Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) in Paris, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Vivian Vale’s golden veils and rue des Jeunes Martyres:
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. (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde mentions God’s veil of blue and calls Keats “the youngest of the martyrs:”
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Oscar Wilde is the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The inscription on Keats's tombstone reads: "Here lies one whose name was writ on water." Lucette tells Van that, like Dolores (apparently, the heroine of Osberg’s novel The Gitanilla), she is “only a picture painted on air:”
She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.
‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’
‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’
‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.
‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’
‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’
‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’
‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’
‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
'Never could finish that novel - much too pretentious.'
'Pretentious but true. It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can't we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?'
'It's safer and faster by plane,' said Van. 'And for Log's sake, speak Russian.'
Mr Sween, lunching with a young fellow who sported a bullfighter’s sideburns and other charms, bowed gravely in the direction of their table; then a naval officer in the azure uniform of the Gulfstream Guards passed by in the wake of a dark, ivory-pale lady and said: ‘Hullo Lucette, hullo, Van.’
‘Hullo, Alph,’ said Van, whilst Lucette acknowledged the greeting with an absent smile: over her propped-up entwined hands she was following with mocking eyes the receding lady. Van cleared his throat as he gloomily glanced at his half-sister.
‘Must be at least thirty-five,’ murmured Lucette, ‘yet still hopes to become his queen.’
(His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal, a puppet potentate manipulated by Uncle Victor, had recently abdicated upon Gamaliel’s suggestion in favor of a republican regime, but Lucette spoke of fragile beauty, not fickle politics.)
‘That was Lenore Colline. What’s the matter, Van?’
‘Cats don’t stare at stars, it’s not done. The resemblance is much less close than it used to be — though, of course, I’ve not kept up with counterpart changes. A propos, how’s the career been progressing?’
‘If you mean Ada’s career, I hope it’s also a flop, the same as her marriage. So my getting you will be all Demon gains. I don’t go often to movies, and I refused to speak to Dora and her when we met at the funeral and haven’t the remotest idea of what her stage or screen exploits may have been lately.’ (3.3)
In the Tobakoff cinema hall, just before Lucette’s suicide, Van and Lucette watch Don Juan’s Last Fling, a movie in which Ada played the gitanilla. According to a mulatto girl whom Lucette’s calls ‘Miss Condor,’ Van resembles her friend Vivian Vale:
A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.
Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.
‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’
‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.
She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.
Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.
‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’
‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’
‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.
‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’ (3.5)
When Van tells Lucette that he is not alone in his cabin, Lucette thinks that he is with Miss Condor:
No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:
‘Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?’ asked Lucette.
‘Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),’ answered Van.
A small pause followed; then she hung up. (ibid.)
Describing Victor Vitry’s film based on his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions the Golden Veil (at first it was "the Golden Curtain," 1.30) that separates Tartary from the rest of the world:
Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one).
Van and Ada saw the film nine times, in seven different languages, and eventually acquired a copy for home use. They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry — not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams. But fifty years had elapsed, and the novella had not been copyrighted; in fact, Van could not even prove that ‘Voltemand’ was he. Reporters, however, ferreted out his authorship, and in a magnanimous gesture, he allowed it to be publicized.
Three circumstances contributed to the picture’s exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra’s appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in ‘the charmed circle of the microscope’ like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I’ll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered!
L.F.T. tiny dolls, L.F.T. breloques of coral and ivory, appeared in souvenir shops, from Agony, Patagonia, to Wrinkleballs, Le Bras d’Or. L.F.T. clubs sprouted. L.F.T. girlies minced with mini-menus out of roadside snackettes shaped like spaceships. From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago — they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general. (5.5)
The lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, seems to be a cross between Hedda Gabler (the title character of a play by Ibsen) with Greta Garbo (a Swedish actress). Describing his meeting with Cordula (Ada’s schoolmate at Brownhill) in a bookshop, Van mentions Cordula's ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh):
He looked her over more closely than he had done before. He had read somewhere (we might recall the precise title if we tried, not Tiltil, that’s in Blue Beard...) that a man can recognize a Lesbian, young and alone (because a tailored old pair can fool no one), by a combination of three characteristics: slightly trembling hands, a cold-in-the-head voice, and that skidding-in-panic of the eyes if you happen to scan with obvious appraisal such charms as the occasion might force her to show (lovely shoulders, for instance). Nothing whatever of all that (yes — Mytilène, petite isle, by Louis Pierre) seemed to apply to Cordula, who wore a ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held both hands deep in her pockets as she challenged his stare. Her bobbed hair was of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue iris could be matched by millions of similar eyes in pigment-poor families of French Estoty. Her mouth was doll-pretty when consciously closed in a mannered pout so as to bring out what portraitists call the two ‘sickle folds’ which, at their best, are oblong dimples and, at their worst, the creases down the well-chilled cheeks of felt-booted apple-cart girls. When her lips parted, as they did now, they revealed braced teeth, which, however, she quickly remembered to shutter. (1.27)
In The Grave of Keats Oscar Wilde mentions “sweetest lips since those of Mitylene” (an allusion to Sappho). Van and Ada look up ‘Lip’ in a dictionary:
The hugest dictionary in the library said under Lip: ‘Either of a pair of fleshy folds surrounding an orifice.’
