Demon to Van: 'However, before
I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this - how long
this has been...' ('going on,' one presumes, or something equally banal, but
then all ends are banal - hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting,
shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop
of thirty thousand feet for the airplane's washroom, being poisoned by one's
wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr and Mrs
Vinelander -) (2.11)
The Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting brings to mind
Sologub's poem Nyurenbergskiy palach ("The Executioner of
Nuremberg," 1908).
Sologub + Dorofey + zero = golos/Logos + dub +
Orfey + ozero
Nedotykomka + Khan + zad = Neznakomka + otdykh +
ad/da
Sologub - Fyodor Sologub (penname
of F. K. Teternikov, 1863-1927), poet and novelist, the author of
Melkiy Bes ("The Petty Demon," 1905), Paul Verlaine's translator,
teacher of mathematics; Sologub's wife Anastasiya Chebotarevski drowned herself
in the Neva (in Finnish, Neva means what Veen does in Dutch: "peat
bog")
Dorofey - male nurse in the
Kalugano hospital: After a long journey down corridors where
pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and
then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious
with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or
laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's
coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van,
past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van,
while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely
unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos).
(1.42)
zero - 0; According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian), Dan's buxom but
otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to
Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of 'play-zero' (as
the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some
time, even before Ada's sudden departure, that a devil combining the
characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to
the torture house of eternity. (2.10)
golos - Russ., voice: Much to Van's amusement (the tasteless display of which his
mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for
most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never
being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness
of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient
old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled
him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed
to Visit him 'because of the constant necessity of routine tests' - or rather
because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude.
(3.8) Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Golos etc.: Russ., The Phoenix
Voice, Russian language newspaper in Arizona.
dub - Russ., oak tree: She [Lucette] would advance
up to the center of the weedy playground in front of the forbidden pavilion, and
there, with an air of dreamy innocence, start to jiggle the board of an old
swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but
still healthy old oak (which appeared - oh, I remember, Van! - in a century-old
lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows
and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare). (1.34)
Then came several preparatory views of the
immediate grounds: the colutea circle, an avenue, the grotto's black O, and the
hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus
ruslan Chat., and a number of other spots meant to be picturesque by the
compiler of the illustrated pamphlet but looking a little shabby owing to
inexperienced photography. (2.7)
"Baldy" brings to mind Lysevich, a character in
Chekhov's story Bab'ye tsarstvo ("Women's Realm," 1894) whose name
comes from lysyi (bald); Lysevich's favorite author whom he recommends
to Anna Akimovna is Maupassant; on Terra Mlle Larivière's story La
rivière de diamants is known as La Parure (1884) by Guy de
Maupassant (see Darkbloom's 'Notes to Ada'); Quercus ruslan
hints at Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820); Lyudmila is a young
beauty in Sologub's Petty Demon
Orfey - Russian name of Orpheus, a
poet and musician who followed his dead wife, Eurydice, to the underworld; one
of Sologub's poems begins: Kamni plyasali pod pesni Orfeya... ("The
Stones Danced to the songs of Orpheus..." 1925)
ozero - Russ., lake; 'Where are we now, Johnny dear?' asked Van as they swung out of
the lake's orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among
laundry-lined pines.
'Dorofey Road,' cried the driver above the din of the
motor. 'It abuts at the forest.' (1.42)
Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain
Tapper in the Kalugano Lakeview Hospital: For half a
minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the
general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously
bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. (ibid.)
cf. Lake Luga, Lake Kitezh and Lake Leman
Nedotykomka - in Sologub's novel, the Petty
Demon's name
Khan - supreme ruler of the Tartars; cf. Khan
Sosso who rules on Antiterra the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate (2.2); But then 'everyone has his own taste,' as the British writer
Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son
gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once
popular with reporters and politicians, 'A Great Good Man' - according, of
course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new
celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now
telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful
fashion. (1.38)
zad - Russ., back; hind
quarters; buttocks
Neznakomka - Russ., Incognita (a poem and a play
by Blok); He [Van] headed
for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed
spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent revenge!), the
girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more
distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always
alone, like Blok's Incognita. (3.3)
otdykh - Russ., rest; relaxation
ad - Russ., hell; Marina's sister Aqua signed
her suicide note: My sister's sister who teper' iz
ada ('now is out of hell') (1.3); one of Ada's letters to Van
begins: This is a second howl iz ada (out of
Hades). (2.1); 'I know there's a Van in Nirvana. I'll
be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,' said Ada.
(5.6); Orfey v adu ("Orpheus in the Underworld," 1858) is an opéra
bouffon by Jacques Offenbach; Offenbach is the author of La belle Hélène.
In EO Pushkin says that his Tatiana is superior to Homer's nasty Helen. Van
compares Ada to Helen of Troy: 'Castle True, Castle Bright!'
he now cried, 'Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the
Moth!' 'Perestagne (stop, cesse)!'
'Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a
Hat, and now Mount Russet -' 'Perestagne!'
repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic). 'Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène -' 'Ach, perestagne!' '- et le phalène.'
'Je t'emplie ("prie" and "supplie"),
stop, Van. Tu sais que j'en vais mourir.' 'But, but, but' - (slapping every time his forehead) - 'to be on
the very brink of, of, of - and then have that idiot turn
Keats!' (3.8) Tatiana is a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse
in the Lakeview Hospital whom Van begs to massage his legs and who delegates the
task to Dorofey (1.42).
da - Russ., yes; from Ada's letters to
Van: He [Demon] and I
have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the
legendary river of Old Rus. Da. (2.1) Send me an aerogram with one Russian word - the end of my name and
wit. (ibid.); Germ., there; Marina to Van: 'Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda [nonsense] from the German hier und da, which is
neither here nor there.' (1.37) V. Azov (penname of Vladimir Ashkinazi,
1873-1941) reviewed Sologub's tragedy Pobeda smerti ("The Victory of
Death," 1907) dedicated to the author's sister who died of tuberculosis; in
his letters to his wife Sologub several times mentions
Azov
Alexey Sklyarenko