Nab incunabulis nad bezdnoy

VN’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) begins ab incunabulis (from the cradle):

 

THE cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated. (Chapter One, 1)

 

and continues nad bezdnoy (above an abyss), a phrase used by VN in Drugie berega (“Other Shores,” 1954), the Russian version of his memoirs:

 

Колыбель качается над бездной. Заглушая шёпот вдохновенных суеверий, здравый смысл говорит нам, что жизнь - только щель слабого света между двумя идеально чёрными вечностями. Разницы в их черноте нет никакой, но в бездну преджизненную нам свойственно вглядываться с меньшим смятением, чем в ту, к которой летим со скоростью четырёх тысяч пятисот ударов сердца в час. Я знавал, впрочем, чувствительного юношу, страдавшего хронофобией и в отношении к безграничному прошлому. С томлением, прямо паническим, просматривая домашнего производства фильм, снятый за месяц до его рождения, он видел совершенно знакомый мир, ту же обстановку, тех же людей, но сознавал, что его-то в этом мире нет вовсе, что никто его отсутствия не замечает и по нём не горюет. Особенно навязчив и страшен был вид только что купленной детской коляски, стоявшей на крыльце с самодовольной косностью гроба; коляска была пуста, как будто "при обращении времени в мнимую величину минувшего", как удачно выразился мой молодой читатель, самые кости его исчезли.

 

Ab incunabulis brings to mind ab ovo (from the beginning), a phrase used by Pushkin at the beginning of Rodoslovnaya moego geroya (“The Pedigree of my Hero,” 1832), a series of stanzas in the Eugene Onegin rhyme sequence:

 

Начнем ab ovo:
         Мой Езерский
Происходил от тех вождей,
Чей в древни веки парус дерзкий
Поработил брега морей.
Одульф, его начальник рода,
Вельми бе грозен воевода
(Гласит Софийский Хронограф).
При Ольге сын его Варлаф
Приял крещенье в Цареграде
С приданым греческой княжны.
От них два сына рождены,
Якуб и Дорофей. В засаде
Убит Якуб, а Дорофей
Родил двенадцать сыновей.

 

Let’s start ab ovo: my Ezerski

was a descendant of those chiefs

whose spirit bellicose and savage

was once the terror of the seas.

The generator of the family,

Odulf “was a most awesome warlord”

– so says the Sophian chronograph.

In Olga’s reign his son Varlaf

embraced the Gospel in Constantinople

together with a dot of a Greek princess.

Two sons were born to them, Yakub

and Dorofey; of these, in ambush

Yakub was slain; while Dorofey

Fathered twelve sons.

 

In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 232) VN points out that “The Pedigree of my Hero” is an important link between EO and Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833), a poem in which Pushkin describes Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter I and uses the phrase nad samoy bezdnoy (before the abyss):

 

О мощный властелин судьбы!
Не так ли ты над самой бездной
На высоте, уздой железной
Россию поднял на дыбы?

Кругом подножия кумира
Безумец бедный обошёл
И взоры дикие навёл
На лик державца полумира.

 

Oh, mighty sovereign of destiny!
Haven’t you similarly reared Russia
With an iron bridle on the eminence
Before the abyss?

The poor madman walked around
The idol’s pedestal
And looked wildly at the face
Of the half-planet’s ruler. (Part II)

 

Lik derzhavtsa polumira (the face of the half-planet’s ruler) brings to mind VN's story Lik (1939) that begins as follows:

 

