In VN’s novel Ada (1969) two gypsy courtesans predict to Van that he will never have children:
What laughs, what tears, what sticky kisses, what a tumult of multitudinous plans! And what safety, what freedom of love! Two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor, had both given our hero exactly the same reason, unmentionable in a family chronicle, for considering him absolutely sterile despite his prowesses. Amused by the Hecatean diagnose, Van underwent certain tests, and although pooh-poohing the symptom as coincidental, all the doctors agreed that Van Veen might be a doughty and durable lover but could never hope for an offspring. How merrily little Ada clapped her hands! (2.6)
Hecate is the Greek goddess of witchcraft. The Hecatean diagnose brings to mind Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.2):
LUCIANUS
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
Pours the poison into the sleeper's ears
Describing Villa Venus (Eric Veen's floramors), Van mentions the Rajah of Cachou (an impostor) who was infected with a venereal disease by a (genuine) great-grandniece of Empress Josephine:
When the deterioration of the club set in, it proceeded with amazing rapidity along several unconnected lines. Girls of flawless pedigree turned out to be wanted by the police as the ‘molls’ of bandits with grotesque jaws, or to have been criminals themselves. Corrupt physicians passed faded blondes who had had half a dozen children, some of them being already prepared to enter remote floramors themselves. Cosmeticians of genius restored forty-year-old matrons to look and smell like schoolgirls at their first prom. Highborn gentlemen, magistrates of radiant integrity, mild-mannered scholars, proved to be such violent copulators that some of their younger victims had to be hospitalized and removed to ordinary lupanars. The anonymous protectors of courtesans bought medical inspectors, and the Rajah of Cachou (an impostor) was infected with a venereal disease by a (genuine) great-grandniece of Empress Josephine. Simultaneously, economic disasters (beyond the financial or philosophical ken of invulnerable Van and Demon but affecting many persons of their set) began to restrict the esthetic assets of Villa Venus. Disgusting pimps with obsequious grins disclosing gaps in their tawny teeth popped out of rosebushes with illustrated pamphlets, and there were fires and earthquakes, and quite suddenly, out of the hundred original palazzos, only a dozen remained, and even those soon sank to the level of stagnant stews, and by 1910 all the dead of the English cemetery at Ex had to be transferred to a common grave. (2.3)
Ordinary lupanars seem to hint at Deus in Lupanari (1909), Vyacheslav Ivanov’s poem dedicated to Alexander Blok. In his poem Neznakomka ("The Unknown Woman," 1906) Blok mentions p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) who cry out "In vino veritas!" Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Van mentions Blok's Incognita:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.
‘Hullo there, Ed,’ said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.
‘I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!’
‘Your hat,’ he said, ‘is positively lautrémontesque — I mean, lautrecaquesque — no, I can’t form the adjective.’
Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.
‘Gin and bitter for me.’
‘I’m so happy and sad,’ she murmured in Russian. ‘Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?’
Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn’t mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject. (3.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
grustnoe etc.: Russ., she addresses him as ‘my sad bliss’.
In the last quatrain of his poem Pomnite den' bezotradnyi i seryi... ("Do you remember the cheerless and gray day..." 1899) Blok mentions grustnoe schast'ye (the sad bliss):
Помните день безотрадный и серый,
Лист пожелтевший во мраке зачах...
Всё мне: Любовь и Надежда и Вера
В Ваших очах!
Помните лунную ночь голубую,
Шли мы, и песня звучала впотьмах...
Я схоронил эту песню живую
В Ваших очах!
Помните счастье: давно отлетело
Грустное счастье на быстрых крылах...
Только и жило оно и горело
В Ваших очах!
One of Blok's poems begins: Ya - Gamlet. Kholodeet krov' ("I am Hamlet. Freezes blood"). Like Gonzago (a character in The Mousetrap, or The Murder of Gonzago, the play performed at Elsinore), Hamlet’s father was poisoned when he was asleep in his garden. According to Ada, Dr Krolik (the local entomologists, Ada’s beloved teacher of natural history) 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)
It seems that, even if he was not poisoned, poor Dr Krolik (the roly-poly old Pole whose grave Van refuses to visit) was buried alive. 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 (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), 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)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en lecture: ‘out’.
