Describing the library of Ardis Hall, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Judge Bald and his followers:
In those times, in this country 'incestuous' meant not only ‘unchaste’ — the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics — but also implied (in the phrase ‘incestuous cohabitation,’ and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had long replaced appeals to ‘divine law’ by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, ‘incest’ could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate, stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples, weaklings, ‘muted mutates’ and, finally, to hopeless sterility. Now that smacked of ‘crime,’ and since nobody could be supposed to control judiciously orgies of indiscriminate inbreeding (somewhere in Tartary fifty generations of ever woolier and woolier sheep had recently ended abruptly in one hairless, five-legged, impotent little lamb — and the beheading of a number of farmers failed to resurrect the fat strain), it was perhaps better to ban ‘incestuous cohabitation’ altogether. Judge Bald and his followers disagreed, perceiving in ‘the deliberate suppression of a possible benefit for the sake of avoiding a probable evil’ the infringement of one of humanity’s main rights — that of enjoying the liberty of its evolution, a liberty no other creature had ever known. Unfortunately after the rumored misadventure of the Volga herds and herdsmen a much better documented fait divers happened in the U.S.A. at the height of the controversy. An American, a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk, described as an ‘habitually intoxicated laborer’ (‘a good definition,’ said Ada lightly, ‘of the true artist’), managed somehow to impregnate — in his sleep, it was claimed by him and his huge family — his five-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria Ivanov, and, then, five years later, also got Maria’s daughter, Daria, with child, in another fit of somnolence. Photographs of Maria, a ten-year old granny with little Daria and baby Varia crawling around her, appeared in all the newspapers, and all kinds of amusing puzzles were provided by the genealogical farce that the relationships between the numerous living — and not always clean-living — members of the Ivanov clan had become in angry Yukonsk. Before the sixty-year-old somnambulist could go on procreating, he was clapped into a monastery for fifteen years as required by an ancient Russian law. Upon his release he proposed to make honorable amends by marrying Daria, now a buxom lass with problems of her own. Journalists made a lot of the wedding, and the shower of gifts from well-wishers (old ladies in New England, a progressive poet in residence at Tennesee Waltz College, an entire Mexican high school, et cetera), and on the same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and demanded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course, only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long shadow upon the little matter of ‘favourable inbreeding.’ By mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols — ‘Peeping Pats,’ as the anti-Irish tabloids called them. (1.21)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): fait divers: news item.
blin: Russ., pancake.
Judge Bald brings to mind Baldus, as in his Russian version (1809-1812) of Écouchard-Lebrun's epigram "О! la maudite compagnie" Batyushkov calls A. S. Shishkov (the leader of the archaists) and his followers:
Всегдашний гость, мучитель мой,
О, Балдус! долго ль мне зевать, дремать с тобой?
Будь крошечку умней или — дай жить в покое!
Когда жестокий рок сведёт тебя со мной —
Я не один и нас не двое.
In his Staraya zapisnaya knizhka ("The Old Notebook," Book 2. 1813-1855) Prince Vyazemski mentions a certain Pimenov (La Rochefoucauld's Russian translator) and quotes Écouchard-Lebrun's epigram in the original:
Дмитриев, жалуясь на Пименова (переводчика Ларошфуко и последнего питомца князя Б. Голицина), который посещал его довольно усердно — сидит два часа и ни слова не промолвит, — говорил, что он приходит держать его под караулом. Лебрэн о парижских Пименовых сказал:
О! la maudite compagnie
Que celle de certains focheux
Dont la nullite vous ennuie:
On n’est pas seul, on n’est pas deux.
(О, будь проклято общество несносных людей, ничтожество которых вам досаждает: вы и не в одиночестве, и не вдвоем.)
In a letter of Jan. 21, 1831, to Eliza Khitrovo (Kutuzov’s daughter and Pushkin's staunch friend who was nicknamed Erminia, after a character in Torquato Tasso's poem Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) Pushkin quotes the last line of Écouchard-Lebrun's epigram:
Vous avez bien raison, Madame, de me reprocher le séjour de Moscou. Il est impossible de n’y pas s’abrutir. Vous connaissez l’épigramme contre la société d’un ennuyeux:
On n’est pas seul, on n’est pas deux.
C’est l’épigraphe de mon existence. Vos lettres sont le seul rayon qui me vienne de l’Europe.
Umirayushchiy Tass ("The Dying Tasso," 1817) is an elegy by Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855), a poet who went mad. The characters in Chekhov's story Bab'ye tsarstvo ("A Woman's Kingdom," 1894) include Pimenov (a young worker with whom Anna Akimovna is in love) and Lysevich, Anna Akimovna's lawyer whose name comes from lysyi (bald). Anna Akimovna and Pimenov bring to mind Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov, the dear housekeeper of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina. In Kim Beauharnais's album Van and Ada see a photograph of the cross and the shade of boughs above her grave:
Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina's dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797-1883). (2.7)
In Chapter Eight (XLVI: 12-14) of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Princess N. mentions the humble churchyard where there’s a cross and the shade of branches over her poor nurse:
А мне, Онегин, пышность эта,
Постылой жизни мишура,
Мои успехи в вихре света,
Мой модный дом и вечера,
Что в них? Сейчас отдать я рада
Всю эту ветошь маскарада,
Весь этот блеск, и шум, и чад
За полку книг, за дикий сад,
За наше бедное жилище,
За те места, где в первый раз,
Онегин, видела я вас,
Да за смиренное кладбище,
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной нянею моей...
“But as to me, Onegin, this magnificence,
a wearisome life's tinsel, my successes
in the world's vortex,
my fashionable house and evenings,
what do I care for them?... At once I'd gladly
give all the frippery of this masquerade,
all this glitter, and noise, and fumes,
for a shelfful of books, for a wild garden,
for our poor dwelling,
for those haunts where for the first time,
Onegin, I saw you,
and for the humble churchyard where
there is a cross now and the shade
of branches over my poor nurse.