Есть пьеса "Бездна" (L'Abîme) известного французского писателя Suire. Она уже сошла со сцены, прямо в Малую Лету (т. е. в ту, которая обслуживает театр,-- речка, кстати сказать, не столь безнадежная, как главная, с менее крепким раствором забвения, так что режиссёрская удочка иное ещё вылавливает спустя много лет). В этой пьесе, по существу идиотской, даже идеально идиотской, иначе говоря -- идеально построенной на прочных условностях общепринятой драматургии, трактуется страстной путь пожилой женщины, доброй католички и землевладелицы, вдруг загоревшейся греховной страстью к молодому русскому, Igor, -- Игорю, случайно попавшему к ней в усадьбу и полюбившему её дочь Анжелику. Старый друг семьи, — волевая личность, угрюмый ханжа, ходко сбитый автором из мистики и похотливости, ревнует героиню к Игорю, которого она в свой черед ревнует к Анжелике, — словом, все весьма интересно, весьма жизненно, на каждой реплике штемпель серьёзной фирмы, и уж, конечно, ни один толчок таланта не нарушает законного хода действия, нарастающего там, где ему полагается нарастать, и, где следует, прерванного лирической сценкой или бесстыдно пояснительным диалогом двух старых слуг.

 

There is a play of the 1920s, called L'Abîme (The Abyss), by the well-known French author Suire. It has already passed from the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater – a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later). This play – essentially idiotic, even ideally idiotic, or, putting it another way, ideally constructed on the solid conventions of traditional dramaturgy – deals with the torments of a middle-aged, rich, and religious French lady suddenly inflamed by a sinful passion for a young Russian named Igor, who has turned up at her château and fallen in love with her daughter Angélique. An old friend of the family, a strong-willed, sullen bigot, conveniently knocked together by the author out of mysticism and lechery, is jealous of the heroine’s interest in Igor, while she in turn is jealous of the latter’s attentions to Angélique; in a word, it is all very compelling and true to life, every speech bears the trademark of a respectable tradition, and it goes without saying that there is not a single jolt of talent to disrupt the ordered course of action, swelling where it ought to swell, and interrupted when necessary by a lyric scene or a shamelessly explanatory dialogue between two old retainers.

 

Bezdna (the abyss) evokes another Latin phrase, de profundis (from the depths). De Profundis (1897) is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, “to Bosie” (the title De Profundis was given to the letter by its publisher, Robert Ross). In Speak, Memory VN describes his father’s visit to England in February 1916, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, and mentions a funny interview with George V whom Korney Chukovski, the enfant terrible of the group, insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde:

 

My father had visited London before—the last time in February 1916, when, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, he had been invited by the British Government to take a look at England’s war effort (which, it was hinted, did not meet with sufficient appreciation on the part of Russia’s public opinion). On the way there, being challenged by my father and Korney Chukovski to rhyme on Afrika, the poet and novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (no relation to Count Lyov Nikolaevich) had supplied, though seasick, the charming couplet

 

Vizhu pal’mu i Kafrika.
Eto—Afrika.
(I see a palm and a little Kaffir. That’s Afrika.)

 

In England the visitors had been shown the Fleet. Dinners and speeches had followed in noble succession. The timely capture of Erzerum by the Russians and the pending introduction of conscription in England (“Will you march too or wait till March 2?” as the punning posters put it) had provided the speakers with easy topics. There had been an official banquet presided over by Sir Edward Grey, and a funny interview with George V whom Chukovski, the enfant terrible of the group, insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde—“dze ooarks of OOald.” The king, who was baffled by his interrogator’s accent and who, anyway, had never been a voracious reader, neatly countered by inquiring how his guests liked the London fog (later Chukovski used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals). (Chapter Thirteen, 1)*

 

Chapter III of Chukovski’s book “Oscar Wilde” (1922) has for the epigraph a phrase from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 279-80): Modo vir modo femina (now a man, now a woman). The author of K Ovidiyu (“To Ovid,” 1821), Pushkin planned to use Modo vir modo femina as a motto of his mock epic Domik v Kolomne (“The Small House in Kolomna,” 1830). At the end of his Foreword to Speak, Memory VN (who, like old Ovid and young Pushkin, lived in exile) alludes to Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto:

 

To avoid hurting the living or distressing the dead, certain proper names have been changed. These are set off by quotation marks in the index. Its main purpose is to list for my convenience some of the people and themes connected with my past years. Its presence will annoy the vulgar but may please the discerning, if only because

   Through the window of that index
      Climbs a rose
   And sometimes a gentle wind ex
      Ponto blows.

