Describing his last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen's floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions a maidservant, Princess Kachurin:
Van never regretted his last visit to one last Villa Venus. A cauliflowered candle was messily burning in its tin cup on the window ledge next to the guitar-shaped paper-wrapped bunch of long roses for which nobody had troubled to find, or could have found, a vase. On a bed, some way off, lay a pregnant woman, smoking, looking up at the smoke mingling its volutes with the shadows on the ceiling, one knee raised, one hand dreamily scratching her brown groin. Far beyond her, a door standing ajar gave on what appeared to be a moonlit gallery but was really an abandoned, half-demolished, vast reception room with a broken outer wall, zigzag fissures in the floor, and the black ghost of a gaping grand piano, emitting, as if all by itself, spooky glissando twangs in the middle of the night. Through a great rip in the marbleized brick and plaster, the naked sea, not seen but heard as a panting space separated from time, dully boomed, dully withdrew its platter of pebbles, and, with the crumbling sounds, indolent gusts of warm wind reached the unwalled rooms, disturbing the volutes of shadow above the woman, and a bit of dirty fluff that had drifted down onto her pale belly, and even the reflection of the candle in a cracked pane of the bluish casement. Beneath it, on a rump-tickling coarse couch, Van reclined, pouting pensively, pensively caressing the pretty head on his chest, flooded by the black hair of a much younger sister or cousin of the wretched florinda on the tumbled bed. The child’s eyes were closed, and whenever he kissed their moist convex lids the rhythmic motion of her blind breasts changed or stopped altogether, and was presently resumed.
He was thirsty, but the champagne he had bought, with the softly rustling roses, remained sealed and he had not the heart to remove the silky dear head from his breast so as to begin working on the explosive bottle. He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained — she, and the other girl, and a third one (a maidservant, Princess Kachurin), who seemed to have been born in the faded bathing suit she never changed and would die in, no doubt, before reaching majority or the first really cold winter on the beach mattress which she was moaning on now in her drugged daze. And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she? — not Rumanian, not Dalmatian, not Sicilian, not Irish, though an echo of brogue could be discerned in her broken but not too foreign English. Was she eleven or fourteen, almost fifteen perhaps? Was it really her birthday — this twenty-first of July, nineteen-four or eight or even several years later, on a rocky Mediterranean peninsula?
A very distant church clock, never audible except at night, clanged twice and added a quarter.
‘Smorchiama la secandela,’ mumbled the bawd on the bed in the local dialect that Van understood better than Italian. The child in his arms stirred and he pulled his opera cloak over her. In the grease-reeking darkness a faint pattern of moonlight established itself on the stone floor, near his forever discarded half-mask lying there and his pump-shod foot. It was not Ardis, it was not the library, it was not even a human room, but merely the squalid recess where the bouncer had slept before going back to his Rugby-coaching job at a public school somewhere in England. The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s’ organized dream,’ but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada. (2.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): smorchiama: let us snuff out the candle.
A maidservant, Princess Kachurin brings to mind VN's poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin (1947) in which the author imagines his incognito visit to Leningrad (St. Petersburg's name in 1924-91):
Качурин, твой совет я принял
и вот уж третий день живу
в музейной обстановке, в синей
гостиной с видом на Неву.
Священником американским
твой бедный друг переодет,
и всем долинам дагестанским
я шлю завистливый привет.
От холода, от перебоев
в подложном паспорте, не сплю:
исследователям обоев
лилеи и лианы шлю.
Но спит, на канапе устроясь,
коленки приложив к стене
и завернувшись в плед по пояс,
толмач, приставленный ко мне.
Kachurin, your advice I’ve accepted
and here I am, living for the third day
in a museumist setup: a blue
drawing room with a view on the Neva.
As an American clergyman
your poor friend is disguised,
and to all the Daghestan valleys
I send envious greetings.
Because of the cold, and the palpitations
of a false passport, I cannot sleep.
To wallpaper investigators
lianas and lilies I send.
