Source for Ada's orchestra/horsecart dream anagram

A very nice interview, thank you for bringing it up. It is as if I visited the Engadine myself! VN must have found the solution of the "cart horse" anagram afterwards (he would see the solution anyway, when the interview was published). As to prowling black spumas in Uncle Van's dreams (apparently, a misprint; it should be "Uncle Ivan"), they seem to hint at the Latin phrase cum spumas agere in ore, "foaming at the mouth." Royal' drozhashchiy penu s gub oblizhet ("A trembling piano will lick off foam from its lips," 1919) is a poem by Pasternak:

Рояль дрожащий пену с губ оближет.
Тебя сорвёт, подкосит этот бред.
Ты скажешь: — милый! — Нет, — вскричу я, — нет!
При музыке?! — Но можно ли быть ближе,

Чем в полутьме, аккорды, как дневник,
Меча в камин комплектами, погодно?
О пониманье дивное, кивни,
Кивни, и изумишься! — ты свободна.

Я не держу. Иди, благотвори.
Ступай к другим. Уже написан Вертер,
А в наши дни и воздух пахнет смертью:
Открыть окно — что жилы отворить.

Pasternak's poem ends in the lines "And in our days even the air smells of death: / To open the window is the same as to open one's veins." Air is the element that destroys Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who dies in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific, 3.7). Pamyati Demona ("In Memory of the Demon") is the first poem in Pasternak's collection Sestra moya zhizn' ("My Sister Life," 1923). When Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) visits Van in Kingston and brings him Ada's letter, Van tells her that all three casements are open:

‘I think I’ll take off my jacket,’ she said with the usual flitting frown of feminine fuss that fits the ‘thought.’ ‘You’ve got central heating; we girls have tiny fireplaces.’

She threw it off, revealing a sleeveless frilly white blouse. She raised her arms to pass her fingers through her bright curls, and he saw the expected bright hollows.

Van said, ‘All three casements pourtant are open and can open wider; but they can do it only westward and that green yard down below is the evening sun’s praying rug, which makes this room even warmer. Terrible for a window not to be able to turn its paralyzed embrasure and see what’s on the other side of the house.’

Once a Veen, always a Veen. (2.5)

Like Penelope Gilliatt (the interviewer whom VN met in the hotel lobby), Lucette is red-haired.

While a trembling piano and "a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra" seem to foreshadow Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher and one of Ada's lovers (who is poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie and dies in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital, 1.42), "prowling black spumas" anticipate Karol, or Karapars ("black panther"), Krolik, a doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey (Dr. Krolik's brother who was Ada's first lover and whose photograph Van sees in Kim Beauharnais' album, 2.7). In his interview with Penelope Gilliatt VN tells about his hospitalization after food poisoning, mentions Lewis Carroll Carroll (as VN calls him) and criticizes Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) Pasternak's novel is known as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, and as Mertvago Forever, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are known as Palace in Wonderlad. Both books are mentioned in Ada in close proximity:

She showed him next where the hammock — a whole set of hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets — was stored: this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs, the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was stuffed by the nest of a bird — no need to identify it. A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.

‘As we all are at that age,’ said Van and stooped to pick up a curved tortoiseshell comb — the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose hairdo?

‘One of the maids,’ said Ada. ‘That tattered chapbook must also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor.’

‘Playing croquet with you,’ said Van, ‘should be rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs.’

‘Our reading lists do not match,’ replied Ada. ‘That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly. We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’ Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it? (1.8)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Les amours du Dr Mertvago: play on 'Zhivago' ('zhiv' means in Russian 'alive' and 'mertv' ‘dead’).

In his interview with Penelope Gilliatt VN says that he knows Dublin (the setting of Joyce's Ulysses) as good as he knows Moscow (the setting of Doctor Zhivago).

