakoff's cinema hall, Ada appears under the
name 'Theresa Zegris:'
Because of a sort of pudeur she [Lucette] did not inform them [the Robinsons] that the actress (obscurely and fleetingly
billed as ‘Theresa Zegris’ in the ‘going-up’ lift-list at the end of the
picture) who had managed to obtain the small but not unimportant part of the
fatal gipsy was none other than the pallid schoolgirl they might have seen in
Ladore. (3.5)
According to Dostoevski, ìû âñå âûøëè èç
ãîãîëåâñêîé "Øèíåëè" ("we all came out from Gogol's
Overcoat"). In his book on Gogol VN compares Akakiy Akakievich's
shinel' (overcoat) to chenille (Fr.,
caterpillar). Zegris is also a butterfly (sooty orange tip, Zegris
eupheme). In his (never posted) letter to Ada Van calls her "my
Zegris butterfly:"
Artistically, and ardisiacally, the
best moment is one of the last — when you follow barefoot the Don who walks down
a marble gallery to his doom, to the scaffold of Dona Anna’s black-curtained
bed, around which you flutter, my Zegris butterfly, straightening a comically
drooping candle, whispering delightful but futile instructions into the frowning
lady’s ear, and then peering over that mauresque screen and suddenly dissolving
in such natural laughter, helpless and lovely, that one wonders if any
art could do without that erotic gasp of schoolgirl mirth. And to think,
Spanish orange-tip, that all in all your magic gambol lasted but eleven minutes
of stopwatch time in patches of two- or three-minute scenes! (3.6)
Aardvark + Massa = maskarad + svara = Samsara +
kvadrat - t
Sig Leymanski = Kingsley Amis
Antilia Glems + Gerald + Ada + Sevan = Gitanilla
+ Esmeralda + navsegda
*In his "Letters of a Russian Traveller" (1790-99) Karamzin
mentions Teresa and Faldoni, the passionate young lovers who committed suicide
in Lyon. "Faldoni" is another character in Dostoevski's "Poor Folk." The first
readers of Dostoevski's first novel, Nekrasov and Grigirovich, compared the
young author to Gogol. Belinski ("furious Vissarion" whose surname comes
from belyi, "white") praised "Poor Folk." In one of his letters
Gogol criticizes "Poor Folk" for verbosity. Dostoevski was arrested for
reading in public Belinski's famous letter to Gogol.
Aardvark, Massa -
She [Marina] swore that all
was over; that the Baron [d'Onsky], a physical wreck
and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source
Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a
Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so.
(1.2)
maskarad - masked ball; a
play in verse by Lermontov (1835); cf. Mascodagama, Van's stage
name
svara - quarrel;
fight
Samsara - in Buddhism, the process of coming into
existence as a differentiated, mortal creature; in Hinduism, the endless
series of births, deaths and rebirths to which all beings are subject; cf.
Lucette's words to Van: "Mamma dwells in her private
Samsara."
(3.5)
kvadrat - math.,
square
Kingsley Amis - a
waggish British novelist (1922-95) keenly interested in physics fiction
(Darkbloom)
Gerald - Moris
Gerald, the hero of Captain Mayne Reid's The Headless
Horseman
Sevan - a lake in
Armenia
Gitanilla - La
Gitanilla, a novel by Cervantes; on Antiterra, a novel by Osberg; Ada
plays the gitanilla in Don Juan's Last Fling, Yuzlik's
film loosely based on Cervantes's crude romance (3.5)
Esmeralda - a
character in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831); Van and Ada
call Lucette "our Esmeralda and mermaid" (2.8); the butterfly in VN's poem
"Lines Written in Oregon" (1953)
navsegda - Russ.,
for ever, for good; the closing line of VN's "Lines Written in Oregon" is
"Esmeralda, immer, immer"
Alexey
Sklyarenko