After his father's sudden death Hugh Person (the main character in VN's novel Transparent Things, 1972) moves to Geneva, has homard à l'américaine for dinner and goes to find his first whore:
This Henry Emery Person, our Person's father, might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer. A lot of handwringing goes about in the dark of remorse, in the dungeon of the irreparable. A schoolboy, be he as strong as the Boston strangler - show your hands, Hugh - cannot cope with all his fellows when all keep making cruel remarks about his father. After two or three clumsy fights with the most detestable among them, he had adopted a smarter and meaner attitude of taciturn semiacquiescence which horrified him when he remembered those times; but by a curious twist of conscience the awareness of his own horror comforted him as proving he was not altogether a monster. He now had to do something about a number of recollected unkindnesses of which he had been guilty up to that very day; they were to be as painfully disposed of as had been the dentures and glasses which the authorities left with him in a paper bag. The only kinsman he could turn up, an uncle in Scranton, advised him over the ocean to have the body cremated abroad rather than shipped home; actually, the less recommended course proved to be the easier one in many respects, and mainly because it allowed Hugh to get rid of the dreadful object practically at once.
Everybody was very helpful. One would like in particular to express one's gratitude to Harold Hall, the American consul in Switzerland, who was instrumental in extending all possible assistance to our poor friend.
Of the two thrills young Hugh experienced, one was general, the other specific. The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life's rot. Specifically, he was delighted to discover three thousand dollars in his father's battered, but plump, wallet. Like many a young man of dark genius who feels in a wad of bills all the tangible thickness of immediate delights, he had no practical sense, no ambition to make more money, and no qualms about his future means of subsistence (these proved negligible when it transpired that the cash had been more than a tenth of the actual inheritance). That same day he moved to much finer lodgings in Geneva, had homard à l'américaine for dinner, and went to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel.
For optical and animal reasons sexual love is less transparent than many other much more complicated things. One knows, however, that in his home town Hugh had courted a thirty-eight-year-old mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter but had been impotent with the first and not audacious enough with the second. We have here a banal case of protracted erotic itch, of lone practice for its habitual satisfaction, and of memorable dreams. The girl he accosted was stumpy but had a lovely, pale, vulgar face with Italian eyes. She took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse - to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy. The bed - a different one, with brass knobs - was made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted, bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again.
Hugh Person followed his chance girl down the long steep stairs, and to her favorite street corner where they parted for many years. He had hoped that the girl would keep him till morn - and thus spare him a night at the hotel, with his dead father present in every dark corner of solitude; but when she saw him inclined to stay she misconstrued his plans, brutally said it would take much too long to get such a poor performer back into shape, and ushered him out. It was not a ghost, however, that prevented him from falling asleep, but the stuffiness. He opened wide both casements; they gave on a parking place four floors below; the thin meniscus overhead was too wan to illumine the roofs of the houses descending toward the invisible lake; the light of a garage picked out the steps of desolate stairs leading into a chaos of shadows; it was all very dismal and very distant, and our acrophobic Person felt the pull of gravity inviting him to join the night and his father. He had walked in his sleep many times as a naked boy but familiar surroundings had guarded him, till finally the strange disease had abated. Tonight, on the highest floor of a strange hotel, he lacked all protection. He closed the windows and sat in an armchair till dawn. (Chapter 6)
In G. Ivanov's story Nevesta iz tumana ("The Bride from the Fog," 1933) Alexandrov (a young painter who just gained recognition and found a Maecenas) eats omar po-amerikanski (homard à l'américaine) in a big Parisian café where he meets a mysterious girl with transparent eyes who takes him to a nearby hotel and spends the night with him:
«Голова болит. Но напиться вчера не пришлось. Вышло иное. Дико и непонятно.
Я пообедал один. Выпил бутылку вина и съел омара по-американски, не думая о желудке. Пока ел, было ничего, но потом стало еще тревожнее. Я вышел на площадь. Давно я не был здесь. Шумно, людно, отвратительно. Я зашел в большое кафе. Мне было холодно. Я сел за свободный столик и, сняв перчатки, потер озябшие руки.
— Вам холодно? — спросил немного гортанный голос. — Выпейте грогу. И мне закажите — мне тоже холодно.