 

Many pages of Speak, Memory are devoted to VN's governesses. In Pushkin's poem Napersnitsa volshebnoy stariny... ("Confidante of magical olden times," 1822) the poet's Muse at first appears in disguise of an old nurse who rocks his cradle and leaves a whistle in his swaddles:

 

Наперсница волшебной старины,
Друг вымыслов игривых и печальных,
Тебя я знал во дни моей весны,
Во дни утех и снов первоначальных.
Я ждал тебя; в вечерней тишине
Являлась ты весёлою старушкой,
И надо мной сидела в шушуне,
В больших очках и с резвою гремушкой.
Ты, детскую качая колыбель,
Мой юный слух напевами пленила
И меж пелён оставила свирель,
Которую сама заворожила.
Младенчество прошло, как легкой сон.
Ты отрока беспечного любила,
Средь важных Муз тебя лишь помнил он,
И ты его тихонько посетила;
Но тот ли был твой образ, твой убор?
Как мило ты, как быстро изменилась!
Каким огнём улыбка оживилась!

Каким огнём блеснул приветный взор!
Покров, клубясь волною непослушной,
Чуть осенял твой стан полу-воздушный;
Вся в локонах, обвитая венком,
Прелестницы глава благоухала;
Грудь белая под жёлтым жемчугом
Румянилась и тихо трепетала...

 

In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor compares his and Tanya's nurse to Pushkin's Arina Rodionovna:

 

Пушкин входил в его кровь. С голосом Пушкина сливался голос отца. Он целовал горячую маленькую руку, принимая её за другую крупную, руку, пахнувшую утренним калачом. Он помнил, что няню к ним взяли оттуда же, откуда была Арина Родионовна, -- из-за Гатчины, с Суйды: это было в часе езды от их мест -- и она тоже говорила "эдак певком". Он слышал, как свежим летним утром, когда спускались к купальне, на досчатой стенке которой золотом переливалось отражение воды, отец с классическим пафосом повторял то, что считал прекраснейшим из всех когда-либо в мире написанных стихов: "Тут Аполлон -- идеал, там Ниобея -- печаль", и рыжим крылом да перламутром ниобея мелькала над скабиозами прибрежной лужайки, где в первых числах июня попадался изредка маленький "чёрный" аполлон.

 

Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin’s hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling of the breakfast kalach (a blond roll). He remembered that his and Tanya’s nurse hailed from the same place that Pushkin’s Arina came from—namely Suyda, just beyond Gatchina: this had been within an hour’s ride of their area—and she had also spoken “singsong like.” He heard his father on a fresh summer morning as they walked down to the river bathhouse, on whose plank wall shimmered the golden reflection of the water, repeating with classic fervor what he considered to be the most beautiful not only of Pushkin’s lines but of all the verses ever written in the world: “Tut Apollon - ideal, tam Niobeya - pechal’” (Here is Apollo-ideal, there is Niobe-grief) and the russet wing and mother-of-pearl of a Niobe fritillary flashed over the scabiosas of the riverside meadow, where, during the first days of June, there occurred sparsely the small Black Apollo. (Chapter Two)

 

Chapter Six of Speak, Memory is devoted to butterflies. At the end of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van compares the butterflies collected by Ada to actors:

 

I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr Lagosse, Stepan Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-seventh birthday, and I hear from my wonderful new Everyrest chair a spade scrape and footsteps in the snow-sparkling garden, and my old Russian valet, who is deafer than he thinks, pull out and push in nose-ringed drawers in the dressing room. This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.

Of all their many houses, in Europe and in the Tropics, the château recently built in Ex, in the Swiss Alps, with its pillared front and crenelated turrets, became their favorite, especially in midwinter, when the famous glittering air, le cristal d’Ex, ‘matches the highest forms of human thought — pure mathematics & decipherment’ (unpublished ad).

