At the beginning of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions Pontius Press (a publishing house):
‘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). (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.
Pontius Press hints at Pontius Pilate, the governor of the Roman province of Judaea who is best known for being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ultimately ordered his crucifiction. In the second stanza of his poem Kogda oktyabr'skiy nam gotovil vremenshchik ("When the October time-server prepared for us the yoke of violence and spite..." 1917) Osip Mandelshtam mentions Pilate:
Когда октябрьский нам готовил временщик
Ярмо насилия и злобы
И ощетинился убийца-броневик,
И пулеметчик низколобый, —
— Керенского распять! — потребовал солдат,
И злая чернь рукоплескала:
Нам сердце на штыки позволил взять Пилат,
И сердце биться перестало!
И укоризненно мелькает эта тень,
Где зданий красная подкова;
Как будто слышу я в октябрьский тусклый день:
— Вязать его, щенка Петрова!
Среди гражданских бурь и яростных личин,
Тончайшим гневом пламенея,
Ты шел бестрепетно, свободный гражданин,
Куда вела тебя Психея.
И если для других восторженный народ
Венки свивает золотые, —
Благословить тебя в далекий ад сойдет
Стопами легкими Россия.
When red October’s dim time-server for us made
A yoke of bloodshed and of malice,
And armoured car, aggressive, then enforced blockade
And loomed an apish gunner, callous —
And “Crucify Kerensky!” irate soldier brayed,
And angry mob on cue applauded:
Then Pilate let them bring us heart on spike displayed,
And heart had stopped — its veins had clotted!
And there, reproachful shadow flickers in the gloom,
Where crimson horse-shoed buildings cluster;
As if on dull October day in misty bloom
“Now string up Peter’s pup!” they bluster.
Amidst the state’s upheaval and the angry sham,
Enflamed with anger, finer, better
You walked a freeman, brave and giving not a damn,
Where Psyche led you, free of fetter.
And if the frenzied populace were then to tress
A golden wreath to grace another —
May still you find in distant hell descends to bless
With flighty steps our Russian Mother.
(transl. Rupert Moreton)
In a conversation about religions in "Ardis the First" Greg Erminin (whose arrival on a pony is a parody of Jesus's arrival on a donkey in Jerusalem) mentions the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days:
A tall rosy-faced youngster in smart riding breeches dismounted from a black pony.
‘It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony,’ said Ada.
Greg, with a well-bred boy’s easy apologies, had brought Marina’s platinum lighter which his aunt had discovered in her own bag.
‘Goodness, I’ve not even had time to miss it. How is Ruth?’
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up with acute indigestion — ‘not because of your wonderful sandwiches,’ he hastened to add, ‘but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.’
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
‘Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,’ remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
‘She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,’ said Greg.
‘And ten years older than me,’ said Marina.
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.
‘Et pourtant,’ said the sound-sensitive governess, wincing, ‘I read to her twice Ségur’s adaptation in fable form of Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer.’
‘She also knows my revised monologue of his mad king,’ said Ada:
Ce beau jardin fleurit en mai,
Mais en hiver
Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais
N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ exclaimed Greg with a veritable sob of admiration. (1.14)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): un juif: a Jew.
et pourtant: and yet.
ce beau jardin etc.: This beautiful garden blooms in May, but in Winter never, never, never, never, never is green etc.
By Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess) means The Merchant of Venice. It brings to mind Venezia Rossa mentioned by Van when he describes Flavita (the Russian Scrabble):
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
By July the ten A’s had dwindled to nine, and the four D’s to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost — faking the fate of its apostrophizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards, in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal note) knows no bounds. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): particule: ‘de’ or ‘d’’.
Baron Klim Avidov is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. Walter C. Keyway, Esq. (the unfortunate English tourist whom Avidov catapulted with an uppercut into the porter’s lodge) believed that the Baron's real surname was Davidov. The term syn Davidov (the son of David) is associated with Jesus Christ. In her memoir essay Fyodor Sologub (1949) Nadezhda Teffi says that in Nav'yi chary ("Phantom Spells"), as Sologub's trilogy Tvorimaya legenda ("The Created Legend," 1905-14) was at first entitled, Sologub ("the brick in a frock coat," as Rozanov called him) intended to portray Christ as a person of the world, our contemporary whose visiting card is "Osip Osipovich Davidov:"
В «Навьих чарах» он предполагал вывести Христа, который должен был явиться как светский господин, даже с визитной карточкой «Осип Осипович Давидов». Но до этого в романе дело не дошло. Должно быть, одумался или не справился.
