Describing his reunion with Ada in 1922, after their longest, seventeen-year-long, separation, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) compares himself to a Cartesian glassman:
He saw her off — and ascended, like a Cartesian glassman, like spectral Time standing at attention, back to his desolate fifth floor. Had they lived together these seventeen wretched years, they would have been spared the shock and the humiliation; their aging would have been a gradual adjustment, as imperceptible as Time itself. (Part Four)
An ascending Cartesian glassman brings to mind amerikanskie zhiteli (the American residents), an allusion to a once popular glass toy, who ascend in the lift of a scyscraper in VN's poem Tselikom v masterskuyu vysokuyu ("In its entirety into a high studio," 1950s):
Целиком в мастерскую высокую
входит солнечный вечер ко мне:
он как нотные знаки, как фокусник,
он сирень на моем полотне.
Ничего из работы не вышло,
только пальцы в пастельной пыли.
Смотрят с неба художники бывшие
на румяную щеку земли.
Я ж смотрю, как в стеклянной обители
зажигается сто этажей
и как американские жители
там стойком поднимаются в ней.
The adjective Cartesian comes from Cartesius. René Descartes (a French philosopher, scientist and mathematician, 1596-1650, who spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic) was known as Cartesius in Latin. The first principle of Descartes' philosophy is cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Second-person plural future active imperative of sum ("am" in Latin), estote, brings to mind 'Russian' Estoty mentioned by Van at the beginning of his Family Chronicle:
‘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.
Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette are the great-great-great-grandchildren of Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, a former viceroy of Estoty:
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left hanging:
A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755–1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.
Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand). (1.1)
Prince Ivan Temnosiniy whose name means in Russian 'dark blue' brings to mind Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, 'little Violet,' and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death). Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband who dies in 1922) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox are Ada's grandchildren.
Mr and Mrs Ronald Oranger and some non-American citizens are mentioned by the Editor in his introductory note to Ada:
With the exception of Mr and Mrs Ronald Oranger, a few incidental figures, and some non-American citizens, all the persons mentioned by name in this book are dead.
[Ed.]