The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada (1969), Van Veen spends two summers, the summer of 1884 and that of 1888, at Ardis, the family estate of Daniel Veen (Van's and Ada's Uncle Dan). According to Mlle Larivière (the governess of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette, Daniel Veen's daughter), Ardis means in Greek "point of an arrow." On the other hand, the toponym Ardis seems to hint at paradise. Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic poem in blank verse by John Milton (an English poet, 1608-74). The Russian tsar Peter I (1672-1725) called the city he had founded in 1703 Paradiz:
Несколько дней спустя, когда обычный вид Петербурга уже почти скрыл следы наводнения, Петр писал в шутливом послании к одному из птенцов своих:
"На прошлой неделе ветром вест-зюйд-вестом такую воду нагнало, какой, сказывают, не бывало. У меня в хоромах было сверху пола 21 дюйм; а по огороду и по другой стороне улицы свободно ездили в лодках. И зело было утешно смотреть, что люди по кровлям и по деревьям, будто во время потопа сидели, не только мужики, но и бабы. Вода, хотя и зело велика была, а беды большой не сделала".
Письмо было помечено: Из Парадиза.
A few days later, when the usual aspect of Petersburg had well nigh obliterated all traces of the flood, Peter wrote in a jovial letter to one of his eaglets:
“Last week, the west-south-west wind beat up such a flood, as, they say, had never happened before. In my apartments water stood twenty-one inches high, while in the garden and on the opposite shore it was high enough to boat on. It was very amusing to see people, men and women, perched on roofs and trees as on Ararat at the Great Flood. The water though high, didn’t do much damage.”
The letter was dated from “Paradise.”(Merezhkovski, Peter and Alexey, 1905, Book Four: "The Flood," Chapter I)
Dmitri Merezhkovski (1865-1941) quotes Peter's humorous epistle to one of his ptensty (nestlings) - an allusion to Sii ptentsy gnezda Petrova ("These nestlings of Peter's nest"), a line in Pushkin's poem Poltava (1829). Peter's letter (in which the tsar describes a flood of the Neva) was marked: Iz Paradiza ("From Paradise"). In one of her letters to Van (written after Van left Ardis forever) Ada mentions the legendary river of Old Rus:
[Los Angeles, 1889]
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He 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. Oh, write me, one tiny note, I’m trying so hard to please you! Want some more (desperate) little topics? Marina’s new director of artistic conscience defines Infinity as the farthest point from the camera which is still in fair focus. She has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters). She sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and role overflow into everyday life, insists on keeping it up at the hotel restaurant, drinks tea v prikusku (‘biting sugar between sips’), and feigns to misunderstand every question in Varvara’s quaint way of feigning stupidity — a double imbroglio, which annoys strangers but which somehow makes me feel I’m her daughter much more distinctly than in the Ardis era. She’s a great hit here, on the whole. They gave her (not quite gratis, I’m afraid) a special bungalow, labeled Marina Durmanova, in Universal City. As for me, I’m only an incidental waitress in a fourth-rate Western, hip-swinging between table-slapping drunks, but I rather enjoy the Houssaie atmosphere, the dutiful art, the winding hill roads, the reconstructions of streets, and the obligatory square, and a mauve shop sign on an ornate wooden façade, and around noon all the extras in period togs queuing before a glass booth, but I have nobody to call.
Speaking of calls, I saw a truly marvelous ornithological film the other night with Demon. I had never grasped the fact that the paleotropical sunbirds (look them up!) are ‘mimotypes’ of the New World hummingbirds, and all my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours. I know, I know! I even know that you stopped reading at ‘grasped’ — as in the old days. (2.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): da: Russ., yes.
The surname Veen means in Dutch what Neva means in Finnish: "peat bog." In 1697 Peter I visited the Netherlands as part of his Grand Embassy to Western Europe. Iz Paradiza ("From Paradise") brings to mind "My sister’s sister who teper' iz ada (now is out of hell)," as the last note of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) was signed:
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
In his humorous story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p'yanitsy ("Woman as Seen by a Drunkard," 1885) signed Brat moego brata (My brother's brother) Chekhov (whose play The Three Sisters, 1901, is known on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra, as Four Sisters) compares girls under sixteen to aqua distillatae (the distilled water). The founder of VN's home city, Peter the Great (as Peter I is sometimes called) brings to mind Pierre Legrand, Van's fencing master:
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bretteur: duelling bravo.
au fond: actually.
