After Van's first summer at Ardis, Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) tells Van that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) never realized Armina was an anagram of the sea, not of her:
‘Marina gives me a glowing account of you and says uzhe chuvstvuetsya osen’. Which is very Russian. Your grandmother would repeat regularly that 'already-is-to-be-felt-autumn' remark every year, at the same time, even on the hottest day of the season at Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her. You look splendid, sïnok moy, but I can well imagine how fed up you must be with her two little girls. Therefore, I have a suggestion —’
‘Oh, I liked them enormously,’ purred Van. ‘Especially dear little Lucette.’
‘My suggestion is, come with me to a cocktail party today. It is given by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey — obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common, and a meddlesome garbage collector hollered at the wrong moment. Well, that excellent and influential lady who wishes to help a friend of mine’ (clearing his throat) ‘has, I’m told, a daughter of fifteen summers, called Cordula, who is sure to recompense you for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood.’
‘We played mostly Scrabble and Snap,’ said Van. ‘Is the needy friend also in my age group?’
‘She’s a budding Duse,’ replied Demon austerely, ‘and the party is strictly a "prof push." You’ll stick to Cordula de Prey, I, to Cordelia O’Leary.’
‘D’accord,’ said Van. (1.27)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): D’accord: Okay.
There is Armina in carmina (pl. of carmen, song in Latin). In his Parizhskaya poema ("The Paris Poem," 1943) VN mentions Ovidius, the author of Epistulae ex Ponto ("Letters from the Black Sea"), and Carmina:
Посмотрев на часы, и сквозь час
дно и камушки мельком увидя,
он оделся и вышел. У нас
это дно называлось: Овидий
oткормлен (от Carmina).
Having looked at his wrist-watch, and through hour
having glimpsed the bottom and little stones,
he dressed and went out. We
called this bottom: Ovidius
crammed with carmina.
K Ovidiyu ("To Ovid," 1821) and K moryu ("To the Sea," 1824) are poems by Pushkin. The latter poem (begun in Odessa and finished in Mikhaylovskoe, Pushkin's family estate in the Province of Pskov) begins: Proshchay, svobodnaya stikhiya! ("Farewell, free element!"). Three different elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed Marina, Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who commits suicide by jumping into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff) and Demon (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.
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.
Naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) brings to mind Rassudku vopreki, naperekor stikhiyam (Contrary to common sense, in spite of the elements), Chatski's words to Famusov in Griboedov’s play in verse Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824):
Пускай меня отъявят старовером,
Но хуже для меня наш Север во сто крат
С тех пор, как отдал всё в обмен на новый лад, —
И нравы, и язык, и старину святую,
И величавую одежду на другую —
По шутовскому образцу:
Хвост сзади, спереди какой-то чудный выем,
Рассудку вопреки, наперекор стихиям,
Движенья связаны, и не краса лицу;
Смешные, бритые, седые подбородки!
Как платья, волосы, так и умы коротки!..
I may be called an old-believer, yet I think
Our North is worse a hundredfold
Since it adopted the new mode,
Having abandoned everything:
Our customs and our conditions,
The language, moral values and traditions,
And, in exchange of the grand gown,
Regardless of all trends
And common sense,
We put on this apparel of a clown:
A tail, a funny cut - oh, what a scene!
It's tight and doesn't match the face;
This funny, grey-haired shaven chin!
'Which covers thee discovers thee!'- there's a phrase.
(Act Three, scene 22; transl. A. Vagapov)
In a conversation with Van in her bedroom Marina quotes Chatski's words to Sofia (Famusov's daughter) in Griboedov's play:
Naked-faced, dull-haired, wrapped up in her oldest kimono (her Pedro had suddenly left for Rio), Marina reclined on her mahogany bed under a golden-yellow quilt, drinking tea with mare’s milk, one of her fads.
‘Sit down, have a spot of chayku,’ she said. ‘The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.’ And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): ‘Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage — I mean "adage," I always fluff that word — and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?’
Van’s mind flashed in advance of his speech. It was, Marina, a fantastic exaggeration. The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe. I’m the well-known beggar in the saddest of all stories.
‘Erunda (nonsense),’ said Van. ‘She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook and misconstrued our stumbling huddle (spotïkayushcheesya sliyanie).’
‘I do not mean Ada, silly,’ said Marina with a slight snort, as she fussed over the teapot. ‘Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. Ada is a big girl, and big girls, alas, have their own worries. Mlle Larivière meant Lucette, of course. Van, those soft games must stop. Lucette is twelve, and naive, and I know it’s all clean fun, yet (odnako) one can never behave too delikatno in regard to a budding little woman. A propos de coins: in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma, "How stupid to be so clever," a play in verse, written, I think, in Pushkin’s time, the hero reminds Sophie of their childhood games, and says:
How oft we sat together in a corner
And what harm might there be in that?
but in Russian it is a little ambiguous, have another spot, Van?’ (he shook his head, simultaneously lifting his hand, like his father), ‘because, you see, — no, there is none left anyway — the second line, i kazhetsya chto v etom, can be also construed as "And in that one, meseems," pointing with his finger at a corner of the room. Imagine — when I was rehearsing that scene with Kachalov at the Seagull Theater, in Yukonsk, Stanislavski, Konstantin Sergeevich, actually wanted him to make that cosy little gesture (uyutnen’kiy zhest).’
‘How very amusing,’ said Van.
The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.
‘I could never stand that breed,’ remarked Van. ‘Dackelophobia.’
‘But girls — do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but — Why do you laugh?’
‘Nothing,’ said Van. ‘I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?’
‘How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way-don’t ask me how’ (double hand gesture of horrified ignorance ‘— when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though — I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little "stylized" (stilizovanï), as your father used to say, an irrisistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games — who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember — not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!’ (1.37)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): chayku: Russ., tea (diminutive).
Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow’s.
cousinage: cousinhood is dangerous neighborhood.
on s’embrassait: kissing went on in every corner.
erunda: Russ., nonsense.
hier und da: Germ., here and there.
raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.
In her Poema vozdukha ("The Poem of Air," 1927) Marina Tsvetaev calls death kurs vozdukhoplavan'ya (a course of aeronautics) where everything begins s azov (from scratch), zanovo (anew):
Курс воздухоплаванья
Смерть, где всё с азов,
Заново…
One of Marina Tsvetaev's memoir essays is entitled Mat' i muzyka ("Mother and Music," 1934). Music at the Villa Marina is a poem by R. L. Stevenson.