Describing his visit to Brownhill (Ada's school for girls) in the fall of 1884, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) says that Ada's breath smelled of ether:
Van was about to march back to the station when Ada appeared — with Cordula. La bonne surprise! Van greeted them with a show of horrible heartiness (‘And how goes it with you, sweet cousin? Ah, Cordula! Who’s the chaperone, you, or Miss Veen?’). The sweet cousin sported a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea. A tiny round patch did not quite hide a pimple on one side of her chin. Her breath smelled of ether. Her mood was even blacker than his. He cheerily guessed it would rain. It did — hard. Cordula remarked that his trench coat was chic. She did not think it worth while to go back for umbrellas — their delicious goal was just round the corner. Van said corners were never round, a tolerable quip. Cordula laughed. Ada did not: there were no survivors, apparently. (1.27)
In organic chemistry, ethers are a class of compounds that contain an ether group, a single oxygen atom bonded to two separate carbon atoms, each part of an organyl group (e.g., alkyl or aryl). Aristotle’s ether (or aether) is the "fifth element" (quintessence), a divine, weightless, and unchangeable substance composing the celestial spheres above the terrestrial realm. Unlike the four earthly elements (earth, water, air, fire), ether is immutable, cannot be touched, and naturally moves in perfect circles, carrying stars and planets. Three elements (fire, water and air) destroy Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions), Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who jumps from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) and Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific):
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. (3.1)
The action in Ada takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. The phenomenon of the Terra planet appeared on Demonia after the L disaster (the Great Revelation) in the beau milieu of the 19th century. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister who in April 1869 married Demon Veen), Van writes:
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).
A demon is an evil or malevolent supernatural entity. In ancient Greek religion, daimon (also spelled daemon) often referred to lesser deities, but could more broadly signify "the experience of divine power." Aristotle’s philosophy holds that eudaimonia (flourishing/living well) is the supreme human good, achieved through rational, virtuous activity rather than fleeting pleasure. It is a lifelong process of fulfilling one's potential (telos) by using reason to find the "golden mean" of virtue in actions. In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Part Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) mentions Spinoza and Aristotle:
Ленин считал, что Чернышевский "единственный действительно великий писатель, который сумел с пятидесятых годов вплоть до 1888 (скостил ему один) остаться на уровне цельного философского материализма". Как то Крупская, обернувшись на ветру к Луначарскому, с мягкой грустью сказала ему: "Вряд ли кого-нибудь Владимир Ильич так любил... Я думаю, что между ним и Чернышевским было очень много общего". "Да, несомненно было общее, -- добавляет Луначарский, сначала было отнесшийся к этому замечанию скептически. -- Было общее и в ясности слога, и в подвижности речи... в широте и глубине суждений, в революционном пламени... В этом соединении огромного содержания и внешней скромности, и наконец в моральном облике обоих этих людей". Статью Чернышевского "Антропологический принцип в философии" Стеклов называет "первым философским манифестом русского коммунизма"; знаменательно, что этим первым манифестом был школьный пересказ, ребяческое суждение о труднейших моральных вопросах. "Европейская теория утилитаризма, -- говорит Страннолюбский, несколько перефразируя Волынского, -- явилась у Чернышевского в упрощенном, сбивчивом, карикатурном виде. Пренебрежительно и развязно судя о Шопенгауере, под критическим ногтем которого его философия не прожила бы и секунды, он из всех прежних мыслителей, по странной ассоциации идей и ошибочным воспоминаниям, признает лишь Спинозу и Аристотеля, которого он думает, что продолжает".
Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy day, Krupskaya turned to Lunacharski and said to him with soft sorrow: “There was hardly anyone Vladimir Ilyich liked so much… I think he had a great deal in common with Chernyshevski.” “Yes, they undoubtedly had much in common,” adds Lunacharski, who had tended at first to treat this remark with skepticism. “They had in common both clarity of style and mobility of speech… breadth and depth of judgement, revolutionary fire… that combination of enormous content with a modest exterior, and finally their joint moral makeup.” Steklov calls Chernyshevski’s article, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy,” the “first philosophical manifesto of Russian communism”; it is significant that this first manifesto was a schoolboy’s rendering, an infantile assessment of the most difficult moral questions. “The European theory of materialism,” says Strannolyubski, rephrasing Volynski somewhat, “took on with Chernyshevski a simplified, muddled, and grotesque form. Passing scornful and impertinent judgment on Schopenhauer, under whose critical fingernail his own saltatory thinking would not have survived for a second, he recognized out of all former thinkers, by a strange association of ideas and according to his mistaken memories, only Spinoza and Aristotle, whom he imagined himself to be continuing.”
Describing his dinner with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) and her family in the Mont Roux Belle Vue Hotel in October 1905, Van says that the breath of Ada's husband carried the odor of a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis:
Finally Van reached Ada’s husband.
Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather ‘undersight’) Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. ‘Obnimemsya, dorogoy’ (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout’s bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis. As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier’s by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektnïy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): korrektnïy: Russ., correct.
hobereau: country squire.
In our world, Alexey Kosygin (1904-1980) was the Prime Minister in Leonid Brezhnev's government (Andrey Andreevich Gromyko was the Minister of Foreign Affairs).