At least twice a year our happy couple indulged in fairly long travels. Ada did not breed or collect butterflies any more, but throughout her healthy and active old age loved to film them in their natural surroundings, at the bottom of her garden or the end of the world, flapping and flitting, settling on flowers or filth, gliding over grass or granite, fighting or mating. Van accompanied her on picture-shooting journeys to Brazil, the Congo, New Guinea, but secretly preferred a long drink under a tent to a long wait under a tree for some rarity to come down to the bait and be taken in color. One would need another book to describe Ada’s adventures in Adaland. The films — and the crucified actors (Identification Mounts) — can be seen by arrangement at the Lucinda Museum, 5, Park Lane, Manhattan. (5.1)

 

In VN's story Lik the title character is an actor:

 

В Париже, где пьеса имела большой успех, Игоря играл François Coulot, играл неплохо, но почему-то с сильным итальянским акцентом, по-видимому, выдаваемым им за русский, но не удивившим ни одного рецензента. Впоследствии же, когда пьеса скатилась в провинцию, исполнителем этой роли случайно сделался настоящий русский актёр, Александр Лик (псевдоним), — худощавый блондин с тёмными, как кофе, глазами, до того получивший небольшую известность, благодаря фильме, где он отлично провёл эпизодическую роль заики.

Трудно, впрочем, решить, обладал ли он подлинным театральным талантом, или же был человек многих невнятных призваний, из которых выбрал первое попавшееся, но мог бы с таким же успехом быть живописцем, ювелиром, крысоловом... Такого рода существа напоминают помещение со множеством разных дверей, среди которых, быть может, находится одна, которая, действительно, ведет прямо в сад, в лунную глубь чудной человеческой ночи, где душа добывает ей одной предназначенные сокровища. Но как бы то ни было, этой двери Александр Лик не отворил, а попал на актёрский путь, по которому шёл без увлечения, с рассеянным видом человека, ищущего каких-то путевых примет, которых нет, но которые, пожалуй, снились или, быть может, принадлежат другой, как бы не проявленной, местности, где ему не бывать никогда, никогда. В условном же плане земного быта, ему было за тридцать, но всё же на несколько лет меньше, чем веку, а потому память о России, которая у людей пожилых, застрявших за границей собственной жизни, превращается либо в необыкновенно сильно развитый орган, работающий постоянно и своей секрецией возмещающий все исторические убытки, либо в раковую опухоль души, мешающую дышать, спать, общаться с беспечными иностранцами, — у него эта память оставалась в зачаточном виде, исчерпываясь туманными впечатлениями детства, вроде соснового запашка дачного новоселья или асимметричной снежинки на башлыке. Его родители умерли, жил он один, любовь и дружбы, перепадавшие ему, все были какие-то сквозные, никто к нему не писал писем просто так, потому что хочется, никто не интересовался его заботами живее его самого, и, когда недавно он узнал от двух докторов — француза и русского, — что у него, как у многих литературных героев, неизлечимая болезнь сердца, как-то не к кому было пойти и пожаловаться на незаслуженную шаткость его, его бытия, когда улицы так и кишат здоровенными стариками. И каким-то образом с его болезнью было связано то, что он любил хорошие, дорогие вещи, мог, например, на последние двести франков купить нашейный платок или вечное перо, но всегда, всегда случалось так, что эти вещи у него пачкались, ломались, портились, несмотря на всю его бережную, даже набожную аккуратность.

 