Demon’s librarian, Miss Vertograd brings to mind Pushkin’s poem Vertograd moey sestry (“The garden of my sister,” 1825):
Вертоград моей сестры,
Вертоград уединенный;
Чистый ключ у ней с горы
Не бежит запечатленный.
У меня плоды блестят
Наливные, золотые;
У меня бегут, шумят
Воды чистые, живые.
Нард, алой и киннамон
Благовонием богаты:
Лишь повеет аквилон,
И закаплют ароматы.
In the poem’s penultimate line Pushkin mentions Aquilon (the North wind). In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (4.5) Ajax mentions the colic of puff'd Aquilon:
Thou, trumpet, there's my purse.
Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon:
Come, stretch thy chest and let thy eyes spout blood;
Thou blow'st for Hector.
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (3.5) Hecate says:
He [Macbeth] shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals' chiefest enemy.
After prophesying that Macbeth will become king, the three witches tell Banquo that he will not be king himself, but that his descendants will be. In Banquo there is ‘ban.’ At the end of Ada Van mentions a logical ban:
‘Yes,’ said Ada (aged eleven and a great hair-tosser), ‘yes — but take a paralytic who forgets the entire past gradually, stroke by stroke, who dies in his sleep like a good boy, and who has believed all his life that the soul is immortal — isn’t that desirable, isn’t that a quite comfortable arrangement?’
‘Cold comfort,’ said Van (aged fourteen and dying of other desires). ‘You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.’
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
...Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
(...We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another...)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three ‘boths’ had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)
“Here was the rub” is an obvious allusion to Hamlet’s words in his famous monologue. Like Hamlet, Van is a good son. But he does not realize that his father (who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) died because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot (who brings along a hundred other people to the celestial party) to destroy his machine in midair.
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) and Ada have at least two children and that 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. Nochnaya Fialka ("The Night Violet," 1906) is a poem in blank verse (subtitled "A Dream") by Alexander Blok.
In 1905, when Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van compares Andrey Vinelander to Keats (the poet who died of tuberculosis):
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’ (3.8)
In his sonnet On the Sea (1817) Keats mentions Hecate (the moon):
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody---
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!
The children of Demon Veen and Marina Durmanov, Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall. Describing their find, Van mentions the sea, Demon’s dark-blue great-grandmother:
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.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left hanging:
A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.
Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): 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.
Princess Sofia Zemski (born Temnosiniy) brings to mind Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin, in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) the “real” name of both Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla). Lastochka means "swallow" and makes one think of Swallowtail (as the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor nicknamed the third courtesan who predicted to Van that he would die childless). Shade’s poem consists of 999 lines and is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda, Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane.” In his Sonet (“A Sonnet,” 1830) Pushkin says that Shakespeare (“the author of Macbeth”) loved the sonnet’s play:
Scorn not the sonnet, critic. Wordsworth
Суровый Дант не презирал сонета;
В нём жар любви Петрарка изливал;
Игру его любил творец Макбета;
Им скорбну мысль Камоэнс облекал.
И в наши дни пленяет он поэта:
Вордсворт его орудием избрал,
Когда вдали от суетного света
Природы он рисует идеал.
Под сенью гор Тавриды отдаленной
Певец Литвы в размер его стесненный
Свои мечты мгновенно заключал.
У нас ещё его не знали девы,
Как для него уж Дельвиг забывал
Гекзаметра священные напевы.
Scorn not the sonnet, critic. Wordsworth
Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;
Into it Petrarch poured out the ardor of love;
Its play the creator of Macbeth loved;
With it Camoes clothed his sorrowful thought.
Even in our days it captivates the poet:
Wordsworth chose it as an instrument,
When far from the vain world
He depicts nature's ideal.
Under the shadow of the mountains of distant Tavrida
The singer of Lithuania in its constrained measure
His dreams he in an instant enclosed.
Here the maidens did not yet know it,
When for it even Delvig forgot
The sacred melodies of the hexameter.
(tr. Ober)