Describing his meeting with Lucette in Paris in 1901, Van compares Lucette to Blok's Incignita (3.3). In his poem Neznakomka ("The Unknown Woman," 1906) Alexander Blok mentions p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) who cry out "In vino veritas!" At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon uses the phrase s glazami (with the eyes) and mentions Dr. Krolik:

'Marina,' murmured Demon at the close of the first course. 'Marina,' he repeated louder. 'Far from me' (a locution he favored) 'to criticize Dan's taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I'm above all that rot, I'm...' (gesture); 'but, my dear,' he continued, switching to Russian, 'the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki - the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) -'
'Everybody has eyes,' remarked Marina drily.
'Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that's not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It's depressing. It's a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.'
'Look, Dad,' said Van, 'Dr Krolik can't do much, because, as you know quite well, he's dead, and Marina can't tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they're alive.'
'The Veen wit, the Veen wit,' murmured Demon.

‘Exactly,’ said Marina. ‘I simply refuse to do anything about it. Besides poor Jones is not at all asthmatic, but only nervously eager to please. He’s as healthy as a bull and has rowed me from Ardisville to Ladore and back, and enjoyed it, many times this summer. You are cruel, Demon. I can’t tell him "ne pïkhtite," as I can’t tell Kim, the kitchen boy, not to take photographs on the sly — he’s a regular snap-shooting fiend, that Kim, though otherwise an adorable, gentle, honest boy; nor can I tell my little French maid to stop getting invitations, as she somehow succeeds in doing, to the most exclusive bals masqués in Ladore.’ (1.38)

Describing the family dinner, Van mentions Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder who took pictures:

'What was that?' exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
'Sheet lightning,' suggested Van.
'If you ask me,' said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, 'I'd guess it was a photographer's flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.'
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. (ibid.)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): certicle: anagram of 'electric.'

In his poem Groza momental'naya navek ("The Thunderstorm Instantaneous Forever") included in "My Sister Life" Pasternak, too, has grom (thunder) take pictures:

А затем прощалось лето
С полустанком. Снявши шапку,
Сто слепящих фотографий
Ночью снял на память гром.

Меркла кисть сирени. B это
Время он, нарвав охапку
Молний, с поля ими трафил
Озарить управский дом.

И когда по кровле зданья
Разлилась волна злорадства
И, как уголь по рисунку,
Грянул ливень всем плетнем,

Стал мигать обвал сознанья:
Вот, казалось, озарятся
Даже те углы рассудка,
Где теперь светло, как днем!

In memory [of the summer] the thunder took at night
a hundred blinding photographs.

The title of Pasternak's poem brings to mind Mertvago Forever.

Pasternak's poem about a piano licking off foam from its lips brings to mind Fet’s glorious Siyala noch’ ("The night was radiant..."), a romance that Van, Ada and Lucette listen in 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotinan restaurant in Manhattan Major):

Here Van stood up again, as Ada, black fan in elegant motion, came back followed by a thousand eyes, while the opening bars of a romance (on Fet’s glorious Siyala noch’) started to run over the keys (and the bass coughed à la russe into his fist before starting).

A radiant night, a moon-filled garden. Beams

Lay at our feet. The drawing room, unlit;

Wide open, the grand piano; and our hearts

Throbbed to your song, as throbbed the strings in it...

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)

On the next morning Van learns from Lucette the name of Ada's future husband:

‘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.

He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose — no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk.’ He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album. (ibid.)

 "A Tiger Turk" mentioned by Ada is her first lover, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey.

Van never finds out that Andrey Vinelander and Ada have at least two children and that Mr. Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little Violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren. According to Penelope Gilliatt, VN asked her if the Queen was pregnant. King Victor (who often visits Villa Venus, Eric Veen's floramors, incognito) seems to be the Antiterran counterpart of the British Queen Victoria (who had nine children). Lewis Carroll Carroll was a "Victorian" writer.

After Andrey Vinelander's death, Van gets a cable from Ada (ARRIVING MONT ROUX TROIS CYGNES MONDAY DINNERTIME I WANT YOU TO WIRE ME FRANKLY IF THE DATE AND THE WHOLE TRALALA ARE INCONVENIENT) in the Engadine:

‘When I was a kid,’ said Van, ‘and stayed for the first — or rather, second — time in Switzerland, I thought that "Verglas" on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna — which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard’s mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.’

