In his lecture on dreams Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Walter Raleigh’s decapitated trunk still topped by the image of his wetnurse:
I have some notes here on the general character of dreams. One puzzling feature is the multitude of perfect strangers with clear features, but never seen again, accompanying, meeting, welcoming me, pestering me with long tedious tales about other strangers — all this in localities familiar to me and in the midst of people, deceased or living, whom I knew well; or the curious tricks of an agent of Chronos — a very exact clock-time awareness, with all the pangs (possibly full-bladder pangs in disguise) of not getting somewhere in time, and with that clock hand before me, numerically meaningful, mechanically plausible, but combined — and that is the curious part — with an extremely hazy, hardly existing passing-of-time feeling (this theme I will also reserve for a later chapter). All dreams are affected by the experiences and impressions of the present as well as by memories of childhood; all reflect, in images or sensations, a draft, a light, a rich meal or a grave internal disorder. Perhaps the most typical trait of practically all dreams, unimportant or portentous — and this despite the presence, in stretches or patches, of fairly logical (within special limits) cogitation and awareness (often absurd) of dream-past events — should be understood by my students as a dismal weakening of the intellectual faculties of the dreamer, who is not really shocked to run into a long-dead friend. At his best the dreamer wears semi-opaque blinkers; at his worst he’s an imbecile. The class (1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, et cetera) will carefully note (rustle of bluebooks) that, owing to their very nature, to that mental mediocrity and bumble, dreams cannot yield any semblance of morality or symbol or allegory or Greek myth, unless, naturally, the dreamer is a Greek or a mythicist. Metamorphoses in dreams are as common as metaphors in poetry. A writer who likens, say, the fact of imagination’s weakening less rapidly than memory, to the lead of a pencil getting used up more slowly than its erasing end, is comparing two real, concrete, existing things. Do you want me to repeat that? (cries of ‘yes! yes!’) Well, the pencil I’m holding is still conveniently long though it has served me a lot, but its rubber cap is practically erased by the very action it has been performing too many times. My imagination is still strong and serviceable but my memory is getting shorter and shorter. I compare that real experience to the condition of this real commonplace object. Neither is a symbol of the other. Similarly, when a teashop humorist says that a little conical titbit with a comical cherry on top resembles this or that (titters in the audience) he is turning a pink cake into a pink breast (tempestuous laughter) in a fraise-like frill or frilled phrase (silence). Both objects are real, they are not interchangeable, not tokens of something else, say, of Walter Raleigh’s decapitated trunk still topped by the image of his wetnurse (one lone chuckle). Now the mistake — the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin (actually seen in a dream by the patient) as a significant abstraction of the real object, as a bumpkin’s bonbon or one-half of the bust if you see what I mean (scattered giggles). There can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot’s hallucinations or in last night’s dream of any of us in this hall. In those random visions nothing — underscore ‘nothing’ (grating sound of horizontal strokes) — can be construed as allowing itself to be deciphered by a witch doctor who can then cure a madman or give comfort to a killer by laying the blame on a too fond, too fiendish or too indifferent parent — secret festerings that the foster quack feigns to heal by expensive confession fests (laughter and applause). (1.4)
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) was sentenced to death in 1603 and beheaded on 29 October 1618. A character in Mark Aldanov's story Na 'Roze Luksemburg' ("Onboard the Rosa Luxemburg," 1942), Mr Duffield (an English officer) seldom parts with an old book in which his ancestor is mentioned. The book is by the Honorable Sir Walter Raleigh, knight:
"Капиталистический мир вновь потрясен империалистической войной. В кровавую бойню втянуто больше половины населения земного шара. В ожесточенных боях на суше, на море и в воздухе участвуют миллионные армии, сотни военных кораблей, броневиков, самолетов.
Среди этого бушующего океана разрушений, уничтожения миллионов человеческих жизней, как несокрушимый утес, стоит могучая страна социализма. Благодаря мудрой сталинской политике она избавлена от ужасов войны и страданий...
Хитро и коварно плели свои преступные замыслы поджигатели войны. Планы английских империалистов сводились к одному: столкнуть Советский Союз и Германию, втянуть эти две крупнейшие европейские страны в войну, а потом, когда воюющие стороны ослабеют, продиктовать им свою волю. Такова исконная политика Англии -- воевать чужими руками, а самой при этом извлекать выгоды. Однако на этот раз замыслы английских империалистов потерпели полный провал; они были разоблачены перед всем миром гениальным вождем большевистской партии и народов Советского Союза -- товарищем Сталиным".