Mileyshiy Emile, as Ada called Monsieur Littré, spoke thus: ‘Partie extérieure et charnue qui forme le contour de la bouche... Les deux bords d’une plaie simple’ (we simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate) ‘...C’est le membre qui lèche.’ Dearest Emile!
A fat little Russian encyclopedia was solely concerned with guba, lip, as meaning a district court in ancient Lyaska or an arctic gulf.
Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van’s upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada’s lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van’s mouth in a feminine key. (1.17)
Van compares Andrey Vinelaner (Ada’s husband who contracted tuberculosis and whom Ada refuses to leave) to Keats:
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears. (3.8)
Describing his visit to Brownhill, Van mentions the fanciest satin in which Cordula could not catch her fingernails:
As Ada reached for the cream, he caught and inspected her dead-shamming hand. We remember the Camberwell Beauty that lay tightly closed for an instant upon our palm, and suddenly our hand was empty. He saw, with satisfaction, that her fingernails were now long and sharp.
‘Not too sharp, are they, my dear,’ he asked for the benefit of dura Cordula, who should have gone to the ‘powder room’ — a forlorn hope.
‘Why, no,’ said Ada.
‘You don’t,’ he went on, unable to stop, ‘you don’t scratch little people when you stroke little people? Look at your little girl friend’s hand’ (taking it), ‘look at those dainty short nails (cold innocent, docile little paw!). She could not catch them in the fanciest satin, oh, no, could you, Ardula — I mean, Cordula?’
Both girls giggled, and Cordula kissed Ada’s cheek. Van hardly knew what reaction he had expected, but found that simple kiss disarming and disappointing. The sound of the rain was lost in a growing rumble of wheels. He glanced at his watch; glanced up at the clock on the wall. He said he was sorry — that was his train.
‘Not at all,’ wrote Ada (paraphrased here) in reply to his abject apologies, ‘we just thought you were drunk; but I’ll never invite you to Brownhill again, my love.’ (1.27)
In her Vospominaniya o Pushkine (“Reminiscences of Pushkin,” 1859) Anna Kern describes a scene that took place in Delvig’s St. Petersburg flat:
Живо воспринимая добро, Пушкин, однако, как мне кажется, не увлекался им в женщинах; его гораздо более очаровывало в них остроумие, блеск и внешняя красота. Кокетливое желание ему понравиться не раз привлекало внимание поэта гораздо более, чем истинное и глубокое чувство, им внушенное. Сам он почти никогда не выражал чувств; он как бы стыдился их и в этом был сыном своего века. Острое, красное словцо, la repartie vive, – вот что несказанно тешило его. Впрочем, Пушкин увлекался, не одними остротами: ему, напр., очень понравилось однажды, когда я на его резкую выходку отвечала выговором: «Pourquoi vous attaquer à moi, qui suis si inoffensive?» И он повторял: «Comme c’est réelle-ment celà; si inoffensive!» Продолжая далее, он заметил: «Да, с вами невесело и ссориться: voila votre cousine, avec elle on trouve à qui s’en prendre». Причина того, что Пушкин скорее очаровывался блеском, нежели достоинством и простотой в характере женщин, заключалась, конечно, в его невысоком о них мнении, бывшем совершенно в духе того времени. При этом мне пришла на память ещё одна забавная сцена, разыгранная Пушкиным в квартире Дельвига, занимаемой мною с семейством по случаю отсутствия хозяев. Сестра его и я сидели у окна, читая книгу. Пушкин подсел ко мне и между прочими нежностями сказал: «Дайте ручку, c’est si satin!» Я отвечала: «Satan!» Тогда сестра поэта заметила, что не понимает, как можно отказывать просьбам Пушкина, и это так понравилось поэту, что он бросился перед нею на колени; в эту минуту входит Алексей Ник. Вульф и хлопает в ладоши… Сюда же можно отнести и отзыв поэта о постоянстве в любви, которою он, казалось, всегда шутил, как и поцелуем руки; но это, по всей вероятности, было притворною данью веку… Однажды, говоря о женщине, которая его страстно любила, он сказал: «Et puis, vous savez qu’il n’y a rien de si insipide que la patience et la résignation».