But he sleeps (curled up on a canapé,
knees snugly pressed to the wall,
in a plaid rug wrapped up to the waist)
– the interpreter I’ve been assigned. (1)
The surname of almost all main characters in Ada, Veen means in Dutch what neva means in Finnish: "peat bog." The Neva is a river that flows through St. Petersburg (VN's home city). Peterburg (1913) is a novel by Andrey Bely (the penname of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934). In his novel Serebryanyi golub’ (“The Silver Dove,” 1908) Bely compares a priest in a cassock who rides a bicycle to smorchok (a morel, pointed edible fungus):
Вот и всё, что было памятного в эти дни – да: что ж это я про самое главное приключение ни слова? Пардон-с: запамятовал! Это, конечно, про велосипед: ах, что бы это значило, чтобы такое случилось с попом? Но прежде всего про велосипед (это у попа был велосипед); не у этого попа, а у того, который – ну, да вы уже сами догадываетесь, о ком идет речь, а велосипед, я вам доложу, прекрасный: молодец поп, что у него есть такая машина: игрушечка-велосипед – новенький, аккуратный, с тормозом, отличнейшая резина и весьма успешный руль-с! Выскочил поп из-под навеса без шапки, в одном подряснике – прыг: да и был таков: только пыль столбом на дороге: маленький-маленький попик, будто сморчок! Очки это съехали на самый носа кончик-с (очки золотые), шапка черных волос копной, крест на сторону, черная борода почитай на самый легла руль, а спинка – дугой… Ну-ну!… Смотрят люди, как зажаривает себе поп на велосипеде по проезжей дороге с рулем и в ветрилом надутой рясе, из-под которой взлетают рыжие голенищи болтающихся с подвернутыми полосатого цвета штиблетами ног на забаву прохожим: только попыхивает пыль в их разинутые от удивленья рты, а верстовые столбы да деревни мимо попа, мимо – так и летят: сама большая дорога тронулась с места и понеслась под велосипед, как будто она была большой белой лентой, быстро разматываемой на одной стороне горизонта и сматываемой на другой. Так-то промчался поп на велосипеде к Целебееву к самому, с трезвоном, срамом и перцем; соскочил у домика отца Вукола, да прямо к нему. (Chapter Four: “Obsession”)
In VN's poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin the author is disguised as an American clergyman (cf. popik, little priest, in Bely's novel). 'Smorchiama la secandela' ("let us snuff out the candle," the bawd's words to Van) seems to combine smorchok (Morchella) with come si chiama ("what is it called" in Italian) and la candela (the candle in Spanish). I vsem dolinam dagestanskim ("And to all the Daghestan valleys"), a line in VN's poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin, hints at V poldnevnyi zhar v doline Dagestana ("In the noon's heat in a valley of Daghestan"), the first line of Lermontov's poem Son ("A Dream," 1841). Like Lermontov’s poem A Dream and VN’s poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin, Ada seems to be a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream). Describing Villa Venus, Van mentions the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia:
But on the whole it was the idyllic and the romantic that he favored. English gentlemen of parts found many pleasures in Letchworth Lodge, an honest country house plastered up to its bulleyes, or Itchenor Chat with its battered chimney breasts and hipped gables. None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia. (2.3)
Palermontovia blends Palermo (the largest city in and capital of Sicily) with Lermontov (a Russian poet, 1814-1841), the author of The Demon (1829-40). In his poem Rossiya ("Russia," 1924) Maximilian Voloshin quotes the words of Nicholas I on the occasion of Lermontov's death: Sobake - sobach'ya smert' ("A dog's death for a dog"):
А между тем от голода, от мора,
От поражений, как и от побед,
Россию прёт и вширь, и ввысь — безмерно.
Её сознание уходит в рост,
На мускулы, на поддержанье массы,
На крепкий тяж подпружных обручей.