‘Oh dear. I’m afraid you must cancel poor 508. If I stayed for the night, 510 would do for both of us, but I’ve got bad news for you. I can’t stay. I must go back to Geneva directly after dinner to retrieve my things and maids, whom the authorities have apparently put in a Home for Stray Females because they could not pay the absolutely medieval new droits de douane — isn’t Switzerland in Washington State, sort of, après tout? Look, don’t scowl’ — (patting his brown blotched hand on which their shared birthmark had got lost among the freckles of age, like a babe in autumn woods, on peut les suivre en reconnaissant only Mascodagama’s disfigured thumb and the beautiful almond-shaped nails) — ‘I promise to get in touch with you in a day or two, and then we’ll go on a cruise to Greece with the Baynards — they have a yacht and three adorable daughters who still swim in the tan, okay?’

‘I don’t know what I loathe more,’ he replied, ‘yachts or Baynards; but can I help you in Geneva?’

He could not. Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce — Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband’s antlers (last call for that joke). (Part Four)

In the penultimate story of his book Les Plaisirs et les Jours (“Pleasures and Days,” 1896), Les regrets, rêveries couleur du temps (“Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time”), Marcel Proust mentions a forgotten village of the Engadine:

Nous nous sommes aimés dans un village perdu d’Engadine au nom deux fois doux : le rêve des sonorités allemandes s’y mourait dans la volupté des syllabes italiennes, À l’entour, trois lacs d’un vert inconnu baignaient des forêts de sapins. Des glaciers et des pics fermaient l’horizon. Le soir, la diversité des plans multipliait la douceur des éclairages. Oublierons-nous jamais les promenades au bord du lac de Sils-Maria, quand l’après-midi finissait, à six heures ? Les mélèzes d’une si noire sérénité quand ils avoisinent la neige éblouissante tendaient vers l’eau bleu pâle, presque mauve, leurs branches d’un vert suave et brillant. Un soir l’heure nous fut particulièrement propice ; en quelques instants, le soleil baissant, fit passer l’eau par toutes les nuances et notre âme par toutes les voluptés, Tout à coup nous rimes un mouvement, nous venions de voir un petit papillon rose, puis deux, puis cinq, quitter les fleurs de notre rive et voltiger au-dessus du lac. Bientôt ils semblaient une impalpable poussière de rose emportée, puis ils abordaient aux fleurs de l’autre rive, revenaient et doucement recommençaient l’aventureuse traversée, s’arrêtant parfois comme tentés au-dessus de ce lac précieusement nuancé alors comme une grande fleur qui se fane. C’en était trop et nos yeux s’emplissaient de larmes. Ces petits papillons, en traversant le lac, passaient et repassaient sur notre âme, – sur notre âme toute tendue d’émotion devant tant de beautés, prête à vibrer, – passaient et repassaient comme un archet voluptueux. (Chapter XXII – PRÉSENCE RÉELLE)

Part Four of Ada is Van's essay The Texture of Time (1922). In À la recherche du temps perdu ("In Search of Lost Time") Proust several time mentions un grand tralala:

« Vous n’étiez pas invité hier chez Salomon ? disait-on dans la famille. — Non, je n’étais pas des élus ! — Qu’est-ce qu’il y avait ? — Un grand tralala, le stéréoscope, toute la boutique. — Ah ! s’il y avait le stéréoscope, je regrette, car il paraît que Salomon est extraordinaire quand il le montre. — Que veux-tu, dit M. Bloch à son fils, il ne faut pas lui donner tout à la fois, comme cela il lui restera quelque chose à désirer. » (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

Brichot m’apprit qu’il y avait ce soir, au « Quai Conti » (c’est ainsi que les fidèles disaient en parlant du salon Verdurin depuis qu’il s’était transporté là), grand « tra la la » musical, organisé par M. de Charlus. (La Prisonnière)

"The whole tralala" in Ada's cable and un grand tralala in Proust's novel bring to mind Tralatitions, Mr. R.'s last book in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972). Tralatition is "a change, as in the use of words; a metaphor." In his interview with Penelope Gilliatt VN speaks of the metaphors:

“And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say ‘as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel,”’ he said, looking out at the rain. “It would be a beautiful metaphor. But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress."

According to Van, Ada was partly written by Ada herself:

Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.

