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more spirits in Ada
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ADA'S SPIRITS: THE AMERICAN 'GORY MARY'
Before tasting liquor in the barroom, let's visit a doss-house. Satin, a character in Maxim Gorky's play Na dne ("At the bottom," 1902), famously says: "Chelovek - eto zvuchit gordo" ("Man, this [word] sounds proudly!"). The adverb gordo ("proudly") is an anagram of the noun gorod ("city"). In his essay Gorod zhyoltogo d'yavola ("City of the Yellow Devil," 1906), Gorky calls thus New York.* On Demonia (Earth's twin planet, on which Ada is set), New York is known as Manhattan, or simply Man. By renaming New York Man, Nabokov seems to give a new meaning to Satin's phrase: "Man, Gorod Zhyoltogo D'yavola tozh,** this sounds proudly!"
It is the same shuler (card-sharpener) and p'yanitsa (drunkard) Satin whom Gorky makes to utter another aphorism: Lozh' - religiya rabov i khozyaev. Pravda - Bog svobodnogo cheloveka ("Lie is the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the God of a free man"). SATIN = SAINT = STAIN = NITSA = STALIN - L = ISTINA - I = AIST + N = ASTI + N... (Nitsa is the Russian name of Nice transliterated in Latin characters; istina is a synonym of pravda and means "truth;" aist is Russian for "stork," the bird believed by children to bring babies; Asti is Asti spumante, the much-sung Italian wine, mentioned by Nabokov in "The University poem," 1927, by Mandelstam in his poem "I'm drinking to the military asters, to everything I was rebuked for..." 1931, and by Khodasevich in his essay on Gorky, 1937; other words, being familiar, need no explanation). Let's turn to Ada now. It is in Nice that the duel between Demon Veen and Baron d'Onsky takes place (1.2). One of the seconds in that duel fought with swords is a certain Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, whose short-sleeves, like those of another second, the charming Monsieur de Pastrouil's, are bespattered with a kind of American 'Gory Mary' (an alcoholic cocktail, to which the mix of Demon Veen's Irish and d'Onsky's Polish blood is compared).
The cocktail's name*** reminds me not only of Mary Tudor (1516-1558, queen of England known as 'Bloody Mary') and Mary Pickford (the Holliwood actress, after whom the mix of vodka and tomato juice is said to have been called), but also of Gorky (Gory = Gorky - k), whose second wife was the actress Maria Andreeva and whose secretary and last love was Baroness Maria Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg (H. G. Wells' mistress and a GPU agent), as well as of another fight in literature. It is held by the characters of Pushkin's poem "Gavriliada" (1821), the Satan and the Archangel Gavril, and witnessed by Maria (the Virgin Mary, who, in Pushkin's version of the events, first makes love to the devil, who seduces her with clever sophisms, then to Gavril, who was sent by God to tell her about his love and to prepare her to his visit,**** but who goes a little too far carrying out God's commission, and with whom Maria gets enamored, before she is visited, in a pigeon's disguise, and impregnated by God; all this happening on one and the same day). The Archangel wins this fight by managing to seize hold of his foe's most sensitive organ, "the arrogant member with which the devil sinned" (cf. in Ada: "and Skonky***** died, not 'of his wounds'... but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin..."), makes the Satan plead for mercy and flee to the Hell. When, a little later, Gavril leaves Maria in raptures, she is reposing on a rumpled bed sheet. I may have a dirty imagination, but, because Maria's husband, the old carpenter, never watered his young wife's secret flower****** with his old watering-can (as Pushkin puts it in the beginning of his a bit too frivolous piece), the bed sheet must be blood-stained.
