Describing the beginning of Demon's affair with Marina, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Belokonsk, the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada) on Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra):
Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat.
His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss, as she ran, flushed and flustered, in a pink dress into the orchard, earning a claque third of the sitting ovation that greeted the instant dispersal of the imbecile but colorful transfigurants from Lyaska — or Iveria. Her meeting with Baron O., who strolled out of a side alley, all spurs and green tails, somehow eluded Demon’s consciousness, so struck was he by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life. Without waiting for the end of the scene, he hurried out of the theater into the crisp crystal night, the snowflakes star-spangling his top hat as he returned to his house in the next block to arrange a magnificent supper. By the time he went to fetch his new mistress in his jingling sleigh, the last-act ballet of Caucasian generals and metamorphosed Cinderellas had come to a sudden close, and Baron d’O., now in black tails and white gloves, was kneeling in the middle of an empty stage, holding the glass slipper that his fickle lady had left him when eluding his belated advances. The claqueurs were getting tired and looking at their watches when Marina in a black cloak slipped into Demon’s arms and swan-sleigh. (1.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Marina's impressario, Scotty brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk ("Cattleroundinton"), the fictional town (modeled after Staraya Russa, an old town and spa in the Province of Novgorod) in which the action in Dostoevski's novel Brothers Karamazov (1880) takes place. One of the chapters in Dostoevski's novel Besy ("The Possessed," 1872), also set in a fictional (nameless) provincial town, is entitled Premudryi zmiy ("The Subtle Serpent"). The allusion is to Christ's words (Matthew 10: 16) "Therefore be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." In Latin that woul be: "Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes et simplices sicut columbæ." Estote (second-person plural future active imperative of sum, "am" in Latin) brings to mind Western Estoty, a tesselated protectorate still lovingly called ‘Russian’ Estoty:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).
Van’s maternal grandmother Daria (‘Dolly’) Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824, Mary O’Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in Bras, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called ‘Russian’ Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with ‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.
granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.
The Russian twin of Whitehorse, Belokonsk brings to mind belyi kon’ (the white horse) in Alexander Blok's poem Ya vyshel v noch’ (“I came out into the night,” 1902):
Я вышел в ночь - узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот.
Дорога, под луной бела,
Казалось, полнилась шагами.
Там только чья-то тень брела
И опустилась за холмами.
И слушал я - и услыхал:
Среди дрожащих лунных пятен
Далёко, звонко конь скакал,
И легкий посвист был понятен.
Но здесь, и дальше - ровный звук,
И сердце медленно боролось,
О, как понять, откуда стук,
Откуда будет слышен голос?
И вот, слышнее звон копыт,
И белый конь ко мне несётся...
И стало ясно, кто молчит
И на пустом седле смеётся.
Я вышел в ночь - узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот.
In her review of Blok’s first collection of poetry, Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame (“Verses about the Beautiful Lady,” 1904), Zinaida Hippius quotes the first and last stanza of Blok’s poem:
Не будем же требовать от этой милой книжки более того, что она может дать; она и так даёт нам много, освежает и утешает нас, посылает лёгкий, мгновенный отдых. Мы устаём от трезвого серого дня и его несомненностей. И мы рады, что поэт говорит нам:
Я вышел в ночь -- узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот…
Let’s not ask of this nice little book more than it can give; in fact, it gives us a lot, refreshing and consoling us, sending to us a light, instantaneous rest. We get tired of the sober gray day and its undoubtedness. And we are happy that the poet tells us:
I came out into the night – to learn, understand
a distant rustle, a near murmur,
to accept the inexistent creatures,
to believe in imaginary clatter of a horse’s hoofs.
