At the beginning of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) speaks of his ancestors and mentions ‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under the American Stars and Stripes:
‘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 action in Ada takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. On Demonia England annexed France in 1815:
The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you.’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe.’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada. (1.40).
The battle of Waterloo in which Napoleon's French army was defeated by two armies of the Seventh Coalition led by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blücher took place on June 18, 1815. It seems that Napoleon (the Emperor of the French, 1769-1821) did not exist on Antiterra. In a letter of October 25, 1891, to Suvorin Chekhov says greatly admires Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) but dislikes the scenes with Napoleon:
Каждую ночь просыпаюсь и читаю «Войну и мир». Читаешь с таким любопытством и с таким наивным удивлением, как будто раньше не читал. Замечательно хорошо. Только не люблю тех мест, где Наполеон. Как Наполеон, так сейчас и натяжки, и всякие фокусы, чтобы доказать, что он глупее, чем был на самом деле. Всё, что делают и говорят Пьер, князь Андрей или совершенно ничтожный Николай Ростов, — всё это хорошо, умно, естественно и трогательно; всё же, что думает и делает Наполеон, — это не естественно, не умно, надуто и ничтожно по значению.
I wake up every night and read War and Peace. One reads it with the same interest and naive wonder as though one had never read it before. It’s amazingly good. Only I don’t like the passages in which Napoleon appears. As soon as Napoleon comes on the scene there are forced explanations and tricks of all sorts to prove that he was stupider than he really was. Everything that is said and done by Pierre, Prince Andrey, or the absolutely insignificant Nikolay Rostov—all that is good, clever, natural, and touching; everything that is thought and done by Napoleon is not natural, not clever, inflated and worthless.
In his poem The Age of Bonze (1821) Byron speaks of Napoleon and mentions bloody and most bootless Waterloo:
Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo,
Which proves how fools may have their fortune too
Won, half by blunder, half by treachery;
Oh, dull St. Helen! with thy Jailor nigh –
Hear! hear! Prometheus from his rock appeal
To Earth, Air, Ocean, all that fear or feel
His power and Glory, all who yet shall hear
A name eternal as the rolling Year;
He teaches them the lesson taught so long,
So oft, so vainly – learn to do no wrong! (5)
In The Age of Bronze Byron several times mentions a Talisman:
What though his Jailor, duteous to the last,
Scarce deemed the Coffin’s lead could keep him fast,
Refusing one poor line along the lid
To date the birth and death of all it hid,
That name shall hallow the ignoble shore,
A Talisman to all save him who bore;
The fleets that sweep before the Eastern blast
Shall hear their Sea boys hail it from the Mast;
When Victory’s Gallic column shall but rise,
Like Pompey’s pillar, in a desart’s skies,
The rocky Isle that holds or held his dust
Shall crown the Atlantic like the Hero’s bust,
And mighty Nature o’er his obsequies
Do more than niggard Envy still denies. (4)
He wants not this; but France shall feel the want
Of this last consolation, though so scant;
Her Honour, Fame, and Faith, demand his bones,
To rear above a Pyramid of thrones;
Or carried onward in the Battle’s van
To form, like Guesclin’s dust,* her Talisman. (4)
*Bertrand du Guesclin (1320-80) died besieging the English at Chateauneuf-de-Randon.
On the eve of Ada’s sixteenth birthday Greg Erminin (whose twin sister Grace marries a Wellington) brings Ada a 'talisman' from his very sick father:
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
Like Tamerlane (Timur, a Turco-Mongol conqueror, 1320s-1405), Byron was lame. In The Age of Bronze Byron says that it is better to drive the Camel than purvey the Bear:
Better still serve the haughty Mussulman,
Than swell the Cossaque’s prowling Caravan;
Better still toil for Masters, than await,
The Slave of Slaves, before a Russian Gate –
Numbered by hordes, a human Capital,
A live Estate, existing but for thrall,
Lotted by thousands, as a meet reward
For the first Courtier in the Czar’s regard;
While their immediate Owner never tastes
His sleep, sans dreaming of Siberia’s wastes;
Better succumb even to their own despair,
And drive the Camel – than purvey the Bear. (6)
In The Age of Bronze Byron mentions Barbaric Moscow’s minarets:
Kosciusko! On – on – on – the thirst of War
Gasps for the Gore of Serfs and of their Czar;
The half Barbaric Moscow’s minarets
Gleam in the Sun, but ’tis a Sun that sets! –
Moscow! thou limit of his long Career,
For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear
To see in vain – He saw thee – how? with Spire
And palace fuel to one common fire. (5)
In a conversation about religions in "Ardis the First" Van mentions Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs:
Now Lucette demanded her mother’s attention.
‘What are Jews?’ she asked.
‘Dissident Christians,’ answered Marina.
‘Why is Greg a Jew?’ asked Lucette.
‘Why-why!’ said Marina; ‘because his parents are Jews.’
‘And his grandparents? His arrière grandparents?’
‘I really wouldn’t know, my dear. Were your ancestors Jews, Greg?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Greg. ‘Hebrews, yes — but not Jews in quotes — I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother’s grandfather, though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him un juif.’
‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp).
‘Who cares —’ said Van.
‘And Belle’ (Lucette’s name for her governess), ‘is she also a dizzy Christian?’
‘Who cares,’ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.’
‘How did this idiotic conversation start in the first place?’ Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented dackel or taksik.
‘Mea culpa,’ Mlle Larivière explained with offended dignity. ‘All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat pork.’
‘The Romans,’ said Greg, ‘the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my grandparents.’
Lucette was puzzled by a verb Greg had used. To illustrate it for her, Van joined his ankles, spread both his arms horizontally, and rolled up his eyes.
‘When I was a little girl,’ said Marina crossly, ‘Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the nursery.’
‘Not all little girls can learn what they are taught,’ observed Ada.
‘Are we Mesopotamians?’ asked Lucette.
‘We are Hippopotamians,’ said Van. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘we have not yet ploughed today.’
A day or two before, Lucette had demanded that she be taught to hand-walk. Van gripped her by her ankles while she slowly progressed on her little red palms, sometimes falling with a grunt on her face or pausing to nibble a daisy. Dack barked in strident protest. (1.14)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): un juif: a Jew.
et pourtant: and yet.