Я повернул голову и увидел прозрачные глаза, маленький красный рот, светлые волосы. Это была она, невеста. Ее глаза. Ее волосы.
Ее руки. Только выражение лица было совсем другое — грустное и немного испуганное.
— И мне, — повторила она. — Или не хотите? Скупой? Я заказал два грога, и она улыбнулась.
— Мне надоело сидеть, — сказала она, выпив. — Хочешь пойдем? Не было сомнений, кто она и чего хочет, но она была совсем непохожа на остальных женщин. Она казалась молодой, наивной и робкой.
— Пойдем ко мне, — предложил я.
— А где это?
Я назвал улицу.
— Ах, нет-нет, — замотала она головой. — Ах, нет. Туда не хочу. Я знаю здесь очень хороший отель. Очень хороший, — с убеждением повторила она. — И недорого.
Снова я шел по площади. Но теперь все вокруг казалось мне таинственным, волшебным, сказочным, как в детстве на Рождество. Фонари и огни реклам сияли, как свечи на елках, и сердце мое дрожало и падало. Я крепко держал ее за локоть.
Сонный лакей повел нас по узкой лестнице, отпер дверь.
— Вам тут будет хорошо, — сказал он. Меня поразила эта фраза. Откуда он знал, что мне будет хорошо?
Комната была жалкая. Большая кровать, умывальник, лампочка под низким потолком. Она сняла шляпу и пальто. Я смотрел на нее. Я ни о чём не спрашивал. Я был совершенно спокоен. Вся тревога моя прошла. Как будто именно этого я и ждал.
Она тоже молчала.
— Как красиво, — сказала она наконец, показывая на пестрые обои. — Птицы и цветы. Я люблю весну. Но и осень я тоже люблю. Дождь и туман. Потуши свет.
— Зачем?
Она прижалась щекой к моему плечу:
— Потуши, потуши. Я иначе не могу. Мне стыдно раздеваться.
— Разве ты не привыкла?
— Нет-нет. Я люблю тебя. Мне страшно, как будто я твоя невеста. Невеста!
Потом снова свет ярко горел — кто его зажег, я или она? Я видел ее лицо: оно сияло счастьем. Оно было самим счастьем. Это искаженное счастьем лицо, эти прозрачные шалые глаза. Рубашка сползла с плеча, и я увидел продолговатое родимое пятно. Больше ничего не помню. На рассвете я проснулся один.»
On the next morning Alexandrov wakes up alone in the hotel room and, a couple of weeks later, after vain attempts to find the girl, shoots himslef dead in the Bouis de Boulogne. Alexandrov dies on the eve of his thirty-fourth birthday:
Он застрелился накануне своего дня рождения: ему исполнилось бы тридцать четыре года. Отличный возраст для художника, которому улыбалась слава. Кишечник еще не окончательно атрофировался после долгой и жестокой голодовки на прославленном Монпарнасе, и легкие, прокопченные и подгнившие на грязных сырых чердаках, можно еще отмыть и укрепить где-нибудь в Савойе или Пиренеях голубым льдом сияющего горного воздуха.
In VN's story Zanyatoy chelovek ("A Busy Man," 1931) Graf Ytski (the author of fugitive verses in the émigré newspapers) fears that he will die at the age of thirty-three. The characters in VN's story include Ivan Ivanovich Engel (Graf Ytski's odd neighbor).
Alexandrov was the name under which Nadezhda Durov (1783-1866, a hero of the anti-Napoleon wars) concealed her identity. Nadezhda Durov's Zapiski ("Memoirs") appeared in the first issues of Pushkin's Sovremennik ("The Contemporary"). In the draft Pushkin's mock epic Domik v Kolomne ("A Small Cottage in Kolomna," 1830) has a motto Modo vir, modo femina ("Now a man, now a woman"). In the first stanza of his poem Zimnee utro ("The Winter Morning," 1829) Pushkin mentions severnaya Avrora (northern Aurora):
Мороз и солнце; день чудесный!
Еще ты дремлешь, друг прелестный —
Пора, красавица, проснись:
Открой сомкнуты негой взоры
Навстречу северной Авроры,
Звездою севера явись!