Пять виселиц на Кронверкской куртине
Рифмуют на Семёновском плацу;
Волы в Тифлис волочат «Грибоеда»,
Отправленного на смерть в Тегеран;
Гроб Пушкина ссылают под конвоем
На розвальнях в опальный монастырь;
Над трупом Лермонтова царь: «Собаке —
Собачья смерть» — придворным говорит;
Промозглым утром бледный Достоевский
Горит свечой, всходя на эшафот…
И всё тесней, всё гуще этот список… (3)
Voloshin compares pale Dostoevski ascending the scaffold to a burning candle. The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In Moyo neobkhodimoe ob'yasnenie ("My Necessary Explanation") Ippolit Terentiev, a character in Dostoevski's novel The Idiot (1869), mentions kakoy-nibud' neschastnyi smorchok iz blagorodnykh ("some wretched fellow who has known better days," as Hyppolite calls his neighbor, Ivan Fomich Surikov):
Припоминаю теперь, с каким жадным интересом я стал следить тогда за ихнею жизнью; такого интереса прежде не бывало. Я с нетерпением и с бранью ждал иногда Колю, когда сам становился так болен, что не мог выходить из комнаты. Я до того вникал во все мелочи, интересовался всякими слухами, что, кажется, сделался сплетником. Я не понимал, например, как эти люди, имея столько жизни, не умеют сделаться богачами (впрочем, не понимаю и теперь). Я знал одного бедняка, про которого мне потом рассказывали, что он умер с голоду, и, помню, это вывело меня из себя: если бы можно было этого бедняка оживить, я бы, кажется, казнил его. Мне иногда становилось легче на целые недели, и я мог выходить на улицу; но улица стала наконец производить во мне такое озлобление, что я по целым дням нарочно сидел взаперти, хотя и мог выходить, как и все. Я не мог выносить этого шныряющего, суетящегося, вечно озабоченного, угрюмого и встревоженного народа, который сновал около меня по тротуарам. К чему их вечная печаль, вечная их тревога и суета; вечная, угрюмая злость их (потому что они злы, злы, злы)? Кто виноват, что они несчастны и не умеют жить, имея впереди по шестидесяти лет жизни? Зачем Зарницын допустил себя умереть с голоду, имея у себя шестьдесят лет впереди? И каждый-то показывает свое рубище, свои рабочие руки, злится и кричит: «Мы работаем как волы, мы трудимся, мы голодны как собаки и бедны! Другие не работают и не трудятся, а они богаты!» (Вечный припев!) Рядом с ними бегает и суетится с утра до ночи какой-нибудь несчастный сморчок «из благородных», Иван Фомич Суриков, – в нашем доме, над нами живет, – вечно с продранными локтями, с обсыпавшимися пуговицами, у разных людей на посылках, по чьим-нибудь поручениям, да еще с утра до ночи. Разговоритесь с ним: «Беден, нищ и убог, умерла жена, лекарства купить было не на что, а зимой заморозили ребенка; старшая дочь на содержанье пошла…»; вечно хнычет, вечно плачется! О, никакой, никакой во мне не было жалости к этим дуракам, ни теперь, ни прежде, – я с гордостью это говорю! Зачем же он сам не Ротшильд? Кто виноват, что у него нет миллионов, как у Ротшильда, что у него нет горы золотых империалов и наполеондоров, такой горы, такой точно высокой горы, как на масленице под балаганами! Коли он живет, стало быть, всё в его власти! Кто виноват, что он этого не понимает?"
I remember now with what hungry interest I began to watch the lives of other people—interest that I had never felt before! I used to wait for Colia’s arrival impatiently, for I was so ill myself, then, that I could not leave the house. I so threw myself into every little detail of news, and took so much interest in every report and rumour, that I believe I became a regular gossip! I could not understand, among other things, how all these people—with so much life in and before them—do not become rich—and I don’t understand it now. I remember being told of a poor wretch I once knew, who had died of hunger. I was almost beside myself with rage! I believe if I could have resuscitated him I would have done so for the sole purpose of murdering him! Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice—that’s what it is—they are all full of malice, malice! Whose fault is it that they are all miserable, that they don’t know how to live, though they have fifty or sixty years of life before them? Why did that fool allow himself to die of hunger with sixty years of unlived life before him? And everyone of them shows his rags, his toil-worn hands, and yells in his wrath: ‘Here are we, working like cattle all our lives, and always as hungry as dogs, and there are others who do not work, and are fat and rich!’ The eternal refrain! And side by side with them trots along some wretched fellow who has known better days, Ivan Fomich Surikov, doing light porter’s work from morn to night for a living, always blubbering and saying that ‘his wife died because he had no money to buy medicine with,’ and his children dying of cold and hunger, and his eldest daughter gone to the bad, and so on. Oh! I have no pity and no patience for these fools of people. Why can’t they be Rothschilds? Whose fault is it that a man has not got millions of money like Rothschild? If he has life, all this must be in his power! Whose fault is it that he does not know how to live his life? (Part III, chapter 5)
Ippolit (Hyppolite) Terentiev is a namesake of Ippolit Matveyevich Vorob'yaninov, a character in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928). Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) is a poem by Alexander Blok (1880-1921). Blok is the author of Pesn' ada ("A Song of Hell," 1909), a poem written in tercets. Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia), Van mentions Blok's Incognita:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.