In the narrative of "Gavriliada" there are several digressions, in which Pushkin reviews his personal amorous past and, in the poem's closing lines, prophesies his own future. For this or some other reason, but I'm reminded of the phrase "to wash one's dirty linen in public."******* Now, linen = Lenin = Nile + N = line + N = nine + L (Nile is a river in Africa, the longest in the world; cf. Van's words to Ada investigatig his erected penis: "the Nile is settled:" 1.19; nine is a number; cf. the nine circles of Dante's inferno). The next step: Lenin + vinograd = vino + Leningrad (vinograd is Russian for "vine" and "grapes;" it is also the title of Pushkin's 1825 poem alluded to in Ada: 1.38; cf. E. A. Vinograd, Pasternak's mistress to whom the poems of one of the sections of "My sister life," 1922, are addressed; vino is Russian for "wine," but can mean any strong liquor). St. Petersburg, Nabokov's home city (in which Pushkin's fatal duel took place), was renamed Leningrad by the Bolsheviks, and Nizhniy Novgorod, the home city of A. M. Peshkov, Gorky (gorky is Russian for "bitter," while the only word we hear the Antiterran Pushkin exclaim in Yukonsk******** is sladko, "sweet;" note that Pushkin's estate Boldino was situated in the province of Nizhniy Novgorod). In the pre-Revolutionary Russia, the natives of Nizhniy Novgorod were called vodokhlyoby ("tee-totallers," literally: "water-swillers"). But even the ancients knew that the truth, whoever's God it might be and if it existed at all,********* was in wine, not in water.
*By zhyoltyi d'yavol ("the yellow devil") Gorky means gold. Note that GOD = DOG = GOLD - L; LOG = GOLD - D = DOLG - D = OLEG - E; GOLD = DOLG = GOLOD - O (on Demonia, Log, apparently the curtailed "Logos," is a Supreme Being; dolg is Russian for "duty" and "debt;" Oleg is a male given name; cf. Pushkin's "A Song about the Prince Oleg's Prophesy," 1822; golod is Russian for "hunger;" in the old Russian alphabet, the name of the letter L was lyudi, "men," of the letter D, dobro, "good," of the letter E, est', "to be," of the letter O, on, "he").
**Also known as City of The Yellow Devil (re that tozh particle, cf. Marina's words: "After that we shall go to Housaie, Gollivud-tozh:" 1.39).
***Known as "Bloody Mary" among cocktail lovers.
****Telling about the errand on which God sends Gavril, Pushkin refers to an obscure Armenian legend. Note that Marina = Armina = Ariman = Armenia - E; Venera = Erevan (Marina is the name of Demon's and d'Onsky's mistress; Armina is the name of Demon's Mediterranean villa; Ariman is the Russian spelling of Ahriman, the evil spirit in the Zoroastrianism; Armenia is a country in Transcaucasia; a cycle of poems by Mandelstam, 1930; Venera is the Russian name of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the planet of the solar system; Erevan is the Russian spelling of Yerevan, the modern capital of Armenia). Note that Mount Ararat, the landing place of Noah's ark where Noah first made wine after the Deluge, is situated in what in the ancient times was Armenia.
*****D'Onsky's nick-name, anagram of konsky ("of a horse").
******Note the water-and-flower theme discussed in my note on Garshin and Dostoevsky re-appearing again.
*******The word "linen" also occurs in Ada. "The professor [Van's invented professor of literature, in an imagined lecture on Proust] concludes that a novel which can be appreciated only by quelque petite blanchisseuse who has examined the author's dirty linen is, artistically, a failure." (1.27)
********A nothern town on Demonia (Antiterra). Note that Yukonsk = Skonky + U. Cf. Belokonsk, the Antiterran twin of Whitehorse (a fortune-teller once predicted Pushkin that he will die because of a white head or a white horse).
*********According to Salieri, the character in Pushkin's play "Mozart and Salieri" (1830), Net pravdy na zemle, no pravdy net i vyshe ("There is no truth on Earth, but higher there's no truth either"). The Bolsheviks would have disagreed with this, for their main organ of the press, the newspaper Pravda, did certainly exist (and may still exist).
If you are not sick of my anagrams, I may continue to translate odds and ends of my 300-page-long "The Truth is in Wine" piece sometime in the future.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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