Frost and sun – a day of splendor
Yet you, dear friend, to sleep surrender
Awake, my beauty – ope thine eyes
That drowsy bliss is still adorning,
To meet the Northern Dawn of Morning
And as the Northern Star – arise!
G. Ivanov's poem Vzdokhni, vzdokhni eshchyo, chtob dushu vzvolnovat' ("Sigh, sigh again, so as to agitate the soul") ends in the line Struit kholodnaya Avrora (cold Aurora sheds):
Вздохни, вздохни еще, чтоб душу взволновать,
Печаль моя! Мы в сумерках блуждаем
И, обреченные любить и умирать,
Так редко о любви и смерти вспоминаем.
Над нами утренний пустынный небосклон,
Холодный луч дробится по льду...
Печаль моя, ты слышишь слабый стон:
Тристан зовет свою Изольду.
Устанет арфа петь, устанет ветер звать,
И холод овладеет кровью...
Вздохни, вздохни еще, чтоб душу взволновать
Воспоминаньем и любовью.
Я умираю, друг! Моя душа черна,
И черный парус виден в море.
Я умираю, друг! Мне гибель суждена
В разувереньи и позоре.
Нам гибель суждена, и погибаем мы
За губы лживые, за солнце взора,
За этот свет, и лед, и розы, что из тьмы
Струит холодная Аврора...
In October 1917 the cruiser Aurora fired the first shot, signalling the beginning of the attack on the Winter Palace. In his story Aurora (1934) G. Ivanov quotes the heroine's poem in which Aurora (a beauty who marries an American millionaire in Leningrad but then suddenly takes poison and dies on the eve of her departure for New York) says that her sad and banal destiny was specially thought up for the devils' amusement (dlya razvlecheniya chertey):
В 1920 году среди груды бездарных рукописей, которые по «должности» секретаря Союза поэтов я разбирал, мне попалась тетрадка, которая меня заинтересовала. Размер хромал, и рифмы не всегда были в порядке, но «что-то», без сомнения, было в этих стихах. Одна строфа до сих пор сохранилась у меня в памяти:
Моя судьба придумана специально
Для развлечения чертей,
Что может быть банальнее — банальной,
Что может быть печальнее — печальной
Судьбы моей?..
Любопытство мое, естественно, еще возросло, когда я взглянул на подпись под стихами. Там стояла фамилия инженера, над великолепием свадьбы которого три года тому назад соловьем заливался в «Петербургской газете» светский хроникер. Автором странных стихов с не всегда выдержанным размером — была Аврора.
The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. Btw., Aurore Dudevant was the real name of George Sand (the mistress of Chopin and Musset). After his first meeting with Armande Hugh Person quotes the closing lines of Musset's poem À Julie (To Julia) in his diary:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied: "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
In his poem Opyat' belila, sepiya i sazha ("Again whiting, sepia and soot," 1921) G. Ivanov mentions the sunset's peacock fan (pavliniy veyer):
Опять белила, сепия и сажа,
И трубы гениев гремят в упор.
Опять архитектурного пейзажа
Стеснённый раскрывается простор!
Горбатый мост прорезали лебедки,
Павлиний веер распустил закат,
И, лёгкие, как парусные лодки,
Над куполами облака летят,
На плоские ступени отблеск лунный
Отбросил зарево. И, присмирев,
На чёрном цоколе свой шар чугунный
Тяжёлой лапою сжимает лев.
Avrore Shernval' ("To Aurora Stjernvall," 1824) is a poem by Baratynski:
Выдь, дохни нам упоеньем,
Соименница зари;
Всех румяным появленьем
Оживи и озари!
Пылкий юноша не сводит
Взоров с милой и порой
Мыслит с тихою тоской:
"Для кого она выводит
Солнце счастья за собой?"
In VN's story Usta k ustam ("Lips to Lips," 1931), a satire on the editors of the Paris émigré review Chisla (Numbers), Galatov (a recognizable portrait of G. Ivanov) paraphrases Baratynski in a letter to Ilya Borisovich:
Квитанцию он положил в бумажник и приготовился к неделям трепетного ожидания. Однако ответ Галатова пришел с чудесной скоростью,-- на пятый день: "Глубокоуважаемый Илья Григорьевич! Редакция в полном восторге от Вами присланного материала. Редко доводилось нам читать страницы, на которых был бы так явственен отпечаток "человеческой души". Ваш роман волнует своим лица не общим выражением. В нем есть "горечь и нежность". Некоторые описания, как, например, в самом начале описание театра, соперничают с аналогичными образами в произведениях наших классиков и, в известном смысле, одерживают верх. Я говорю это с полным сознанием "ответственности" такого суждения. Ваш роман был бы истинным украшением "Ариона".
