Spring in
Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a
nectarine hue to her [Lucette's] limbs, which
looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the
breeze dried her skin. (3.5)
Spring in Fialta (Vesna v Fial'te, 1938) is
a story by VN.
Minataor is an anagram of Taormina, a city in Sicily (an
island in the Mediterranean, constituting a region of Italy). On the other
hand, it hints at Minotaur, the bull-headed monster who lived in the Cretan
Labyrinth (built by Daedalus, a legendary architect). Minotaur was killed by
Theseus whom Ariadne (the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaё) gave the thread
by which he escaped from the labyrinth. Ariadna is a story
(1895) by Chekhov. The action in Chekhov's story Dama s sobachkoy
("The Lady with the Lap Dog," 1899) begins in Yalta. Yalta's altolike
name is echoed by Fialta's viola:
I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of
those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small
flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its
viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid
Lent that especially anoints one’s soul.
Viola is Sebastian's brother in Shakespeare's play "The
Twelfth Night" (1623). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941), VN's first English novel, the narrator (V.) is Sebastian's brother.
There is night in Knight and nox (Lat., night) in Knox. Violet
Knox (whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little violet") is old Van's
typist. Describing Lucette's suicide, Van mentions Oceanus Nox:
The
sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those
damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x.
(3.5)
The son of Dedalus Veen, Demon
(Van's and Ada's father whom Ada's husband Andrey Vinelander
calls "Dementiy Labirintovich," 3.8) married Marina's twin sister
Aqua:
The modest
narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in April (my favorite
month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George's Day* (according to
Mlle Larivière's maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen - out of spite
and pity, a not unusual blend.
...Actually, Aqua was less
pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable
marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in
sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British
Commonwealth - say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and
Palermontovia - as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to
Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins,
marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua's bivouacs. She had plans at one time to
seek a modicum of health ('just a little grayishness, please, instead of the
solid black') in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias,
and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our
joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time
spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically
unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive...
(1.3)
Palermontovia blends Palermo (the capital of Sicily) with Lermontov,
the author of Demon (1829-40). In Chekhov's play "The Three Sisters"
(on Antiterra known as "Four Sisters," 2.1, 2.9) Solyonyi (the officer who kills
Tuzenbakh in a pistol duel) imagines that he resembles Lermontov.
Solyonyi means in Russian "salt, salty."
Van interrupted Lucette's nervous patter by asking her
if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt.
Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose
Captain! (3.5)
Poor mad Aqua believed that she could understand the language of her
namesake, water:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of
tap water - which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily)
a fragment of human speech lingering in one's ears while one washes one's hands
after cocktails with strangers. (1.3)
In Drugie Berega ("Other Shores," 1954), as he speaks of chess
problems, VN mentions the false Ariadne's spurious thread that would
entangle everyone who enters the labyrinth:
Дело в том, что соревнование в шахматных задачах
происходит не между белыми и чёрными, а между составителем и воображаемым
разгадчиком (подобно тому, как в произведениях писательского искусства настоящая
борьба ведётся не между героями романа, а между романистом м читателем), а
потому значительная часть ценности задачи зависит от числа и качества
«иллюзорных решений», - всяких обманчиво-сильных первых ходов, ложных следов и
других подвохов, хитро и любовно приготовленных автором, чтобы поддельной нитью
лже-Ариадны опутать вошедшего в лабиринт. (Chapter
Thirteen, 4)
It should be understood that competition in chess
problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the
hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is
not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a
great part of a problem's value is due to the number of 'tries' -- delusive
opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly
prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. (Speak, Memory,
Chapter Fourteen, 3)
In her poem Lzhedmitriyu ("To False Dmitriy," 1921) Marina
Tsvetaev calls Marina Mnishek (the wife of three pretenders to the Russian
throne) Lzhemarina ("False Marina"):
— Своекорыстная кровь! —
Проклята, проклята
будь
Ты — Лжедимитрию смогшая быть Лжемариной!
Marina Tsvetaev (the poet of genius who in the late 1930s returned to
Russia and perished there) was the mother of Ariadna ("Alya") Efron (1912-75).
