I've taken to applying the vowel shift of 4.29-34 and I've come across some interesting finds.
4.10-4.14: "controlled belly laugh" becomes bully laugh. I'm not sure how others have missed this, but since General Ivan Durmanov is an adult male animal that is antlered, he's a buck (or a moose or other, but stick with me). He's a buck that appears at the start of a novel that is concerned with stories, especially other famous novels. He makes a bullying joke at another's expense. He is supposedly, ostensibly above royalty--"sur-royally antlered" but is ultimately an "English bull[y]". These traits all recall plump Buck Mulligan as he appears at the start of Ulysses, Telemachus, but also remember a joke he makes about an obscene farm he would own in which he (and his friends) would inseminate women who volunteered themselves--which puts 3.16 "country gentleman" in a new light. One sense of bully is a pimp. I don't have W2 or 3, so using M-W, bully may also mean sweetheart--which would combine Buck's queenliness and hart, chiefly British, the male of the red deer especially when over five years old. Of course, the General is a cuckold who feigns his detachment, which evokes Bloom at the actual start of Ulysses. (Joyce is all over this chapter, e.g. 3.21: "enjoy a halcyon climate")
20.07: I tried changing "libellula" into libullula but could find nothing--can anyone else? It may only be meant to point back to 4.10.14. There may be a pun on libel since the next sentence speaks of her "poor little letters from the homes of madness"
45.07: The same could be said of "big-bellied robot"--note that this paragraph talks of "brilliant conversational gifts" devolving into "affected wit".
55.20: Here, "bellows" seems especially unfruitful, although VN may have in mind someone with the surname Bülow.
61.08 Since VN is speaking of the introduction of the interior monologue into novels, a finger pointing back to Joyce makes sense.
90.08 "Bronze bell" turns into a bronze bull. Wikipedia says: "Phalaris himself is claimed to have been killed in the brazen bull when he was overthrown by Telemachus, the ancestor of Theron." This may relate to 45.07, with its consonance, but also instances through Ada of the mind being the worst torture house in all the world, the cage in which each of us are trapped.
91.02-03 "Belle" turns into F. bulle, or bubble. Lariviere is constantly bubbly and vague. Based on this, "dizzy Christian" is probably a play on ditzy, as well on whirling dervishes, given the Islamisms below.
There are certainly more opportunities to shift the vowel, but does any of this make sense to anybody else?
English bull to American bell
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns.
Daniel Veen’s mother was a Trumbell, and he was prone to explain at great length — unless sidetracked by a bore-baiter — how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell.’ Somehow or other he had ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer. He did not have — initially at least — any particular liking for paintings, had no aptitude for any kind of salesmanship, and no need whatever to jolt with the ups and downs of a ‘job’ the solid fortune inherited from a series of far more proficient and venturesome Veens. Confessing that he did not much care for the countryside, he spent only a few carefully shaded summer weekends at Ardis, his magnificent manor near Ladore. He had revisited only a few times since his boyhood another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally and which he owned jointly with his cousin, a great fisherman in his youth. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.
Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.
The simplest interpretation of "how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell’" is "from John Bull (national personification of the United Kingdom, especially in political cartoons and similar graphic works) to Liberty Bell (iconic symbol of American independence located in Philadelphia)." Daniel Veen's mother, a Trumbell, seems to blend Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), the 33rd President of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953 (the year of Stalin's death), with For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel by Ernest Hemingway. "A modern substitute of Mayne Reid," Hemingway is the author of Death in the Afternoon (1932), a non-fiction book about the history, ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting.
Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and Nikolay Ogaryov (1813-77) published Kolokol (The Bell), the first Russian censorship-free weekly newspaper in Russian and French languages, in London (1857–1865) and Geneva (1865–1867). After the 1917 Revolution the Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg (where VN was born on April 23, 1899) was renamed the Herzen Street. VN was born a hundred years after Pushkin (1799-1837). Vol'nost' ("To Liberty," 1817) is Pushkin's first great ode. On Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra), Pushkin's poem Mednyi vsadnik ("The Bronze Horseman," 1833) is known as The Headless Horseman:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
Arthur James Plunkett, 8th Earl of Fingall (1759-1835) was an Irish peer. A prominent Roman Catholic, he was a leading supporter of the cause of Catholic Emancipation. In Irish Avatar (1821) Lord Byron violently attacks Fingall for accepting the Order of St. Patrick from George IV - wears Fingall thy trappings? - and for his deferential behavior during the Royal Visit in 1821. Byron is the author of the following epigram (to be found in Byron's letter of June 22, 1821, to Thomas Moore):
The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull;
Each tugs it a different way,
And the greatest of all is John Bull.
Hitler attacked the Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941 (120 years, day for day, after Byron wrote his letter to Moore). Young Moore is Van's groom:
She kissed him allover the face, she kissed his hands, then again his lips, his eyelids, his soft black hair. He kissed her ankles, her knees, her soft black hair.
‘When, my love, when again? In Luga? Kaluga? Ladoga? Where, when?’
‘That’s not the point,’ cried Van, ‘the point, the point, the point is — will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?’
‘You spit, love,’ said wan-smiling Ada, wiping off the P’s and the F’s. ‘I don’t know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying —’
‘The girls don’t matter,’ said Van, ‘it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you. Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors — but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.’
They embraced one last time, and without looking back he fled.
Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork. Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears. (1.25)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): qu’y puis-je? what can I do about it?
Stumbling on melons... arrogant fennels: allusions to passages in Marvell’s ‘Garden’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’.
Wow! I certainly couldn't…
Wow! I certainly couldn't compete with this in scholarliness! I've been interested in the relationship between VN and Hemingway before since their styles are so stunningly different--although, since you've said that the "English Bull" points to Hemingway, I wonder if there are any other fingers in Ch 1 pointing to the man. Dan's fishermanship and Demon's are discussed in the following lines. Could this be one reason VN mentions a burg [iceberg, as in Hemingway's iceberg theory] in the 4.01-02: "Raduga, near the burg of that name?" And since he does allude to Hemingway by the Bell and Bull, does this mean 9.05 "Barkley College" is meant to share a name with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse and the love interest of A Farewell to Arms? There are probably other linkages to find if this is plausible.
Farewell to Arms
Fare thee well, and if for ever, Still for ever fare thee well. Byron (the epigraph to Chapter Eight of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin). The characters in A Farewell to Arms include Miss Van Campen (an older woman in charge of the Milan Hospital). Describing poor mad Aqua's torments, Van mentions a married man and his Camping Ford garçonnière:
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She 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.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
The Milan Hospital makes one think of Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale:
Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Persty: Evidently Pushkin’s vinograd:
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.
(devï molodoy, jeune fille)
ciel-étoilé: starry sky.
Baron d'Onsky (Demon's adversary in a sword duel) is a cross between Dmitri Donskoy (a Moscow Prince who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo, 1380) and Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion).
Arms = Mars = sram (cf. styd i sram, "it's a shame")
Ada's birthday
Ada was born on July 21, 1872. July 21 is also Hemingway's birthday. Three months VN's junior, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) committed suicide on July 2, 1961. Sixteen years later, day for day, VN died in a Lausanne hospital. The poet in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), John Shade is killed by Gradus on July 21, 1959. Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on October 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum). In Lucette's Tobakoff suite there hangs a steeplechase picture of "Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up:"
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. 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)
Thomas Cox (c. 1665-90), known as "The Handsome Highwayman", was an English highwayman, sentenced to death and hanged at Tyburn on Sept. 12, 1690. He was listed in James Caulfield's Blackguardiana: or, a dictionary of rogues, bawds, pimps, whores, pickpockets, shoplifters, &c. (1793) and features in a song sung by a character in W. Harrison Ainsworth's novel Rookwood (1834):
Nor did housebreaker ever deal harder knocks
On the stubborn lid of a good strong box,
Than that prince of good fellows, TOM COX, TOM COX!
Which nobody can deny.