According to Ada, Vanda Broom (Ada’s lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill) was shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places:
Would she like to stay in this apartment till Spring Term (he thought in terms of Terms now) and then accompany him to Kingston, or would she prefer to go abroad for a couple of months — anywhere, Patagonia, Angola, Gululu in the New Zealand mountains? Stay in this apartment? So, she liked it? Except some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected — as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait. She had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places. It was, Van said, sad. Little Lucette no doubt had told him about a later escapade? Punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans? Raving about the delectations of clitorism? ‘N’exagérons pas, tu sais,’ said Ada, patting the air down with both palms. ‘Lucette affirmed,’ he said, ‘that she (Ada) imitated mountain lions.’
He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest.
‘That’s right,’ said the other total-recaller.
And, by the way, Grace — yes, Grace — was Vanda’s real favorite, pas petite moi and my little crest. She (Ada) had, hadn’t she, a way of always smoothing out the folds of the past — making the flutist practically impotent (except with his wife) and allowing the gentleman farmer only one embrace, with a premature eyakulyatsiya, one of those hideous Russian loanwords? Yes, wasn’t it hideous, but she’d love to play Scrabble again when they’d settled down for good. But where, how? Wouldn’t Mr and Mrs Ivan Veen do quite nicely anywhere? What about the ‘single’ in each passport? They’d go to the nearest Consulate and with roars of indignation and/or a fabulous bribe have it corrected to married, for ever and ever. (2.6).
At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday (when Van walks on his hands for the first time) Ada and Grace Erminin play anagrams:
But whatever wrath there hung in the air, it soon subsided. Ada asked her governess for pencils and paper. Lying on his stomach, leaning his cheek on his hand, Van looked at his love’s inclined neck as she played anagrams with Grace, who had innocently suggested ‘insect.’
‘Scient,’ said Ada, writing it down.
‘Oh no!’ objected Grace.
‘Oh yes! I’m sure it exists. He is a great scient. Dr Entsic was scient in insects.’
Grace meditated, tapping her puckered brow with the eraser end of the pencil, and came up with:
‘Nicest!’
‘Incest,’ said Ada instantly.
‘I give up,’ said Grace. ‘We need a dictionary to check your little inventions.’ (ibid.)
Among the people who were expected at the picnic but never turned up is Dr Krolik, the local entomologist, Ada’s beloved teacher of natural science:
Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr Krolik, who called himself Ada’s court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present early on the following day — three exquisitely carved chrysalids (‘Inestimable gems,’ cried throatily Ada, tensing her brows), all of which were to yield before long, specimens of a disappointing ichneumon instead of the Kibo Fritillary, a recently discovered rarity. (ibid.)
Kibo Fritillary is an invented nymphalid butterfly.
Krolik + Pilgram + Kibo + Van = karlik + pilgrim + Nabokov
Karlik is Russian for “dwarf.” In VN’s stoy Pilgram (“The Aurelian,” 1930) Ragusa and karlikovaya iva (the dwarf willow, Salix herbacea) are mentioned:
Географический образ мира, подробнейший путеводитель (где игорные дома и старые церкви отсутствовали) он бессознательно составил себе из всего того, что нашел в энтомологических трудах, в ученых журналах и книгах, -- а прочел он необыкновенно много и обладал отличной памятью. Динь в южной Франции, Рагуза в Далмации, Сарепта на Волге, -- знаменитые, всякому энтомологу дорогие места, где ловили мелкую нечисть, на удивление и страх аборигенам, странные люди, приехавшие издалека, -- эти места, славные своей фауной, Пильграм видел столь же ясно, словно сам туда съездил, словно сам в поздний час пугал содержателя скверной гостиницы грохотом, топотом, прыжками по комнате, в открытое окно которой, из черной, щедрой ночи, влетела и стремительно закружилась, стукаясь о потолок, серенькая бабочка. Он посещал Тенериффу, окрестности Оротавы, где в жарких, цветущих овражках, которыми изрезаны нижние склоны гор, поросших каштаном и лавром, летает диковинная разновидность капустницы, и тот другой остров -- давняя любовь охотников, -- где на железнодорожном скате, около Виццавоны, и повыше, в сосновых лесах, водится смуглый, коренастый, корсиканский махаон. Он посещал и север -- болота Лапландии, где мох, гонобобель и карликовая ива, богатый мохнатыми бабочками полярный край, -- и высокие альпийские пастбища, с плоскими камнями, лежащими там и сям среди старой, скользкой колтунной травы, -- и, кажется, нет большего наслаждения, чем приподнять такой камень, под которым и муравьи, и синий скарабей, и толстенькая сонная ночница, еще, быть может, никем не названная; и там же, в горах, он видел полупрозрачных, красноглазых аполлонов, которые плывут по ветру через горный тракт, идущий вдоль отвесной скалы и отделенный широкой каменной оградой от пропасти, где бурно белеет вода.
