According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969), only at the very last interview with his mother Marina employed his petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha:
Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature — I mean, premonitory — nightmare about, ‘You can, Sir,’ she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha — never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).
‘Dummy-mum’ — (laughing). ‘Angels, too, have brooms — to sweep one’s soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.’
Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted stalactite.
Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about ‘double guarantee’ in eternity. Start just before that.
‘I know there’s a Van in Nirvana. I’ll be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,’ said Ada.
‘True, true’ (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches, and what you used to call ‘golden gouts’).
‘As lovers and siblings,’ she cried, ‘we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes in paradise!’
‘Neat, neat,’ said Van. (5.6)
In his poem Gorodok ("A Townlet," 1815) Pushkin calls Jean de La Fontaine (a French poet and fabulist, 1621-1695) Vanyusha Lafonten:
И ты, певец любезный,
Поэзией прелестной
Сердца привлёкший в плен,
Ты здесь, лентяй беспечный,
Мудрец простосердечный,
Ванюша Лафонтен!
The element that destroys Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer in January 1900 and whose body is burned, according to her instructions) is fire. In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his married life and of his dead daughter and mentions Lafontaine (the author of La Cigale et la Fourmi):
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
Espied on a pine’s bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song. (ll. 235-244)
In their old age (even on the very last day of their long lives) Van and Ada translate Shade's poem into Russian:
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
...Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
(...We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another...)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three ‘boths’ had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)
Ada tells Van that he should have married Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who on June 4, 1901, commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic). In Chapter Four (L: 9-14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin compares married life (for which Lenski was born) to roman vo vkuse Lafontena (a novel in the genre of Lafontaine):
Он весел был. Чрез две недели
Назначен был счастливый срок.
И тайна брачныя постели,
И сладостной любви венок
Его восторгов ожидали.
Гимена хлопоты, печали,
Зевоты хладная чреда
Ему не снились никогда.
Меж тем как мы, враги Гимена,
В домашней жизни зрим один
Ряд утомительных картин,
Роман во вкусе Лафонтена...26
Мой бедный Ленский, сердцем он
Для оной жизни был рождён.
Merry he was. A fortnight hence
the blissful date was set,
and the nuptial bed's mystery
and love's sweet crown awaited
his transports.
Hymen's cares, woes,
yawnings' chill train,
he never visioned.
Whereas we, enemies of Hymen,
perceive in home life but a series
of tedious images,
a novel in the genre of Lafontaine.26
O my poor Lenski! For the said
life he at heart was born.
Pushkin’s note 26: August Lafontaine, author of numerous family novels.
August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine (1758–1831) was a German novelist. In his lifetime, he was the most popular German novelist, his works surpassing by far the popularity of his contemporary Goethe's. In "Mignon's Song" ("Kennst du das Land"), a famous poem by Goethe from his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), die Goldorangen (the golden oranges) are mentioned:
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Möcht’ ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn!
Kennst du das Haus? auf Säulen ruht sein Dach,
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Möcht’ ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn.
Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg,
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut:
Kennst du ihn wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Geht unser Weg; o Vater, laß uns ziehn!
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little Violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.