In Marina Tsvetaev's memoir essay Geroy truda ("The Hero of Toil,"
1925) eight-year-old Alya compares Bryusov to Shere Khan (the tiger in
Kipling's Jungle Book) and Bryusov's mistress Adalis, to a young wolf
from Shere Khan's retinue:
Москва, начало декабря
1920 г.
Несколько дней спустя, читая
"Джунгли".
— Марина! Вы знаете — кто Шер-Хан? —
Брюсов! — Тоже хромой и одинокий, и у него там тоже Адалис. (Приводит:) «А
старый Шер-Хан ходил и открыто принимал лесть»… Я так в этом узнала Брюсова! А
Адалис — приблуда, из молодых волков.
As she speaks to Van onboard Admiral Tobakoff, Lucette quotes
Kipling:
They examined without much interest the objects of
pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The
presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. Half a dozen glossy-jacketed
copies of Salzman were impressively heaped between a picture of the
handsome, thoughtful, now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of
immortelles.
He clutched at a red rope and they entered the
lounge;
'Whom did she [Miss
Condor] look like?' asked Lucette. 'En laid et en
lard?'
'I don't know,' he lied. 'Whom?'
'Skip it,' she said. 'You're mine tonight. Mine, mine,
mine!'
She was quoting Kipling - the same phrase that Ada used
to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean procrastination.
(3.5)
Condor and My vse Robinzony ("We all are Robinson
Crusoes") are poems by Bryusov.
From Van's letter to Ada: The Robinsons, Robert
and Rachel, who, I know, planned to write to you through my father, were the
penultimate people to talk to her that night. (3.6) Before jumping into
the Atlantic, Lucette takes the Quietus pills given her by the Robinsons. In his
famous monologue ("To be, or not to be..." 3.1) Hamlet mentions quietus
("when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin...").
Like Nina in Spring in Fialta, the son of the Robinsons was killed
in a car accident:
She turned toward him, brushing back the flying hair
from her face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her expression, and
presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert who beamed after them, waving
similarly raised hands to her, to him, to life, to death, to the happy old days
when Demon paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before he was killed
in a head-on car collision.
She [Lucette] dispatched the pozharskiya kotletï
with gratitude: he was not scolding her for popping up as some sort of
transcendental (rather than transatlantic) stowaway; and in her eagerness to see
him she had botched her breakfast after having gone dinnerless on the
eve. (3.5)
The pozharskiya kotletï (chops) bring to mind Minin and Pozharski,
the heroes of the Patriotic war of 1612 against the Polish invaders.
Minin + Efron + ya + altar' = Erminin + fonar' +
Yalta
ya - I (first person
pronoun)
altar' - altar
Erminin - the Erminin twins, Greg and
Grace
fonar' - lantern, lamp
Fonar' is mentioned in Blok's famous poem Noch'. Ulitsa.
Fonar'. Apteka... (1912):
Night, street, lamp, drugstore,
A dull and meaningless light.
Go on
and live another quarter century -
Nothing will change. There's no way
out.
You'll die, then start from the beginning,
It will repeat, just
like before:
Night, icy ripples on a canal,
Drugstore, street, lamp.
In her erratic student years
Aqua organized with Milton Abraham's invaluable help a Phree
Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who
after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford
garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of
endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played
'golf' on Sundays and belonged to 'lodges.' (1.3)
Aqua's poor little letters from the homes of madness to
her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov ('Heart
rending-Sounds'). (ibid.)
The phrase shchemyashchie zvuki (heart-rending sounds) occurs in
at least three poems of Blok. Blok is the author of Nochnaya fialka
("The Night Violet. A Dream," 1906) and Pesn' ada ("The Song of
Hell," 1909). Blok's Neznakomka ("Incognita," 1906) is alluded to in
Ada (3.3). Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Stikhi k Bloku
("Verses to Blok," 1921). One of Blok's poems begins: Ya - Gamlet...
(1914):
I’m Hamlet. And my blood runs cold
When treachery is up to scheming;
My only love in the whole wide world.
Is in my heart, among the living.
Ophelia, the cold of life
Has taken you away, my dear;
The
prince of Demark, in a strife,
Hit with a blade, I am dying here.
*Mount St. George is mentioned at the beginning of Spring in
Fialta.