Grunting, Pilgram plucked at the gilded head of the black pin upon which the silky little creature was crucified, and took the specimen out of the box. Turning it this way and that, he peered at the label pinned under the body. 'Yes—Tatsienlu, East Tibet,' he read. 'Taken by the native collectors of Father Dejean' (which sounded almost like 'Prester John')—and he would stick the butterfly back again, right into the same pinhole. His motions seemed casual, even careless, but this was the unerring nonchalance of the specialist: the pin, with the recious insect, and Pilgram's fat fingers were the correlated parts of one and the same flawless machine. It might happen, however, that some open box, having been brushed by the elbow of the visitor, would stealthily begin to slide off the counter—to be stopped just in the nick of time by Pilgram, who would then calmly go on lighting his pipe; only much later, when busy elsewhere, he would suddenly produce a moan of retrospective anguish.
But not only averted crashes made him moan. Father Dejean, stout-hearted missionary climbing among the rhododendrons and snows, how enviable was thy lot! And Pilgram would stare at his boxes and puff and brood and reflect that he need not go so far: that there were thousands of hunting grounds all over Europe. Out of localities cited in entomological works he had built up a special world of his own, to which his science was a most detailed guidebook. In that world there were no casinos, no old churches, nothing that might attract a normal tourist. Digne in Southern France, Ragusa in Dalmatia, Sarepta on the Volga, Abisko in Lapland—those were the famous sites dear to butterfly collectors, and this is where they had poked about, on and off, since the fifties of the last century (always greatly perplexing the local inhabitants). And as clearly as if it were a reminiscence Pilgram saw himself troubling the sleep of a little hotel by stamping and jumping about a room through the wide-open window of which, out of the black generous night, a whitish moth had dashed in and was kissing its shadow all over the ceiling. (II)
Bolota Laplandii (the marshes of Lapland) bring to mind lapochka Lapiner, as in her herbarium (discovered by Van and Ada in the attic of Ardis Hall) Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) calls “her own Dr Krolik:
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here.
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’ (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.
c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.
lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
According to Ada, Dr Krolik died of a heart attack in his garden:
Her brilliance, her genius. Of course, she had changed in four years, but he, too, had changed, by concurrent stages, so that their brains and senses stayed attuned and were to stay thus always, through all separations. Neither had remained the brash Wunderkind of 1884, but in bookish knowledge both surpassed their coevals to an even more absurd extent than in childhood; and in formal terms Ada (born on July 21, 1872) had already completed her private school course while Van, her senior by two years and a half, hoped to get his master’s degree at the end of 1889. Her conversation might have lost some of its sportive glitter, and the first faint shadows of what she would later term ‘my acarpous destiny’ (pustotsvetnost’) could be made out — at least in back view; but the quality of her innate wit had deepened, strange ‘metempirical’ (as Van called them) undercurrents seemed to double internally, and thus enrich, the simplest expression of her simplest thoughts. She read as voraciously and indiscriminately as he, but each had evolved a more or less ‘pet’ subject — he the terrological part of psychiatry, she the drama (especially Russian), a ‘pet’ he found ‘pat’ in her case but hoped would be a passing vagary. Her florimania endured, alas; but after Dr Krolik died (in 1886) of a heart attack in his garden, she had placed all her live pupae in his open coffin where he lay, she said, as plump and pink as in vivo. (1.35)
Dr Krolik’s sudden death brings to mind Pilgram’s end in “The Aurelian.” In a letter to Van Ada says that Krolik is burrowing again:
‘O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many military-looking desert plants especially various species of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and "oil wells" (whatever they are-our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall ever love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine). A.’ (2.5)
In Turgenev’s novel Dym (“Smoke,” 1867) Irina’s letter to Litvinov also ends in the words Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya:
На другое утро Литвинов только что возвратился домой от банкира, с которым еще раз побеседовал об игривом непостоянстве нашего курса и лучшем способе высылать за границу деньги, как швейцар вручил ему письмо. Он узнал почерк Ирины и, не срывая печати, — недоброе предчувствие, бог знает почему, проснулись в нем, — ушел к себе в комнату. Вот что прочел он (письмо было написано по-французски):
«Милый мой! я всю ночь думала о твоем предложении… Я не стану с тобой лукавить. Ты был откровенен со мною, и я буду откровенна: я не могу бежать с тобою, я не в силах это сделать. Я чувствую, как я перед тобою виновата; вторая моя вина еще больше первой, — я презираю себя, свое малодушие, я осыпаю себя упреками, но я не могу себя переменить. Напрасно я доказываю самой себе, что я разрушила твое счастие, что ты теперь, точно, вправе видеть во мне одну легкомысленную кокетку, что я сама вызвалась, сама дала тебе торжественные обещания… Я ужасаюсь, я чувствую ненависть к себе, но я не могу поступать иначе, не могу, не могу. Я не хочу оправдыватъся, не стану говорить тебе, что я сама была увлечена… все это ничего не значит; но я хочу сказать тебе и повторить, и повторить еще раз: я твоя, твоя навсегда, располагай мною, как хочешь, когда хочешь, безответно и безотчетно, я твоя… Но бежать, все бросить… нет! нет! нет! Я умоляла тебя спасти меня, я сама надеялась все изгладить, сжечь все как в огне… Но, видно, мне нет спасения; видно, яд слишком глубоко проник в меня; видно, нельзя безнаказанно в течение многих лет дышать этим воздухом! Я долго колебалась, писать ли тебе это письмо, мне страшно подумать, какое ты примешь решение, я надеюсь только на любовь твою ко мне. Но я сочла, что было бы бесчестным с моей стороны не сказать тебе правды — тем более что ты, быть может, уже начал принимать первые меры к исполнению нашего замысла. Ах! он был прекрасен, но несбыточен. О мой друг, считай меня пустою, слабою женщиной, презирай меня, но не покидай меня, не покидай твоей Ирины!.. Оставить этот свет я не в силах, но и жить в нем без тебя не могу. Мы скоро вернемся в Петербург, приезжай туда, живи там, мы найдем тебе занятия, твои прошедшие труды не пропадут, ты найдешь для них полезное применение… Только живи в моей близости, только люби меня, какова я есть, со всеми моими слабостями и пороками, и знай, что ничье сердце никогда не будет так нежно тебе предано, как сердце твоей Ирины. Приходи скорее ко мне, я не буду иметь минуты спокойствия, пока я тебя не увижу. Твоя, твоя, твоя И.»