In Tayna Tryokh. Egipet i Vavilon (“The Secret of Three: Egypt and Babylon,” 1925) Merezhkovski says "How can we grasp what Divine Eros is when, instead of Aphrodite Urania, we have La Belle Hélène (an opéra bouffe by Jacques Offenbach) and, instead of the Eleusinian temple, we have the brothel:"
Как глубоко наше скопчество, видно из того, что в нём согласны все индивидуалисты и социалисты, буржуа и пролетарии, верующие в Бога и безбожники. Как нам понять, что такое божественный Эрос, когда вместо Афродиты Урании – у нас «Елена Прекрасная», а вместо Елевзинского храма – публичный дом?
and mentions the play of divine numbers crystallized by the Egyptians in a pyramid and by the Babylonians in a seven storey Ziggurat tower:
Не эту ли игру божественных чисел кристаллизируют и египтяне в пирамиде, соединяя в одной точке неба четыре исходящих из земли треугольника, и вавилоняне – в башне Zikkurat, семиярусной: 3 + 4 = 7? (“The Divine Trefoil,” XI)
While a pyramid brings to mind the pyramids of Ladorah, igra bozhestvennykh chisel (the play of divine numbers) makes one think of "numbers and rows and series" mentioned by Van when he tells about Marina's death:
He traveled, he studied, he taught.
He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van — who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers.
He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth, and ennui, and discarded ‘merrycans’ with ‘Billy’ labels, and the jungle jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden, were but places on the map of his own madness.
He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sun decks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.
For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant, and retired to her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d’Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her), Van’s mother had been suffering from various ‘obscure’ illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated, and which she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower. Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions; and once, in 1899, he saw, as he entered the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina, a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts. Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater, but never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis, none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and ‘self-focusing’ or its opposite device, ‘self-dissolving.’ She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakon’s rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper’s kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism.
Early in 1900, a few days before he saw Marina, for the last time, at the clinic in Nice (where he learned for the first time the name of her illness), Van had a ‘verbal’ nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus. Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating ‘I can’t!’ (meaning ‘can’t die’ — a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming ‘You can, sir!’ She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions. (3.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): dyakon: deacon.
Describing the Neva flood, Merezhkovski says that Peter I worked all night, saving people from water and fire:
Всю ночь работал Петр без отдыха, спасая людей от воды и огня. Как простой пожарный, лазил на горящие здания; огнем опалило ему волосы; едва не задавило рухнувшей балкою. Помогая вытаскивать убогие пожитки бедняков из подвальных жилищ, стоял по пояс в воде и продрог до костей. Страдал со всеми, ободрял всех. Всюду, где являлся царь, работа кипела так дружно, что ей уступали вода и огонь. (Peter and Alexey. Book Four: "The Flood")
"Wherever the tsar appeared, the work was going on with such enthusiasm that water and fire gave in." Water is the element that destroys Lucette, Van's and Ada's half-sister who in June 1901 commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic. In March 1905 Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Demon learns about his children's affair by chance, because of Uncle Dan's odd Boschean death. In February 1893 Daniel Veen dies in the brand-new Ladore hospital (Dr Nikulin's clinic) after escaping from Ardis (Dan thought that a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house). In the 1900s Van's nonclandestine correspondence with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) is established with the tacit sanction of Demon. In Merezhkovski's novel, Peter I gives his sanction to the murder of his son Alexey (who was tortured to death in the St. Petersburg's Peter-and-Paul Fortress). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN points out that Rozhdestveno, the Nabokovs' family estate 80 km south of St. Petersburg, had been the seat of Prince Alexey Petrovich.
Ardis means in Greek "point of an arrow." In a song that seventy-year-old Pyotr Andreich Tolstoy (Peter's envoy in Constantinople who bought for the tsar Abram Hannibal, Peter's godson and Pushkin's black ancestor, and who managed to bring exiled Prince Alexey from Italy back to St. Petersburg) sings in the ear of pretty Princess Cherkasski, as he dances minuet with her, Cupid's arrows are mentioned:
Петр Андреич Толстой, который шел в менуэте с княгинею Черкасскою, напевал ей на ухо своим бархатным голосом под звуки музыки.