(She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact — that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history — because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure — combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

The males of the firefly, a small luminous beetle, more like a wandering star than a winged insect, appeared on the first warm black nights of Ardis, one by one, here and there, then in a ghostly multitude, dwindling again to a few individuals as their quest came to its natural end. Van watched them with the same pleasurable awe he had experienced as a child, when, lost in the purple crepuscule of an Italian hotel garden, in an alley of cypresses, he supposed they were golden ghouls or the passing fancies of the garden. Now as they softly flew, apparently straight, crossing and recrossing the darkness around him, each flashed his pale-lemon light every five seconds or so, signaling in his own specific rhythm (quite different from that of an allied species, flying with Photinus ladorensis, according to Ada, at Lugano and Luga) to his grass-domiciled female pulsating in photic response after taking a couple of moments to verify the exact type of light code he used. The presence of those magnificent little animals, delicately illuminating, as they passed, the fragrant night, filled Van with a subtle exhilaration that Ada’s entomology seldom evoked in him — maybe in result of the abstract scholar’s envy which a naturalist’s immediate knowledge sometimes provokes. The hammock, a comfortable oblong nest, reticulated his naked body either under the weeping cedar that sprawled over one corner of a lawn, and granted a partial shelter in case of a shower, or, on safer nights, between two tulip trees (where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the bright blood blotching his pillow). (1.12)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): pensive reeds: Pascal’s metaphor of man, un roseau pensant.

horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’), p.62.

According to Penelope Gilliatt, long ago the Empress of Russia gave VN pleasure by being an eager admirer of Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

"The high-flying philistinism of protected art tastes strikes him often as richly foolish. Long ago the Empress of Russia gave him pleasure by being an eager admirer of Ella Wheeler Wilcox."

The last Russian Empress, Aleksandra Fyodorovna, was a granddaughter of the British Queen Victoria (who corresponds to the Antiterran King Victor, a frequent visitor of floramors, one hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay entitled "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream"). Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox (Ada's grandchildren who marry after Van's and Ada's death) are sverhimperatorskaya cheta (a super-imperial couple).

On Antiterra England annexed France in 1815 and Paris is also known as Lute (from Lutèce, the city's ancient name). Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions Milord Goal, governor of Lute:

On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)

In Speak, Memory (a book that VN was holding when he met Penelope Gilliat in the hotel lobby) VN says that, as a Cambridge student, he was a football goalkeeper. Describing Victor Vitry's film version of his novel, Van mentions the final football match in the Olympic Games held in Berlin:

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). (5.5)

VN told Penelope Gilliatt that he saw the Queen on TV at a football match. According to Penelope Gilliatt, VN did not cared about de Gaulle. At the end of the same chapter about Vitry's film Van mentions a bad-tempered French general:

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. (ibid.)

Chose is Van's English University. Charlie Chose seems to be the Antiterran counterpart of Charlie Chaplin. In his Universitetskaya poema ("The University Poem," 1927) VN mentions smeshnoy i trogatel'nyi Chaplin (funny and touching Chaplin).

Alain, excuse the belated comments:

Nice find! I enjoyed the article; Nabokov came across as more candid than usual, or perhaps the writer made it seem so.

I was confused at first by the “orchal orchestra.” I thought maybe it was a “choral” orchestra if there is such a thing– but what’s the point? It turns out that “orchal” is related to testicles (Gr. Orchis)! Whether “orchestra” or “horse cart,” that certainly would be a crash or clash of symbols. Then again – the “cart horse” might well be well-endowed! This way the word-play would come full circle, without even mentioning "cart horse."  

BTW, some interesting discussion of the “black spumas” were posted previously: NABOKV-L POST 0026924 and NABOKV-L POST 0026924

It occurred to me that the “black spumas” refer to the earlier description of Mascodagama’s black costume as a sort of “shapeless nastiness”:

The shock of his powerful and precipitous entry affected so deeply the children in the audience that for a long time later, in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the ‘primordial qualm,’ a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage. (1.30)

The tubercular youth in the hammock was having a nightmare of stalking black blood-coughs. The children in the Mascodagama's audience were likewise having a "nightmarish" experience of the nasty black shape.