One of Sologub's most famous poems is Nyurenbergskiy palach ("The Executioner of Nuremberg," 1908). Describing his conversation with Demon (Van's and Ada's father who just discovered that his children are lovers), Van mentions the Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting (an allusion to the iron maiden of Nuremberg, a medieval instrument of torture):
The dragon drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind. Now clad in a gray dressing gown, Demon lay on a gray couch in his third-floor study. His son stood at the window with his back to the silence. In a damask-padded room on the second floor, immediately below the study, waited Ada, who had arrived with Van a couple of minutes ago. In the skyscraper across the lane a window was open exactly opposite the study and an aproned man stood there setting up an easel and cocking his head in search of the right angle.
The first thing Demon said was:
‘I insist that you face me when I’m speaking to you.’
Van realized that the fateful conversation must have already started in his father’s brain, for the admonishment had the ring of a self-interruption, and with a slight bow he took a seat.
‘However, before I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this — how long this has been...’ (‘going on,’ one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are banal — hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane’s washroom, being poisoned by one’s wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr and Mrs Vinelander —)
‘It will be nine years soon,’ replied Van. ‘I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four. Except for a single occasion, we did not make love again until the summer of eighteen eighty-eight. After a long separation we spent one winter together. All in all, I suppose I have had her about a thousand times. She is my whole life.’
A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up, came in response to his well-rehearsed speech.
Finally, Demon: ‘The second fact may horrify you even more than the first. I know it caused me much deeper worry — moral of course, not monetary — than Ada’s case — of which eventually her mother informed Cousin Dan, so that, in a sense —’
Pause, with an underground trickle. (2.11)
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. Demon's Manhattan house was turned by Van into a museum:
I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr Lagosse, Stepan Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-seventh birthday, and I hear from my wonderful new Everyrest chair a spade scrape and footsteps in the snow-sparkling garden, and my old Russian valet, who is deafer than he thinks, pull out and push in nose-ringed drawers in the dressing room. This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.
Of all their many houses, in Europe and in the Tropics, the château recently built in Ex, in the Swiss Alps, with its pillared front and crenelated turrets, became their favorite, especially in midwinter, when the famous glittering air, le cristal d’Ex, ‘matches the highest forms of human thought — pure mathematics & decipherment’ (unpublished ad).
At least twice a year our happy couple indulged in fairly long travels. Ada did not breed or collect butterflies any more, but throughout her healthy and active old age loved to film them in their natural surroundings, at the bottom of her garden or the end of the world, flapping and flitting, settling on flowers or filth, gliding over grass or granite, fighting or mating. Van accompanied her on picture-shooting journeys to Brazil, the Congo, New Guinea, but secretly preferred a long drink under a tent to a long wait under a tree for some rarity to come down to the bait and be taken in color. One would need another book to describe Ada’s adventures in Adaland. The films — and the crucified actors (Identification Mounts) — can be seen by arrangement at the Lucinda Museum, 5, Park Lane, Manhattan. (5.6)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Stepan Nootkin: Van's valet.
Nootka Island is the largest island off the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. On the other hand, the surname of old Van's valet brings to mind Famusov's words in Griboedov's Woe from Wit (Act Two, scene 2): "Vy, nyneshnie - nu-tka! (You, the present-day men, come on!)." In his essay Vrazhda i druzhba stikhiy ("The Enmity and Friendship of the Elements," 1905) Sologub quotes Chatski's words in Griboedov's comedy "we live rassudku vopreki, naperekor stikhiyam (contrary to reason, in spite of the elements):"
Стихии давно уже против нас. Ещё Чацкий говаривал, что мы живём «рассудку вопреки, наперекор стихиям». Это сказано, собственно, о фраке. Но это относится, конечно, и к очень многому другому.
In his essay Sologub repeats the words of a newspaper reporter who said that in the naval battle of Tsushima (27-28 May 1905) the elements helped the Japanese and were against the Russians. Three different elements destroy Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's s mother), Lucette and Demon:
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.
For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant, and retired to her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d’Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her), Van’s mother had been suffering from various ‘obscure’ illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated, and which she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower. Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions; and once, in 1899, he saw, as he entered the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina, a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts. Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater, but never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis, none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and ‘self-focusing’ or its opposite device, ‘self-dissolving.’ She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakon’s rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper’s kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism.
Early in 1900, a few days before he saw Marina, for the last time, at the clinic in Nice (where he learned for the first time the name of her illness), Van had a ‘verbal’ nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus. Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating ‘I can’t!’ (meaning ‘can’t die’ — a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming ‘You can, sir!’ She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions. (3.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): dyakon: deacon.