In Paris, where the play had great success, Igor was played by François Coulot, and played not badly but for some reason with a strong Italian accent, which he evidently wanted to pass off as Russian, and which did not surprise a single Parisian critic. Afterwards, when the play trickled down into the provinces, this role fell by chance to a real Russian actor, Lik (stage name of Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn), a lean, fair-haired fellow with coffee-dark eyes, who had previously won some fame, thanks to a film in which he did an excellent job in the bit part of a stutterer.
It was hard to say, though, if Lik (the word means “countenance” in Russian and Middle English) possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone. But, be that as it may, Lik had failed to open that door, taking instead the Thespian path, which he followed without enthusiasm, with the absent manner of a man looking for signposts that do not exist but that perhaps have appeared to him in a dream, or can be distinguished in the undeveloped photograph of some other locality that he will never, never visit. On the conventional plane of earthly habitus, he was in his thirties, and so was the century. In elderly people stranded not only outside the border of their country but outside that of their own lives, nostalgia evolves into an extraordinarily complex organ, which functions continuously, and its secretion compensates for all that has been lost; or else it becomes a fatal tumor on the soul that makes it painful to breathe, sleep, and associate with carefree foreigners. In Lik, this memory of Russia remained in the embryonic state, confined to misty childhood recollections, such as the resinous fragrance of the first spring day in the country, or the special shape of the snowflake on the wool of his hood. His parents were dead. He lived alone. There was always something sleazy about the loves and friendships that came his way. Nobody wrote gossipy letters to him, nobody took a greater interest in his worries than he did himself, and there was no one to go and complain to about the undeserved precariousness of his very being when he learned from two doctors, a Frenchman and a Russian, that (like many protagonists) he had an incurable heart ailment—while the streets were virtually swarming with robust oldsters. There seemed to be a certain connection between this illness of his and his fondness for fine, expensive things; he might, for example, spend his last 200 francs on a scarf or a fountain pen, but it always, always happened that the scarf would soon get soiled, the pen broken, despite the meticulous, even pious, care he took of things.

 

Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Van Veen mentions deranged minds ready to plunge into any abyss:

 

The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.

Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)

 

The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In Speak, Memory VN mentions Dostoevski, the author of The Double, etc.:

 

My great-great-grandfather, General Aleksandr Ivanovich Nabokov (1749–1807), was, in the reign of Paul the First, chief of the Novgorod garrison regiment called “Nabokov’s Regiment” in official documents. The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where “Nabokov’s River” is named after my ancestor. The memory of the leader of the expedition is preserved in quite a number of place names, one of them being Golovnin’s Lagoon, Seward Peninsula, W. Alaska, from where a butterfly, Parnassius phoebus golovinus (rating a big sic), has been described by Dr. Holland; but my great-grandfather has nothing to show except that very blue, almost indigo blue, even indignantly blue, little river winding between wet rocks; for he soon left the navy, n’ayant pas le pied marin (as says my cousin Sergey Sergeevich who informed me about him), and switched to the Moscow Guards. He married Anna Aleksandrovna Nazimov (sister of the Decembrist). I know nothing about his military career; whatever it was, he could not have competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787–1852), one of the heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin’s schoolmate and close friend. Careful, printers: two “chin” ’s and one “kin.” (Chapter Three, 1)

 

Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1909) is a poem by Alexander Blok. In Speak, Memory VN speaks of his first love and mentions the verse of Alexander Blok:

 

WHEN I first met Tamara—to give her a name concolorous with her real one—she was fifteen, and I was a year older. The place was the rugged but comely country (black fir, white birch, peatbogs, hayfields, and barrens) just south of St. Petersburg. A distant war was dragging on. Two years later, that trite deus ex machina, the Russian Revolution, came, causing my removal from the unforgettable scenery. In fact, already then, in July 1915, dim omens and backstage rumblings, the hot breath of fabulous upheavals, were affecting the so-called “Symbolist” school of Russian poetry—especially the verse of Alexander Blok. (Chapter Twelve, 1)

 

In his poem Vozmezdie ("Retribution," 1910-21), in which Dostoevski appears as a character, Blok mentions the moon's lik and bezdna (the abyss) from which St. Petersburg (Blok's and VN's home city) arose:

 

Но перед майскими ночами
Весь город погружался в сон,
И расширялся небосклон;
Огромный месяц за плечами
Таинственно румянил лик
Перед зарёй необозримой...
О, город мой неуловимый,
Зачем над бездной ты возник?.. (Chapter Two, IV)

 

Nabokov + pishu = ab ovo + Pushkin (pishu – I write)

 

*According to Chukovski, this story was invented in full by Nabokov.

 

I hope you've noticed that my previous post, "Ardis & ardor in Ada," has been updated.