The next morning Litvinov had only just come home from seeing the banker, with whom he had had another conversation on the playful instability of our exchange, and the best means of sending money abroad, when the hotel porter handed him a letter. He recognised Irina's handwriting, and without breaking the seal—a presentiment of evil, Heaven knows why, was astir in him—he went into his room. This was what he read (the letter was in French):
'My dear one, I have been thinking all night of your plan. . . . I am not going to shuffle with you. You have been open with me, and I will be open with you; I cannot run away with you, I have not the strength to do it. I feel how I am wronging you; my second sin is greater than the first, I despise myself, my cowardice, I cover myself with reproaches, but I cannot change myself In vain I tell myself that I have destroyed your happiness, that you have the right now to regard me as a frivolous flirt, that I myself drew you on, that I have given you solemn promises. . . . I am full of horror, of hatred for myself, but I can't do otherwise, I can't, I can't. I don't want to justify myself, I won't tell you I was carried away myself . . . all that 's of no importance; but I want to tell you, and to say it again and yet again, I am yours, yours for ever, do with me as you will when you will, free from all obligation, from all responsibility! I am yours. . . . But run away, throw up everything . . . no! no! no! I besought you to save me, I hoped to wipe out everything, to burn up the past as in a fire . . . but I see there is no salvation for me; I see the poison has gone too deeply into me; I see one cannot breathe this atmosphere for years with impunity. I have long hesitated whether to write you this letter, I dread to think what decision you may come to, I trust only to your love for me. But I felt it would be dishonest on my part to hide the truth from you—especially as perhaps you have already begun to take the first steps for carrying out our project. Ah! it was lovely but impracticable. О my dear one, think me a weak, worthless woman, despise, but don't abandon me, don't abandon your Irina ! . . . To leave this life I have not the courage, but live it without you I cannot either. We soon go back to Petersburg, come there, live there, we will find occupation for you, your labours in the past shall not be thrown away, you shall find good use for them . . . only live near me, only love me; such as I am, with all my weaknesses and my vices, and believe me, no heart will ever be so tenderly devoted to you as the heart of your Irina. Come soon to me, I shall not have an instant's peace until I see you. — Yours, yours, yours, I.' (Chapter XXV)
According to Marina, at Van’s age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev’s Smoke:
Her intimacy with her cher, trop cher René, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed the reading situation entirely — whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air. Soon upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess (who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any length of time, and without any trace of ‘en lecture,’ any volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father’s librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger’s format and presumable date of publication, post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth century libertines, German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. Puzzled Mlle Larivière would have consulted the Master of Ardis, but she never discussed with him anything serious since the day (in January, 1876) when he had made an unexpected (and rather halfhearted, really — let us be fair) pass at her. As to dear, frivolous Marina, she only remarked, when consulted, that at Van’s age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev’s Smoke. Thereafter, anything Ada wanted or might have wanted to want was placed by Van at her disposal in various safe nooks, and the only visible consequence of Verger’s perplexities and despair was an increase in the scatter of a curious snow-white dust that he always left here and there, on the dark carpet, in this or that spot of plodding occupation — such a cruel curse on such a neat little man! (1.21)
It seems that Marina’s twin sister Aqua (Demon’s wife) went mad, because she was poisoned by Marina. In her delirium Aqua saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea (note also "bibles and brooms"):
Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drowning the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might have been just another consumable witch. (1.3)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) electricity ("the unmentionable magnetic power") was banned after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century. Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901) is a poem by Zinaida Hippius. In her review of Alexander Blok’s first collection of poetry, Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame (“Verses about the Beautiful Lady,” 1904), Hippius says that the Knight of the pale Beautiful Lady managed to grow only the faintly glimmering wings of a butterfly:
Нежный, слабый, паутинный, влюбленный столько же в смерть, сколько в жизнь, рыцарь бледной Прекрасной Дамы — сумел вырастить себе лишь слабо мерцающие крылья бабочки. Он неверными и короткими взлетами поднимается над пропастью; но пропасть широка; крылья бабочки не осилят её. Крылья бабочки скоро устают, быстро слабеют. (I)
In his poem Neznakomka (“The Unknown Woman,” 1906) Blok mentions p’yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits). Blok is the author of Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), a poem in blank verse subtitled Son (A Dream). After his pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Van loses forever his ability to walk on his hands. Van discovers that he cannot dance on his hands and answers the dorophone of Vanda Broom on the same day:
Van spent a medicinal month in Cordula’s Manhattan flat on Alexis Avenue. She dutifully visited her mother at their Malbrook castle two or three times a week, unescorted by Van either there or to the numerous social ‘flits’ she attended in town, being a frivolous fun-loving little thing; but some parties she canceled, and resolutely avoided seeing her latest lover (the fashionable psychotechnician Dr F.S. Fraser, a cousin of the late P. de P.’s fortunate fellow soldier). Several times Van talked on the dorophone with his father (who pursued an extensive study of Mexican spas and spices) and did several errands for him in town. He often took Cordula to French restaurants, English movies, and Varangian tragedies, all of which was most satisfying, for she relished every morsel, every sip, every jest, every sob, and he found ravishing the velvety rose of her cheeks, and the azure-pure iris of her festively painted eyes to which indigo-black thick lashes, lengthening and upcurving at the outer canthus, added what fashion called the ‘harlequin slant.’
