In the "library" chapter of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions a spectacular skin disease that Monsieur Philippe Verger (the Ardis librarian) shared with Miss Vertograd (the librarian of Demon Veen, Van's and Ada's father):
Ada was denied the free use of the library. According to the latest list (printed May 1, 1884), it contained 14,841 items, and even that dry catalogue her governess preferred not to place in the child’s hands — ‘pour ne pas lui donner des idées.’ On her own shelves, to be sure, Ada had taxonomic works on botany and entomology as well as her schoolbooks and a few innocuous popular novels. But not only was she not supposed to browse in the library unsupervised, but every book she took out to read in bed or bower had to be checked by her mentor and charged’ en lecture’ with name and stamped date in the index-card files kept in a careful mess by Mlle Larivière and in a kind of desperate order (with the insertion of queries, calls of distress, and even imprecations, on bits of pink, red or purple paper) by a cousin of hers, Monsieur Philippe Verger, a diminutive old bachelor, morbidly silent and shy, who moused in, every other week, for a few hours of quiet work — so quiet, in fact, that one afternoon when a tallish library ladder suddenly went into an eerie backward slow-motion swoon with him high up on it embracing a windmill of volumes, he reached the floor, supine, with his ladder and books, in such a hush that guilty Ada, who had thought she was alone (pulling out and scanning the utterly unrewarding Arabian Nights), mistook his fall for the shadow of a door being stealthily opened by some soft-fleshed eunuch.
Her intimacy with her cher, trop cher René, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed the reading situation entirely — whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air. Soon upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess (who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any length of time, and without any trace of ‘en lecture,’ any volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father’s librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger’s format and presumable date of publication, post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth century libertines, German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. Puzzled Mlle Larivière would have consulted the Master of Ardis, but she never discussed with him anything serious since the day (in January, 1876) when he had made an unexpected (and rather halfhearted, really — let us be fair) pass at her. As to dear, frivolous Marina, she only remarked, when consulted, that at Van’s age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev’s Smoke. Thereafter, anything Ada wanted or might have wanted to want was placed by Van at her disposal in various safe nooks, and the only visible consequence of Verger’s perplexities and despair was an increase in the scatter of a curious snow-white dust that he always left here and there, on the dark carpet, in this or that spot of plodding occupation — such a cruel curse on such a neat little man!
At a nice Christmas party for private librarians arranged under the auspices of the Braille Club in Raduga a couple of years earlier, emphatic Miss Vertograd had noticed that she and giggling Verger, with whom she was in the act of sharing a quiet little cracker (tugged apart with no audible result — nor did the gold paper frilled at both ends yield any bonbon or breloque or other favor of fate), shared also a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a London weekly. Very delicately, Miss Vertograd would transmit through Van library slips to the rather unresponsive Frenchman with this or that concise suggestion: ‘Mercury!’ or ‘Höhensonne works wonders.’ Mademoiselle, who was in the know, too, looked up ‘Psoriasis’ in a one-volume medical encyclopedia, which her late mother had left her and which had not only helped her and her charges on various minor occasions but had suggested suitable illnesses for the characters in the stories she contributed to the Québec Quarterly. In the present case, the cure optimistically advised was to ‘take a warm bath at least twice a month and avoid spices’; this she typed out and passed on to her cousin in a Get-Well envelope. Finally, Ada showed Van a letter from Dr Krolik on the same subject; it said (English version): ‘Crimson-blotched, silver-scaled, yellow-crusted wretches, the harmless psoriatics (who cannot communicate their skin trouble and are otherwise the healthiest of people — actually, their bobo’s protect them from bubas and buboes, as my teacher used to observe) were confused with lepers — yes, lepers — in the Middle Ages, when thousands if not millions of Vergers and Vertograds crackled and howled bound by enthusiasts to stakes erected in the public squares of Spain and other fire-loving countries.’ But this note they decided not to plant in the meek martyr’s index under PS as they had first intended: lepidopterists are over-eloquent on lepidosis.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): pour ne pas etc.: so as not to put any ideas in her head.
en lecture: ‘out’.
cher, trop cher René: dear, too dear (his sister’s words in Chateaubriand’s René).
Chiron: doctor among centaurs: an allusion to Updike’s best novel.
London Weekly: a reference to Alan Brien’s New Statesman column.
Höhensonne: ultra-violet lamp.
bobo: little hurt.