With the receipt tucked away in his wallet, Ilya Borisovich braced himself for weeks and weeks of tremulous waiting. Galatov's reply came, however, with miraculous promptness—on the fifth day.
Dear Ilya Grigorievich,
The editors are more than entranced with the material you sent us. Seldom have we had the occasion to peruse pages upon which a "human soul" has been so clearly imprinted. Your novel moves the reader with a face's singular expression, to paraphrase Baratynski, the singer of the Finnish crags. It breathes "bitterness and tenderness." Some of the descriptions, such as for example that of the theater, in the very beginning, compete with analogous images in the works of our classical authors and in a certain sense gain the accendancy. This I say with a full awareness of the "responsibility" attached to such a statement. Your novel would have been a genuine adornment of our review.
In his epigram (1827) on Vasiliy Lvovich Pushkin (Alexander's uncle) Baratynski says that the author of Opasnyi sosed ("The Dangerous Neighbor," 1811) asked the devil to help him to write his poem:
Откуда взял Василий непотешный
Потешного Буянова? Хитрец
К лукавому прибег с мольбою грешной.
«Я твой, сказал: но будь родной отец,
Но помоги». — Плодятся без усилья
Горят, кипят задорные стихи,
И складные страницы у Василья
Являются в тетрадях чепухи.
In Chapter Five of Eugene Onegin Pushkin calls Buyanov (the hero of "The Dangerous Neighbor," one of the guests at Tatiana's nameday party) "my first cousin." In Chapter Three of EO Pushkin pleads for Baratynski's help when he faces the task of translating Tatiana's French letter to Onegin. At the beginning of his last letter to his publisher Mr. R. (the American writer whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland) mentions devils:
Dear Phil,
This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably. (Chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel's last sentence ("Easy, you know, does it, son"), after his death Mr. R. went straight to hell where he is misprinted by devils.
Homard is French for "lobster." In VN's novel Ada (1969) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) tells Van that she always teeters on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst:
She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay and said:
‘You can’t imagine’ — (‘I can imagine anything,’ he insisted) — ‘you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and streams of creams I am compelled to use — in the privacy of my balconies or in desolate sea caves — before I can exhibit myself to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, my beloved painter — I’m reading his diary published by his last duchess, it’s in three mixed languages and lovely, I’ll lend it to you. You see, darling, I’d consider myself a pied cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the same color as those on show.’ (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Obst: Germ., fruit.
On Admiral Tobakoff Van compares Lucette to rising Aurora:
Two half-naked children in shrill glee came running toward the pool. A Negro nurse brandished their diminutive bras in angry pursuit. Out of the water a bald head emerged by spontaneous generation and snorted. The swimming coach appeared from the dressing room. Simultaneously, a tall splendid creature with trim ankles and repulsively fleshy thighs, stalked past the Veens, all but treading on Lucette’s emerald-studded cigarette case. Except for a golden ribbon and a bleached mane, her long, ripply, beige back was bare all the way down to the tops of her slowly and lusciously rolling buttocks, which divulged, in alternate motion, their nether bulges from under the lamé loincloth. Just before disappearing behind a rounded white corner, the Titianesque Titaness half-turned her brown face and greeted Van with a loud ‘hullo!’
Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who’s that stately dame?)
‘I thought she addressed you,’ answered Van, ‘I did not distinguish her face and do not remember that bottom,’
‘She gave you a big jungle smile,’ said Lucette, readjusting her green helmet, with touchingly graceful movements of her raised wings, and touchingly flashing the russet feathering of her armpits.
‘Come with me, hm?’ she suggested, rising from the mat.
He shook his head, looking up at her: ‘You rise,’ he said, ‘like Aurora.’