Покинь, Купидо, стрелы:
Уже мы все не целы.
Но сладко уязвленны
Любовною стрелою
Твоею золотою,
Любви все покоренны
И жеманно приседая перед кавалерами, как того требовал чин менуэта, хорошенькая княгиня отвечала томной улыбкой пастушки Хлои семидесятилетнему юноше Дафнису. (Peter and Alexey. Book One. "The St. Petersburg Venus")
Peterburgskaya Venera ("The St. Petersburg Venus"), Book One of Merezhkovski's Peter and Alexey, brings to mind Eric Veen's essay "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream." Describing Villa Venus, Van calls floramors (one hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world in memory of his grandson) "parodies of paradise:"
Eric’s grandfather’s range was wide — from dodo to dada, from Low Gothic to Hoch Modern. In his parodies of paradise he even permitted himself, just a few times, to express the rectilinear chaos of Cubism (with ‘abstract’ cast in ‘concrete’) by imitating — in the sense described so well in Vulner’s paperback History of English Architecture given me by good Dr Lagosse — such ultra-utilitarian boxes of brick as the maisons closes of El Freud in Lubetkin, Austria, or the great-necessity houses of Dudok in Friesland.
But on the whole it was the idyllic and the romantic that he favored. English gentlemen of parts found many pleasures in Letchworth Lodge, an honest country house plastered up to its bulleyes, or Itchenor Chat with its battered chimney breasts and hipped gables. None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia. We appreciated greatly his blending local banality (that château girdled with chestnuts, that castello guarded by cypresses) with interior ornaments that pandered to all the orgies reflected in the ceiling mirrors of little Eric’s erogenetics. Most effective, in a functional sense, was the protection the architect distilled, as it were, from the ambitus of his houses. Whether nestling in woodland dells or surrounded by a many-acred park, or overlooking terraced groves and gardens, access to Venus began by a private road and continued through a labyrinth of hedges and walls with inconspicuous doors to which only the guests and the guards had keys. Cunningly distributed spotlights followed the wandering of the masked and caped grandees through dark mazes of coppices; for one of the stipulations imagined by Eric was that ‘every establishment should open only at nightfall and close at sunrise.’ A system of bells that Eric may have thought up all by himself (it was really as old as the bautta and the vyshibala) prevented visitors from running into each other on the premises, so that no matter how many noblemen were waiting or wenching in any part of the floramor, each felt he was the only cock in the coop, because the bouncer, a silent and courteous person resembling a Manhattan shopwalker, did not count, of course: you sometimes saw him when a hitch occurred in connection with your credentials or credit but he was seldom obliged to apply vulgar force or call in an assistant. (3.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): maison close: brothel.
vyshibala: Russ., bouncer.
Palermontovia blends Palermo (the largest city in and capital of Sicily) with Lermontov (a Russian poet, 1814-41), the author of The Demon (1829-40). M. Yu. Lermontov. Poet sverkhchelovechestva (“Lermontov as a Poet of the Superhuman,” 1911) is an essay by Merezhkovski. Like Lermontov's poem Son ("A Dream," 1841), VN's Ada seems to be a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream). And, just like Eric Veen's Villa Venus, Van's and Ada's Ardis is but a parody of paradise. In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Seven: XXIV: 14) Tatiana wonders if Onegin might not a be parody:
И начинает понемногу
Моя Татьяна понимать
Теперь яснее — слава богу —
Того, по ком она вздыхать
Осуждена судьбою властной:
Чудак печальный и опасный,
Созданье ада иль небес,
Сей ангел, сей надменный бес,
Что ж он? Ужели подражанье,
Ничтожный призрак, иль еще
Москвич в Гарольдовом плаще,
Чужих причуд истолкованье,
Слов модных полный лексикон?..
Уж не пародия ли он?
And my Tatiana by degrees
begins to understand
more clearly now — thank God —
him for whom by imperious fate
she is sentenced to sigh.
A sad and dangerous eccentric,
creature of hell or heaven,
this angel, this proud fiend, what, then, is he?
Can it be, he's an imitation,
an insignificant phantasm, or else
a Muscovite in Harold's mantle,
a glossary of alien vagaries,
a complete lexicon of words in vogue?...
Might he not be, in fact, a parody?