One Sunday, while Cordula was still lolling in her perfumed bath (a lovely, oddly unfamiliar sight, which he delighted in twice a day), Van ‘in the nude’ (as his new sweetheart drolly genteelized ‘naked’), attempted for the first time after a month’s abstinence to walk on his hands. He felt strong, and fit, and blithely turned over to the ‘first position’ in the middle of the sun-drenched terrace. Next moment he was sprawling on his back. He tried again and lost his balance at once. He had the terrifying, albeit illusionary, feeling that his left arm was now shorter than his right, and Van wondered wrily if he ever would be able to dance on his hands again. King Wing had warned him that two or three months without practice might result in an irretrievable loss of the rare art. On the same day (the two nasty little incidents thus remained linked up in his mind forever) Van happened to answer the ‘phone — a deep hollow voice which he thought was a man’s wanted Cordula, but the caller turned out to be an old schoolmate, and Cordula feigned limpid delight, while making big eyes at Van over the receiver, and invented a number of unconvincing engagements.
'It's a gruesome girl!' she cried after the melodious adieux. 'Her name is Vanda Broom, and I learned only recently what I never suspected at school - she's a regular tribadka - poor Grace Erminin tells me Vanda used to make constant passes at her and at - at another girl. There's her picture here,' continued Cordula with a quick change of tone, producing a daintily bound and prettily printed graduation album of Spring, 1887, which Van had seen at Ardis, but in which he had not noticed the somber beetle-browed unhappy face of that particular girl, and now it did not matter any more, and Cordula quickly popped the book back into a drawer; but he remembered very well that among the various more or less coy contributions it contained a clever pastiche by Ada Veen mimicking Tolstoy's paragraph rhythm and chapter closings; he saw clearly in mind her prim photo under which she had added one of her characteristic jingles:
In the old manor, I've parodied
Every veranda and room,
And jacarandas at Arrowhead
In supernatural bloom.
It did not matter, it did not matter. Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair. (1.43)
The name Vanda Broom is secretly present in Ada's poem. The old manor, in which Ada has parodied every veranda and room, is Ardis.
Vanda Broom + Ardis + Odin + Ragusa = dar + Vanadis + Borodino + grausam
Odin - in the Scandinavian mythology, the chief god; odin (accented on the second syllable) is Russian for “one, alone;” Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu... (“I go out on the road alone,” 1841) is a poem by Lermontov
Ragusa - Italian name of Dubrovnik, a seaport in S Croatia
dar - gift; Dar is a novel (1937) by VN; in Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” (1830) Salieri mentions dar Izory (Isora’s gift)
Vanadis - one of the names of Freyja, the Scandinavian Venus
Borodino - village W of Moscow, site of the battle against Napoleon in 1812; a poem (1837) by Lermontov
grausam - Germ., gruesome (according to Cordula, Vanda Broom is a gruesome girl)
It seems that the girlfriend of a girlfriend who shot dead Vanda Broom on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places, was Ada (and that Dr Krolik was buried alive). The son of Dedalus Veen and Irina Garin (from gar', "burning;" cf. Irina in Turgenev's "Smoke"), Demon Veen dies in an airplane disaster, because Ada managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.
Btw., Pierre François Marie Auguste Dejean (1780-1845) was a French entomologist (cf. Father Dejean in "The Aurelian").