In John Updike's novel The Centaur (1963), the character Peter Caldwell grapples with psoriasis, a skin condition that causes red, scaly patches. Updike is the author of Rabbit, Run (1963). Krolik is Russian for "rabbit." At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon tells Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) that Jones (a manservant at Ardis) should see Dr Krolik (the local entomologist, Ada's beloved teacher of natural history):
'Marina,' murmured Demon at the close of the first course. 'Marina,' he repeated louder. 'Far from me' (a locution he favored) 'to criticize Dan's taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I'm above all that rot, I'm...' (gesture); 'but, my dear,' he continued, switching to Russian, 'the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki - the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) -'
'Everybody has eyes,' remarked Marina drily.
'Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that's not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It's depressing. It's a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.'
'Look, Dad,' said Van, 'Dr Krolik can't do much, because, as you know quite well, he's dead, and Marina can't tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they're alive.'
'The Veen wit, the Veen wit,' murmured Demon.
‘Exactly,’ said Marina. ‘I simply refuse to do anything about it. Besides poor Jones is not at all asthmatic, but only nervously eager to please. He’s as healthy as a bull and has rowed me from Ardisville to Ladore and back, and enjoyed it, many times this summer. You are cruel, Demon. I can’t tell him "ne pïkhtite," as I can’t tell Kim, the kitchen boy, not to take photographs on the sly — he’s a regular snap-shooting fiend, that Kim, though otherwise an adorable, gentle, honest boy; nor can I tell my little French maid to stop getting invitations, as she somehow succeeds in doing, to the most exclusive bals masqués in Ladore.’
‘That’s interesting,’ observed Demon.
‘He’s a dirty old man!’ cried Van cheerfully.
‘Van!’ said Ada.
‘I’m a dirty young man,’ sighed Demon.
‘Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.
Yes, oh, yes,’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing... Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but "court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?’
‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.’
(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)
‘Ah!’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ne pïkhtite: Russ., do not wheeze.
Demon and Van, both of them are sportsmen. Updike's Rabbit, Run depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and attempts to escape the constraints of his life. A Bildungsroman, Updike's Centaur was compared by critics to James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Its main character, Stephen Dedalus, brings to mind Dedalus Veen (Demon's father, 1799-1883). Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) calls his father-in-law Dementiy Labirintovich. Dans le labyrinthe ("In the Labyrinth," 1959) is a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The name of Demon's librarian, Miss Vertograd, seems to hint at Pushkin's poem Vertograd moey sestry ("My Sister's Garden," 1825). On the other hand, vertograd (archaic, garden) brings to mind J. L. Borges's story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths," 1941). On Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) VN's Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg (anagram of Borges). In his letter to Van (written after Lucette's suicide) Demon mentions the lawyer of the writer Osberg:
Son:
I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress. (3.6)
In March 1905 Demon Veen 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). Two lawyers were present, when Van saw Demon for the last time:
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict. (3.7)
The characters in Chekhov's story Bab'ye tsarstvo ("A Woman's Kingdom," 1894) include Lysevich, Anna Akimovna's lawyer. The surname Lysevich comes from lysyi (bald). In the "library" chapter of Ada Van mentions the opus 'Sex and Lex' and Judge Bald:
In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings, Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or ten the sentence ‘les deux enfants pouvaient donc s’abandonner au plaisir sans aucune crainte.’ A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses s’amusent) explained that the ‘donc’ referred both to the infertility of tender age and to the sterility of tender consanguinity. Van said, however, that the writer and the critic erred, and to illustrate his contention, drew his sweetheart’s attention to a chapter in the opus ‘Sex and Lex’ dealing with the effects on the community of a disastrous caprice of nature.
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'): les deux enfants etc.: ‘therefore the two children could make love without any fear’.
fait divers: news item.
blin: Russ., pancake.
In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov compares Chekhov’s play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896) to a newspaper with an endless series of faits divers:
Забегая несколько вперёд, я уже здесь укажу на его комедию “Чайку”, в которой, наперекор всем литературным принципам, основой действия является не логическое развитие страстей, не неизбежная связь между предыдущим и последующим, а голый, демонстративно ничем не прикрытый случай. Читая драму, иной раз кажется, что пред тобой номер газеты с бесконечным рядом faits divers, нагромождённых друг на друга без всякого порядка и заранее обдуманного плана.
Anticipating a little, I would here point to his comedy, The Seagull, where, in defiance of all literary principles, the basis of action appears to be not the logical development of passions, nor the inevitable connection between cause and effect, but pure chance, ostentatiously unmasked. As one reads the play, it seems at times that one has before one a copy of a newspaper with an endless series of faits divers, heaped upon one another, without order and without previous plan. (II)
Van reads about the airplane disaster in which his father died in a newspaper:
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father. (3.7)