On Antiterra Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by
Lewis Carroll are known as Palace in Wonderland (1.8). In his
philosophical work Texture of Time Van Veen mentions Alice in the
Camera Obscura, a book given to him by Demon's former house
tutor:
Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else
about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if
it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is
there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the
age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain,
consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at
different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the
nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions
borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if
different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen:
Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my
own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics
but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to
be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the
action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my
professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many
a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without
physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the
experiment can be performed - and how tantalizing, then, the discovery
of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance - so
exact that the 'something' which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered
but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it 'somehow' to my early boyhood
rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with
a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the 'e.g.' worked - he was my
father's former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura
for my eighth birthday). (Ada, Part Four)
Van was born on January 1,
1870. Ergo, January 1, 1908, is his thirty-eight birthday. It
is VN (born April 23, 1899) who was eight in the first months of
1908.
The deviser of the Veen test (the method of determining female
virginity without physical examination), Van is sure that he was Ada's first
lover. Actually, he had a predecessor: Dr Krolik's brother, Karol, or
Karapars, Krolik. A doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey. This
transpires through a photo in Kim Beauharnais's album (2.7;see my previous
post).
Camera obscura is is an optical device that projects an
image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing
and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to
photography and the camera. The author
of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll was keenly
interested in photography (he particularly liked to photograph little
girls).
The first creature whom Alice meets in Wonderland is a White
Rabbit (chapter I "Down the Rabbit-Hole"). As she is thinking over all the
children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could
have been changed for any of them, Alice says: "I'm sure I'm not
Ada" (chapter II "The Pool of Tears").
Alice was changed for Anya by VN, who translated Lewis
Carroll's book as Anya v strane chudes (1923). Anya is a diminutive of
Anna. Donna Anna is a character in Pushkin's little tragedy Kamennyi
gost' ("The Stone Guest," 1830) and in Don Juan's Last
Fling, the movie that Van and Lucette watch in the Tobakoff cinema
hall:
The main picture had now started. The
three leading parts - cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and
not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna - were played by solid
stars, whose images passed by in 'semi-stills,' or as some say 'translucencies,'
in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be
quite good.
On the way to the remote castle where the difficult
lady, widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night of love in her
chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine nurses his potency by spurning
the advances of a succession of robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy
cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of
her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg's novella, as was to be
proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also predicted something to Van, for even
before Dolores came out of the circus tent to water Juan's horse, Van knew who
she would be. (3.5)
It is Ada who plays the part of Dolores (the gitanilla).
On Antiterra, The Gitanilla is a novel by Osberg. Osberg is an anagram
of Borges (the Argentinian writer who, like VN, was born in 1899
and who was blind by the time VN wrote Lolita, 1955, and
Ada, 1969). Lolita is a diminutive of Dolores ("She was Dolores on
the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita"). On her
twelfth birthday Ada is permitted to wear her 'lolita:'
For the big picnic on Ada's twelfth
birthday and Ida's forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted
to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name
in Osberg's novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish 't,' not a thick
English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red
poppies or peonies, 'deficient in botanical reality,' as she grandly expressed
it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms
of this, and only this, dream. (1.13)
Van leaves the Tobakoff cinema hall in the middle of the main
picture:
Van, however, did not understand until
much later (when he saw - had to see; and then see again and again - the entire
film, with its melancholy and grotesque ending in Donna Anna's castle) that what
seemed an incidental embrace constituted the Stone Cuckold's revenge. In fact,
being upset beyond measure, he decided to go even before the olive-grove
sequence dissolved. (3.5)
Much later he writes in a (never posted)
letter to Ada:
That [illegible] is a complete
refutation of odious Kim's odious stills. 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)
Dr Krolik's brother was born in Turkey. In Batyushkov's
Vecher u Kantemira ("An Evening at Kantemir's," 1816) Kantemir (the
poet and diplomat, Russian envoy at the court of Louis XV, son of the
last Moldavian Gospodar'*) says that he was born in
Constantinople (the former name of Istanbul) and that his ancestor (apparently,
Timur) was a ruler of the Oriental Empire:
Я родился в Константинополе. Праотцы мои
происходят от древней фамилии, некогда обладавшей престолом восточной Империи.