Коммандэр читал по-русски свободно, но медленно. Прочитав передовую статью "Морского Сборника", он немного удивился -- впрочем, не слишком, - заглянул на первую страницу и кивнул головой вполне удовлетворенно: "Номер седьмой, 1940 год..." Тогда понятно: русский капитан дал ему старый журнал. Тем не менее у него прошла охота читать дальше. Мистер Деффильд взял со столика каюты другую книгу, с которой расставался редко. Это было очень старое, перешедшее к нему от предков издание с длинным названием "A report of the troth of the Fight about the Isles of Azores this last summer. Betwixt the Revenge, one of her Majesties Shippes, and an Armada of the King of Spaine. Penned by the Honorable Sir Walter Raleigh, knight.
Because the rumors are diversely spread, as well in England as in the low countries and elsewhere, of this late encounter between her Majesties Shippes and the Armada of Spaine; and that the Spaniardes according to their usual maner, fill the world with their vaine glorious vaunts, making great apparence of victories: when on the contrary, themselves are most commonly and shamefully beaten and dishonoured; thereby hoping to possesse the ignorant multitude by anticipating and forerunning false reports: It is agreeable with all good reason, for manifestation of the truth to overcome falsehood and untruth; that the beginning, continuance and successe of this late honourable encounter of Syr Richard Grinvile, and other her Majesties' Captaines, with the Armada of Spaine; should be truely set downe and published without parcialtie or false imaginations...
The names of her Majesties shippes were these as followeth: the Defiaunce, winch was Admiral, the Revenge Viceadmiral, the Bonaventure commanded by Captaine Crosse, the Lion by George Fenner, the Foresight by Mr. Thomas Vavisour, and the Crane by Duffield..." (Chapter X)
The image of Sir Walter Raleigh's wet nurse that still tops his decapitated trunk brings to mind Ruby Black, Van's very young wet nurse:
After her first battle with insanity at Ex en Valais she returned to America, and suffered a bad defeat, in the days when Van was still being suckled by a very young wet nurse, almost a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father’s demon blood. (1.3)
In her last note Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) mentions Ruby:
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
Poor Ruby makes one think of Aldanov's story Rubin ("The Ruby," 1949). Aqua's and Lucette's suicide (in June 1901 Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette jumps from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) bring to mind Aldanov's novel Samoubiystvo ("The Suicide," 1957). One of its main characters is Lenin. Other characters include the Lastochkin couple (husband and wife, both of them commit suicide). In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) the "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. One of the three main characters in Pale Fire is Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer). Describing poor mad Aqua's torments, Van mentions the gradual, gradual Shade:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether.
But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.
my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.
ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
Mental panic seems to hint at Panika byla naznachena na dva chasa dnya (The panic was appointed on two o'clock in the afternoon), the first sentence in "Onboard the Rosa Luxemburg:"
Паника была назначена на два часа дня. Пароход "Роза Люксембург" выходил из Мурманска в час. Командир капитан-лейтенант Сергей Сергеевич Прокофьев, герой Советского Союза, награжденный орденом Ленина и медалью "Золотая Звезда", очень крепкий, невысокий человек, с умным, некрасивым и привлекательным лицом, был на ногах с пяти утра. Как всегда перед выходом в море, работы было чрезвычайно много. Он побывал в порту, получил от разведки последние указания и в десятом часу вернулся на катере; в целях лучшего хранения тайны "Роза Люксембург" стояла в заливе довольно далеко от порта. Он увидел ее, лишь обогнув в бухте английские суда. По дороге Прокофьев с волнением всматривался в свой пароход, зная, что больше его снаружи не увидит. "Кажется, все в порядке..." Затем, поднявшись на борт, он в последний раз проверил все машины, механизмы, котлы, штурманскую часть, орудия в макетных ящиках. Несмотря на свою обстоятельность, опыт и знание дела, Сергей Сергеевич мучительно боялся, уж не забыл ли о чем-либо важном.
Пароход был очень старый. Когда-то он назывался "Великий Князь Константин Николаевич", в 1917 году был переименован в "Архангельск"; после убийства Розы Люксембург ему сгоряча дали ее имя. В былые времена он предназначался преимущественно для перевозки грузов, но принимал и небогатых или случайных пассажиров. Кают было двадцать шесть -- больше, чем теперь требовалось. На этот раз две из них - самые лучшие после капитанской - были отведены иностранным гостям. (Chapter I)
A very old vessel, Rosa Luxemburg has twenty-six cabins (two of them, the best after the Captain's suite, were given to the foreign guests). Lucette commits suicide at the age of twenty-five. In Lucette's Tobakoff suite there is a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up:’
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain! (3.5)