The characters in VN's novel Ada (1969) include Valerio, a waiter at the 'Monaco' (a good restaurant in the entresol of a tall building crowned by Van's penthouse and its spacious terrace):
Lucette had gone (leaving a curt note with her room number at the Winster Hotel for Young Ladies) when our two lovers, now weak-legged and decently robed, sat down to a beautiful breakfast (Ardis' crisp bacon! Ardis' translucent honey!) brought up in the lift by Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman, always ill-shaven and gloomy, but a dear old boy (he it was who, having procured neat Rose last June, was being paid to keep her strictly for Veen and Dean). (2.6)
In her memoir essay on Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina Tsvetaev says that Valeriy Bryusov (a Russian poet, 1873-1924) was trizhdy rimlyanin (a triple Roman):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
Valeriy, Valeriy, Valeriy, Valeriy! (1903) is a poem by Zinaida Hippius:
Валерий, Валерий, Валерий, Валерий!
Учитель, служитель священных преддверий!
Тебе поклонились, восторженно-чисты,
Купчихи, студенты, жиды, гимназисты…
И, верности чуждый – и чуждый закона,
Ты Грифа ласкаешь, любя Скорпиона.
Но всех покоряя – ты вечно покорен,
То красен – то зелен, то розов – то черен…
Ты соткан из сладких, как сны, недоверий,
Валерий, Валерий, Валерий, Валерий!
Валерий, Валерий, Валерий, Валерий!
Тебя воспевают и гады и звери.
Ты дерзко-смиренен – и томно-преступен,
Ты явно-желанен – и тайно-доступен.
Измена и верность – все мгла суеверий!
Тебе – открываются сразу все двери,
И сразу проникнуть умеешь во все ты,
О маг, о владыка, зверями воспетый,
О жрец дерзновенный московских мистерий,
Валерий, Валерий, Валерий, Валерий!
In her poem Hippius repeats Bryusov's first name sixteen times. In one of the chapters of VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) repeats the name Lolita ten times before saying "Repeat till the page is full, printer:"
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head - everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. (1.26)
The maiden name of Humbert's first wife (daughter of a Polish doctor) is Valeria Zborovski. According to Humbert, Valeria dressed à la gamine:
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu , an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style - and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naive as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable. (1.8)
Van calls Ada “a truly unusual gamine:”
Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr Van Veen, son of Baron ‘Demon’ Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages. (5.6)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): gamine: lassie.
Humbert identifies himself with Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus, a Roman poet, c. 84 BC - c. 54 BC):
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl”that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hairof the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary "revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,” and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze! (1.15)
Describing a conversation at table in “Ardis the First,” Van mentions la Lesbie de Catulle:
‘You know, children,’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!’
‘But you just said you collected flowers?’ said Ada.
‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.’
The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself — and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! — Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist). (1.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bambin angélique: angelic little lad.
Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall. In his essay on Bryusov in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers” the critic Yuli Ayhenvald says that Bryusov prefers herbarium to live flowers:
И, однако, при этом зове к иссушению жизни, при этом предпочтении гербария цветам, Брюсов думает, что
Быть может, всё в жизни - лишь средство
Для ярко-певучих стихов.
Describing Marina's herbarium, Van calls Ada "Pompeianella:"
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here.
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’ (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.
c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.
lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
Pompeyanka (“A Pompeian Woman,” 1901) is a poem by Bryusov:
«Мне первым мужем был купец богатый,
Вторым поэт, а третьим жалкий мим,
Четвёртым консул, ныне евнух пятый,
Но кесарь сам меня сосватал с ним.
Меня любил империи владыка,
Но мне был люб один нубийский раб,
Не жду над гробом: «casta et pudica»,
Для многих пояс мой был слишком слаб.
Но ты, мой друг, мизиец мой стыдливый!
Навек, навек тебе я предана.
Не верь, дитя, что женщины все лживы:
Меж ними верная нашлась одна!»
Так говорила, не дыша, бледнея,
Матрона Лидия, как в смутном сне,
Забыв, что вся взволнована Помпея,
Что над Везувием лазурь в огне.
Когда ж без сил любовники застыли
И покорил их необорный сон,
На город пали груды серой пыли,
И город был под пеплом погребён.
Века прошли; и, как из алчной пасти,
Мы вырвали былое из земли.
И двое тел, как знак бессмертной страсти,
Нетленными в объятиях нашли.
Поставьте выше памятник священный,
Живое изваянье вечных тел,
Чтоб память не угасла во вселенной
О страсти, перешедшей за предел!
‘My first husband was quite a wealthy merchant,
My next - a poet, third - a piteous mime,
The fourth - a consul, now “five” is a eunuch,
But Caesar married us himself this time.
The master of the empire loved me madly,
but I was fond of one Nubian slave.
My belt undid for many. And I never
Dreamed Casta et Pudica above my grave.
But you, young friend, my shy one from Mysia,
Forever… ever… I am yours alone.
Love, don’t believe that all women are liars;
Among them there was found a faithful one!’
And so she spoke, and she was pale and breathless…
Lydia, a matron, as in some vague dream,
Forgetting that all Pompei was in panic
And that Vesuvius’ sky was flame and steam.
And when the lovers tired and became quiet
And they were overcome with potent sleep,
Masses of gray dust fell upon the city,
And it was buried under ashes deep.
Centuries passed, and as from greedy jawbones,
We tore the past from earth here in this place.
We found a symbol of immortal passion:
Two bodies well-preserved in their embrace.
Erect the sacred monument still higher:
Live sculpture of eternal bodies found!
So memory will keep the world reminded
Of passion which transcended every bound.
It is Valerio who tells Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father who visits Van in Manhattan in order to tell him about Uncle Dan's odd Boschean death) that his son had lived up there with his lady all winter:
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain.
On that memorable morning, Van, after ordering breakfast, had climbed out of his bath and donned a strawberry-red terrycloth roalbe when he thought he heard Valerio’s voice from the adjacent parlor. Thither he padded, humming tunelessly, looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance). (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): R4: ‘rook four’, a chess indication of position (pun on the woman’s name).
Valerio also brings to mind Lermontov's poem Valerik (1840). Lermontov is the author of The Demon (1829-40) and Umirayushchiy gladiator ("The Dying Gladiator," 1836).