‘Hullo there, Ed,’ said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.
‘I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!’
‘Your hat,’ he said, ‘is positively lautrémontesque — I mean, lautrecaquesque — no, I can’t form the adjective.’
Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.
‘Gin and bitter for me.’
‘I’m so happy and sad,’ she murmured in Russian. ‘Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?’
Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn’t mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject. (3.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
grutnoe etc.: Russ., she addresses him as 'my sad bliss.'
During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
The author of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream,' Eric Veen derived his project from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole:
In the spring of 1869, David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance), escaped uninjured when the motorcar he was driving from Cannes to Calais blew a front tire on a frost-blazed road and tore into a parked furniture van; his daughter sitting beside him was instantly killed by a suitcase sailing into her from behind and breaking her neck. In his London studio her husband, an unbalanced, unsuccessful painter (ten years older than his father-in-law whom he envied and despised) shot himself upon receiving the news by cablegram from a village in Normandy called, dreadfully, Deuil.
The momentum of disaster lost none of its speed, for neither did Eric, a boy of fifteen, despite all the care and adoration which his grandfather surrounded him with, escape a freakish fate: a fate strangely similar to his mother’s.
After being removed from Note to a small private school in Vaud Canton and then spending a consumptive summer in the Maritime Alps, he was sent to Ex-en-Valais, whose crystal air was supposed at the time to strengthen young lungs; instead of which its worst hurricane hurled a roof tile at him, fatally fracturing his skull, Among the boy’s belongings David van Veen found a number of poems and the draft of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.'
To put it bluntly, the boy had sought to solace his first sexual torments by imagining and detailing a project (derived from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole): namely, a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ The little chap saw it as a kind of fashionable club, with branches, or, in his poetical phrase, ‘Floramors,’ in the vicinity of cities and spas. Membership was to be restricted to noblemen, ‘handsome and healthy,’ with an age limit of fifty (which must be praised as very broadminded on the poor kid’s part), paying a yearly fee of 3650 guineas not counting the cost of bouquets, jewels and other gallant donations. Resident female physicians, good-looking and young (‘of the American secretarial or dentist-assistant type’), would be there to check the intimate physical condition of ‘the caresser and the caressed’ (another felicitous formula) as well as their own if ‘the need arose,’ One clause in the Rules of the Club seemed to indicate that Eric, though frenziedly heterosexual, had enjoyed some tender ersatz fumblings with schoolmates at Note (a notorious preparatory school in that respect): at least two of the maximum number of fifty inmates in the major floramors might be pretty boys, wearing frontlets and short smocks, not older than fourteen if fair, and not more than twelve if dark. However, in order to exclude a regular flow of ‘inveterate pederasts,’ boy love could be dabbled in by the jaded guest only between two sequences of three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week — a somewhat comical, but not unshrewd, stipulation. (2.3)
In Leo Tolstoy's short novel Otrochestvo ("Boyhood," 1854) Nikolenka Irteniev (the narrator and main character in Tolstoy's trilogy "Childhood," "Boyhood" and "Youth") mentions zapakh smorchkov (the smell of mushrooms) in the woods after a spring thunderstorm:
Но вот дождь становится мельче; туча начинает разделяться на волнистые облака, светлеть в том месте, в котором должно быть солнце, и сквозь серовато-белые края тучи чуть виднеется клочек ясной лазури. Через минуту робкий луч солнца уже блестит в лужах дороги, на полосах падающего, как сквозь сито, мелкого, прямого дождя и на обмытой, блестящей зелени дорожной травы. Черная туча также грозно застилает противоположную сторону небосклона, но я уже не боюсь ее. Я испытываю невыразимо-отрадное чувство надежды в жизни, быстро заменяющее во мне тяжелое чувство страха. Душа моя улыбается так же, как и освеженная, повеселевшая природа. Василий откидывает воротник шинели, снимает фуражку и отряхивает ее; Володя откидывает фартук; я высовываюсь из брички и жадно впиваю в себя освеженный, душистый воздух. Блестящий, обмытый кузов кареты с важами и чемоданами покачивается перед нами, спины лошадей, шлеи, вожжи, шины колес — всё мокро и блестит на солнце, как покрытое лаком. С одной стороны дороги — необозримое озимое поле, кое-где перерезанное неглубокими овражками, блестит мокрой землею и зеленью и расстилается тенистым ковром до самого горизонта; с другой стороны — осиновая роща, поросшая ореховым и черемушным подседом, как бы в избытке счастия стоит, не шелохнется и медленно роняет с своих обмытых ветвей светлые капли дождя на сухие прошлогодние листья. Со всех сторон вьются с веселой песнью и быстро падают хохлатые жаворонки; в мокрых кустах слышно хлопотливое движение маленьких птичек и из середины рощи ясно долетают звуки кукушки. Так обаятелен этот чудный запах леса, после весенней грозы, запах березы, фиялки, прелого листа, сморчков, черемухи, что я не могу усидеть в бричке, соскакиваю с подножки, бегу к кустам и, несмотря на то, что меня осыпает дождевыми каплями, рву мокрые ветки распустившейся черемухи, бью себя ими по лицу и упиваюсь их чудным запахом. Не обращая даже внимания на то, что к сапогам моим липнут огромные комки грязи, и чулки мои давно уже мокры, я, шлепая по грязи, бегу к окну кареты.
— Любочка! Катенька! — кричу я, подавая туда несколько веток черемухи: — посмотри, как хорошо!
Девочки пищат, ахают; Мими кричит, чтобы я ушел, а то меня непременно раздавят.
— Да ты понюхай, как пахнет! — кричу я.
At last, however, the lightning grew paler and more diffuse, and the thunderclaps lost some of their terror amid the monotonous rattling of the downpour. Then the rain also abated, and the clouds began to disperse. In the region of the sun, a lightness appeared, and between the white-grey clouds could be caught glimpses of an azure sky. Finally, a dazzling ray shot across the pools on the road, shot through the threads of rain—now falling thin and straight, as from a sieve—, and fell upon the fresh leaves and blades of grass. The great cloud was still louring black and threatening on the far horizon, but I no longer felt afraid of it—I felt only an inexpressibly pleasant hopefulness in proportion, as trust in life replaced the late burden of fear. Indeed, my heart was smiling like that of refreshed, revivified Nature herself. Vasiliy took off his cloak and wrung the water from it. Volodya flung back the apron, and I stood up in the britchka to drink in the new, fresh, balm-laden air. In front of us was the carriage, rolling along and looking as wet and resplendent in the sunlight as though it had just been polished. On one side of the road boundless oatfields, intersected in places by small ravines which now showed bright with their moist earth and greenery, stretched to the far horizon like a checkered carpet, while on the other side of us an aspen wood, intermingled with hazel bushes, and parquetted with wild thyme in joyous profusion, no longer rustled and trembled, but slowly dropped rich, sparkling diamonds from its newly-bathed branches on to the withered leaves of last year. From above us, from every side, came the happy songs of little birds calling to one another among the dripping brushwood, while clear from the inmost depths of the wood sounded the voice of the cuckoo. So delicious was the wondrous scent of the wood, the scent which follows a thunderstorm in spring, the scent of birch-trees, violets, mushrooms, and thyme, that I could no longer remain in the britchka. Jumping out, I ran to some bushes, and, regardless of the showers of drops discharged upon me, tore off a few sprigs of thyme, and buried my face in them to smell their glorious scent. Then, despite the mud which had got into my boots, as also the fact that my stockings were soaked, I went skipping through the puddles to the window of the carriage.
“Lubochka! Katenka!” I shouted as I handed them some of the thyme, “Just look how delicious this is!”
The girls smelt it and cried, “A-ah!” but Mimi shrieked to me to go away, for fear I should be run over by the wheels.
“Oh, but smell how delicious it is!” I persisted. (Chapter II: "The Thunderstorm")
At the beginning of Ada Van mentions Tolstoy's Detstvo i Otrochestvo:
‘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.
The Russian word for fatherland is otechestvo. Svechka ("The Candle," 1886) is a story by Tolstoy. Svecha gorela (the candle burned) is a refrain in Pasternak's poem Zimnyaya noch' ("Winter Night") included in "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago." On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) is known as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, Mertvago Forever and Klara Mertvago.