‘His first compliment,’ observed Lucette with a little cock of her head as if speaking to an invisible confidant. (3.5)
At the beginning of Ada the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin (1875-77) is turned inside out:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
The hero of G. Ivanov's story "The Bride from the Fog," Alexandrov says that Tolstoy is wrong and that every happy life is happy in its own way:
"Новость: я веду дневник. Никогда прежде не чувствовал потребности в этом. Да и что было записывать? Неудачи, бедность, горе... Только неудачи, бедность и горе были моей жизнью. «Все счастливые семьи похожи одна на другую, каждая несчастна посвоему.» Может быть. Не мне спорить с Толстым. Но мне кажется, что с отдельными человеческими жизнями дело обстоит как раз наоборот. Несчастье всегда одинаково: неудачи, бедность, горе. А каждая счастливая жизнь счастлива на свой особенный лад. Этим дневником я открываю свою счастливую жизнь. Моя новая счастливая жизнь. Ей уже около двух недель, но только сегодня утром, выглянув из окна спального вагона на снег и Альпы, я понял, что она началась. Снег. Я смотрел на него новыми глазами, глазами счастливого человека. Он уже не пугал меня холодом, отсутствием угля, жалким летним пальто. Снег значил — лыжи, радостное возбуждение, огромный отель в горах, дорогой спортивный костюм. Счастье— прежде всего — свобода. Свобода — прежде всего—деньги. Денег у меня сейчас много. Даже слишком много — ведь я совсем не умею их тратить.
И свободы тоже слишком много — еще неизвестно, что буду делать с ней. Но жаловаться на это не приходится. Напротив. Было бы, например, очень некстати тащить сейчас за собой в новую счастливую жизнь какую-нибудь набившую оскомину любовницу, тащить только потому, что она жила со мной на одном чердаке и штопала мои драные носки. Хвалю себя, что всегда был Волком-одиночкой, как прозвали меня на Монпарнасе. Если бы такая, оставшаяся от старого женщина у меня была, я бы, конечно, ее бросил вместе с носками и чердаком. Но это подлость, а с подлости новую жизнь нехорошо начинать.»
Montparnasse (where Alexandrov was nicknamed "the lone wolf") brings to mind Guillaume de Monparnasse (the penname of Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess who writes fiction). When Van describes the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Ada mentions poor Mlle L. and Gavronsky (as Ada calls G. A. Vronsky, the movie man who makes a film of Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfatns Maudits):
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
'Gavronsky" hints at khavron'ya (pig) and brings to mind khavryusha (a play on Avryusha, a quaint diminutive of Avrora), a word used by G. Ivanov in his story Aurora:
Повела она меня в гостиную. В розовом шелковом кресле сидит штурман, граммофон слушает, цигарку кeрит, ногти полирует.
Она так застенчиво знакомит. Он руку тянет, не вставая.
— Садитесь,— говорит,— Аврюша нам самовар вздует (подумайте только, это ее, гордую Аврору, Аврюшей называет. Аврюша, почему не хаврюша).
The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In an interview in Strong Opinions (p. 195) VN calls the Russian writer who almost ninety-three years ago occupied the room to which the whore takes Hugh Person "a minor Dostoevski:"
Allow me to quote a passage from my first page which baffled the wise and misled the silly: "When we concentrate on a material object. . . the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object." A number of such instances of falling through the present's "tension film" are given in the course of the book. There is the personal history of a pencil. There is also, in a later chapter, the past of a shabby room, where, instead of focusing on Person and the prostitute, the spectral observer drifts down into the middle of the previous century and sees a Russian traveler, a minor Dostoevski, occupying that room, between Swiss gambling house and Italy.
Btw., "The Lobster-Quadrille" (Omarovaya kadril' in VN's Russian version) is Chapter X of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (known on Demonia as Palace in Wonderland). At the age of ten Hugh Person's wife Armande was the dream of a Lutwidgean:
The albums were quite as candid as the house, though less depressing. The Armande series, which exclusively interested our voyeur malgré lui, was inaugurated by a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot. Not only did the snapshots follow Armande through all the phases of the past and all the improvements of amateur photography, but the girl also came in various states of innocent undress. Her parents and aunts, the insatiable takers of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the same right to total nudity as an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess. (Chapter 12)