Следственно, во мне играет ещё кровь греческая, и я непритворно люблю голубое
небо и вечно зелёные оливы стран полуденных. В молодости я странствовал с отцом
моим, неразлучным сопутником, искренним другом Петра Великого, и видел обширные
долины России от Днепра до Кавказа, от Каспийского моря до берегов величественной Москвы. Я знаю Россию и обитателей
её. Хижина земледельца и терем боярина мне равно известны.
Timur (Tamerlane) and Nabok are paired in
Ada:
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin
twins to her picnic [on Ada's sixteenth birthday];
but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The
latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young
drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But
Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her
bringing a 'talisman' from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as
much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five
centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
Batyushkov's Kantemir mentions the archimandrite Krolik who approved his
(Kantemir's) writings:
Учёный Феофан, архимандрит Кролик (оба достойные
пастыря), Никита Трубецкий и другие вельможи одобрили мои слабые опыты, моё перо
неискусное, но смелое, чистосердечное.
Talisman is a famous poem (1827) by Pushkin. In May,
1820, Pushkin was exiled to South Russia and spent several years in Kishinev
(the capital of Bessarabia).
On April 30, 1823, a few days before
Pushkin had begun Eugene Onegin in Bessarabia, Vyazemski in Moscow
wrote to Aleksandr Turgenev in Petersburg: "I have recently had a letter
from Pushkin, the Arabian devil [bes arabskiy]" - a pun
on bessarabskiy, "the Bessarabian." The epithet should have been,
of course, arapskiy, from arap ("Blackamoor," an allusion to
Pushkin's Ethiopian blood), and not arabskiy, from arab
("Arab"). (EO Commentary, II, p. 38)
After the Crimean War Demon's friend Bessborodko is installed
in Bessarabia:
At the Goodson Airport, in one of the
gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat
of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of imitation marblewood,
behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters: 'Crimea
Capitulates'...
'Stocks,' said Demon, 'are on the zoom.
Our territorial triumphs, et cetera. An American governor, my friend
Bessborodko, is to be installed in Bessarabia, and a British one, Armborough,
will rule Armenia. I saw you enlaced with your little Countess near the parking
lot. If you marry her I will disinherit you. They're quite a notch below our
set.' (2.1)
Goodson is mentioned by Van in Texture of
Time:
Technological Sophists argue that by taking
advantage of the Laws of Light, by using new telescopes revealing ordinary print
at cosmic distances through the eyes of our nostalgic agents on another planet,
we can actually see our own past (Goodson discovering the Goodson and that sort
of thing) including documentary evidence of our not knowing what lay in store
for us (and our knowing now), and that consequently the Future did exist
yesterday and by inference does exist today. This may be good physics but is
execrable logic, and the Tortoise of the Past will never overtake the Achilles
of the future, no matter how we parse distances on our cloudy
blackboards.
Speaking of Zegris butterfly (Spanish orange-tip): Zegris and
Abencerage are the families of Granada Moors whose feud inspired Chateaubriand
(Darkbloom, 'Notes to Ada'). Poor mad Batyushkov
used to call Chateaubriand (the author of Le Dernier
Abencerage) "Château
brillant." In Ada, 'Abencerage' and 'Zegris' are two bogus
publishing houses:
Letters from Terra, by Voltemand
[Van's penname], 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.) (2.2)
In her herbarium Marina mentions lapochka Lapiner (whom Van calls
Marina's "own Dr Krolik"):
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by
lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his 'mute gentiarium' 5.I.1870.
(1.1) Van was born five days ago. Dr Lapiner delivered at his birth.
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'):
Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive
reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with
rabbits. The French 'lapin' in Lapiner is matched by the Russian
'Krolik', the name of Ada's beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et
passim), and the Russian 'zayats' (hare) sounds like 'Seitz' (the
German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin 'cuniculus' in
'Nikulin' ('grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov', p.341),
and a Greek 'lagos' in 'Lagosse' (the doctor who attends Van in his old
age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist,
p.298.
*King
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private editorial
communications are read by both co-editors.