According to Hippius, the Knight of the pale Beautiful Lady managed to grow only the faintly glimmering wings of a butterfly:
Нежный, слабый, паутинный, влюбленный столько же в смерть, сколько в жизнь, рыцарь бледной Прекрасной Дамы — сумел вырастить себе лишь слабо мерцающие крылья бабочки. Он неверными и короткими взлетами поднимается над пропастью; но пропасть широка; крылья бабочки не осилят её. Крылья бабочки скоро устают, быстро слабеют. (I)
The name Hippius brings to mind “Tu es tres hippique ce matin,” Segur’s words in VN’s story Vesna v Fial'te (“Spring in Fialta,” 1936):
-- Критика!-- воскликнул он.-- Хороша критика! Всякая тёмная личность мне читает мораль. Благодарю покорно. К моим книгам притрагиваются с опаской, как к неизвестному электрическому аппарату. Их разбирают со всех точек зрения, кроме существенной. Вроде того, как если бы натуралист, толкуя о лошади, начал говорить о сёдлах, чепраках или M-me de V. (он назвал даму литературного света, в самом деле очень похожую на оскаленную лошадь). Я тоже хочу этой голубиной крови,-- продолжал он тем же громким, рвущим голосом, обращаясь к лакею, который понял его желание, посмотрев по направлению перста, бесцеремонно указывавшего на стакан англичанина. Сегюр упомянул имя общего знакомого, художника, любившего писать стекло, и разговор принял менее оскорбительный характер. Между тем англичанин вдруг решительно поднялся, встал на стул, оттуда шагнул на подоконник и, выпрямившись во весь свой громадный рост, снял с верхнего угла оконницы и ловко перевел в коробок ночную бабочку с бобровой спинкой.
-- ...это, как белая лошадь Вувермана,-- сказал Фердинанд, рассуждая о чём-то с Сегюром.
-- Tu es trés hippique ce matin,-- заметил тот.
"Criticism!" he exclaimed. "Fine criticism! Every slick jackanapes sees fit to read me a lecture. Ignorance of my work is their bliss. My books are touched gingerly, as one touches something that may go bang. Criticism! They are examined from every point of view except the essential one. It is as if a naturalist, in describing the equine genus, started to jaw about saddles or Mme. de V. (he named a well-known literary hostess, who indeed strongly resembled a grinning horse). I would like some of that pigeon's blood, too," he continued in the same loud, ripping voice, addressing the waiter, who understood his desire only after he had looked in the direction of the long-nailed finger which unceremoniously pointed at the Englishman's glass. For some reason or other, Segur mentioned Ruby Rose, the lady who painted flowers on her breast, and the conversation took on a less insulting character. Meanwhile the big Englishman suddenly made up his mind, got up on a chair, stepped from there onto the windowsill, and stretched up till he reached that coveted corner of the frame where rested a compact furry moth, which he deftly slipped into a pillbox.
“… rather like Wouwerman’s white horse,” said Ferdinand, in regard to something he was discussing with Segur.
“Tu es très hippique ce matin,” remarked the latter.
The White Horse is a painting by Philips Wouwerman (1619-68), a Dutch painter of hunting, landscape and battle scenes. Neizvestnyi elektricheskiy apparat (something that may go bang) mentioned by Ferdinand (Nina’s husband, a Franco-Hungarian writer) brings to mind Hippius’ poem Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901). After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Antiterra:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.)
There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development.
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.
Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of ‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations.
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... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
Roman numeral L is equal to 50. Chronologically, the Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. Dostoevski's first novel (written in epistolary form) is Bednye lyudi ("Poor Folk," 1846). In the old Russian alphabet the letter L was called lyudi (in the drafts of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Tatiana Larin signs her letter to Onegin with her initials T. L.: "Podumala, chto skazhut lyudi, / i podpisala Tvyordo, Lyudi"). Dostoevski is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). In Dostoevski's story Son smeshnogo cheloveka ("The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," 1877) the hero in his dream shoots himself in the heart and an angel takes him to a planet that looks exactly like Earth, but Earth before the fall. During Van's first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
The wise serpent brings to mind “the surprised and pleased Serpent” mentioned by Ada when she takes over and describes the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time):
Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —
Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).
Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter. (1.19)