Pushkin’s sister Olga Sergeevna and Anna Kern were sitting at the window reading a book. Pushkin sat down near Anna Kern, took her hand and said: “c’est si satin!” Anna Kern replied: “Satan!” The poet’s sister said that she did not understand how one could refuse the requests of Pushkin. The poet liked these words so much that he fell on his knees before his sister. On this moment Alexey Vulf (Anna Kern’s first cousin and lover) came in and clapped his hands…
Describing her first meeting with Pushkin in 1819, at a party (replete with parlor games) given by the Olenins, Anna Kern mentions ad (hell) and ray (paradise):
За ужином Пушкин уселся с братом моим позади меня и старался обратить на себя мое внимание льстивыми возгласами, как, например: "Est-il permis d'etre ainsi jolie!" Потом завязался между ними шутливый разговор о том, кто грешник и кто нет, кто будет в аду и кто попадёт в рай. Пушкин сказал брату: "Во всяком случае, в аду будет много хорошеньких, там можно будет играть в шарады. Спроси у m-me Керн, хотела ли бы она попасть в ад?" Я отвечала очень серьёзно и несколько сухо, что в ад не желаю. "Ну, как же ты теперь, Пушкин?" -- спросил брат. "Je me ravise,-- ответил поэт,-- я в ад не хочу, хотя там и будут хорошенькие женщины..."
According to Anna Kern, Pushkin told her brother that in hell there will be a lot of pretty women with whom one can play charades. To Pushkin's question would she like to go to hell Anna Kern replied that she would not. "Well, Pushkin, what would you say now?" asked Anna's brother. "I've changed my mind," the poet said, "I don't want to go to hell, even though there will be pretty women there."
Daniel Veen's family estate, Ardis hints at paradise. In Ada there is ad (hell).
Pushkin’s famous poem Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnoven’ye… (“I recollect a wondrous moment…” 1825) was addressed to Anna Kern and set to music by Glinka (who was in love with Anna Kern’s daughter). According to Van, the composer visited Ardis:
Then Banoffsky launched into Glinka's great amphibrachs (Mihail Ivanovich had been a summer guest at Ardis when their uncle was still alive - a green bench existed where the composer was said to have sat under the pseudoacacias especially often, mopping his ample brow):
Subside, agitation of passion! (2.8)
Uymites', volneniya strasti! ("Subside, agitation of passion!") is the opening line of Kukolnik's poem Somnenie ("Uncertainty," 1838) set to music by Glinka. Tearful Van listens to this romance in 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major where he dines with Ada and Lucette) and recalls it when he wakes up next morning:
'Mne snitsa saPERnik SHCHASTLEEVOY!' (Mihail Ivanovich arcating the sand with his cane, humped on his bench under the creamy racemes).
'I dream of a fortunate rival!' (ibid.)
Van’s “fortunate rival” is Andrey Andreevich Vinelander (Ada’s future husband whose name Van finds out from Lucette):
‘My dear,’ said Van, ‘do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.’
‘Only she never told you,’ said loyal Lucette, ‘so nothing could escape. Nope. I can’t do that to your sweetheart and mine, because we know you could hit that keyhole with a pistol.’
‘Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss.’
‘Oh, Van,’ she said over a deep sigh. ‘You promise you won’t tell her I told you?’
‘I promise. No, no, no,’ he went on, assuming a Russian accent, as she, with the abandon of mindless love, was about to press her abdomen to his. ‘Nikak-s net: no lips, no philtrum, no nosetip, no swimming eye. Little vixen’s axilla, just that — unless’ — (drawing back in mock uncertainty) — ‘you shave there?’
‘I stink worse when I do,’ confided simple Lucette and obediently bared one shoulder.
‘Arm up! Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!’ commanded Van, and for a few synchronized heartbeats, fitted his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow.
She sat down with a bump on a chair, pressing one hand to her brow.
‘Turn off the footlights,’ said Van. ‘I want the name of that fellow.’
‘Vinelander,’ she answered. (ibid.)
Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka and who seems to be a granddaughter of Andrey Vinelander and Ada) and Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge (Van's adversary in a pistol duel in the woods near Kalugano, 1.42), bring to mind gentle violets mentioned by Wilde in The Grave of Keats.