When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) asks Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) if Greg Erminin's wife is un peu snob, Lucette replies that everybody is un peu snob:
She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.
‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’
‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’
‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.
‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’
‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’
‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’
‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’
‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’
‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’
‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’ (3.3)
Cordula de Prey's first husband, Ivan Giovannovich Tobak (the ship-owner), is Russian. In G. Ivanov's Raspad atoma ("Disintegration of the Atom," 1938), a kind of poem in prose, the hero says that Russian snobs are the most odious snobs in the world:
Ох, это русское, колеблющееся, зыблющееся, музыкальное, онанирующее сознание. Вечно кружащее вокруг невозможного, как мошкара вокруг свечки. Законы жизни, сросшиеся с законами сна. Жуткая метафизическая свобода и физические преграды на каждом шагу. Неисчерпаемый источник превосходства, слабости, гениальных неудач. Ох, странные разновидности наши, слоняющиеся по сей день неприкаянными тенями по свету: англоманы, толстовцы, снобы русские-- самые гнусные снобы мира,-- и разные русские мальчики, клейкие листочки, и заветный русский тип, рыцарь славного ордена интеллигенции, подлец с болезненно развитым чувством ответственности. Он всегда на страже, он, как ищейка, всюду чует несправедливость, куда угнаться за ним обыкновенному человеку! Ох, наше прошлое и наше будущее, и наша теперешняя покаянная тоска. "А как живо было дитятко..." Ох, эта пропасть ностальгии, по которой гуляет только ветер донося оттуда страшный интернационал и отсюда туда-- жалобное, астральное, точно отпевающее Россию, "Боже, Царя верни"...
Onaniruyushchee soznanie (the masturbating consciousness) and tolstovtsy (the followers of Leo Tolstoy's teaching) mentioned by Ivanov's hero bring to mind Van masturbating in his Tobakoff cabin:
In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord) and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.
Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but necessary act.
He saw the situation dispassionately now and felt he was doing right by going to bed and switching off the ‘ectric’ light (a surrogate creeping back into international use). The blue ghost of the room gradually established itself as his eyes got used to the darkness. He prided himself on his willpower. He welcomed the dull pain in his drained root. He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child. At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone. The thing seemed to squat for each renewed burst of ringing and at first he decided to let it ring itself out. Then his nerves surrendered to the insisting signal, and he snatched up the receiver.
No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:
‘Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?’ asked Lucette.
‘Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),’ answered Van.
A small pause followed; then she hung up. (3.5)
In the Tobakoff cinema hall Van and Lucette watch Don Juan's Last Fling, a film in whch Ada played the gitanilla. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) VN's novel Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg. Lucette compares herself to the heroine of Osberg's novel (a namesake of Dolores Haze), when she says that she is only a picture painted on air. Air is the element that destroys Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific). The element that destroys Lucette (who jumps into the Atlantic from the open deck of Admiral Tobakoff) is water:
She drank a ‘Cossack pony’ of Klass vodka — hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!
She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.
‘Beddydee,’ said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. ‘Bedtime, miss,’ he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.
Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:
‘Mr Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.’
Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.
Although Lucette had never died before — no, dived before, Violet — from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair — t,a,c,l — she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.
Got it.
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the — not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dimanche etc.: Sunday. Lunch on the grass. Everybody stinks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p.375, a painter’s diary Lucette has been reading).
Nox: Lat., at night.
Oceanus Nox and the infinite fractions of solitude remind one of absolyutnaya noch' (the absolute night) and yadro odinochestva (the core of solitude) mentioned by the hero of Disintegration of the Atom at the end of his tale:
Тишина и ночь. Полная тишина, абсолютная ночь. Мысль, что все навсегда кончается, переполняет человека тихим торжеством. Он предчувствует, он наверняка знает, что это не так. Но пока длится эта секунда он не хочет противиться ей. Уже не принадлежа жизни еще не подхваченный пустотой-- он позволяет себя баюкать, как музыке или морскому прибою, смутной певучей лжи.
Уже не принадлежа жизни, еще не подхваченный пустотой... На самой грани. Он раскачивается на паутинке. Вся тяжесть мира висит на нем, но он знает-- пока длится эта секунда, паутинка не оборвется, выдержит все. Он смотрит в одну точку, бесконечно малую точку, но пока эта секунда длится, вся суть жизни сосредоточена там. Точка, атом, миллионы вольт, пролетающие сквозь него и вдребезги, вдребезги плавящие ядро одиночества.
...Спираль была закинута глубоко в вечность. По ней пролетало все: окурки, закаты, бессмертные стихи, обстриженные ногти, грязь из-под этих ногтей. Мировые идеи, кровь, пролитая за них, кровь убийства н совокупления, геморроидальная кровь, кровь из гнойных язв. Черемуха, звезды, невинность, фановые трубы, раковые опухоли, заповеди блаженства, ирония, альпийский снег. Министр, подписавший версальский договор, пролетел, напевая "Германия должна платить",-- на его острых зубах застыла сукровица, в желудке просвечивал крысиный яд. Догоняя шинель, промчался Акакий Акакиевич, с птичьим профилем, в холщовых подштанниках, измазанных семенем онаниста. Все надежды, все судороги, вся жалость, вся безжалостность, вся телесная влага, вся пахучая мякоть, все глухонемое торжество... И тысячи других вещей. Теннис в белой рубашке и купанье в Крыму, снящиеся человеку, которого в Соловках заедают вши. Разновидности вшей: платяные, головные и особенные, подкожные, выводимые одной политанью. Политань, пилюли от ожиренья, шарики против беременности, ледоход на Неве, закат на Лидо и все описания закатов и ледоходов-- в бесполезных книгах литературных классиков. В непрерывном пестром потоке промелькнули синее платье, размолвка, зимний туманный день Спираль была закинута глубоко в вечность. Разбитое вдребезги, расплавленное мировое уродство, сокращаясь, вибрируя, мчалось по ней. Там, на самой грани, у цели, все опять сливалось в одно. Сквозь вращенье трепет и блеск, понемногу проясняясь, проступали черты. Смысл жизни? Бог? Нет, все то же: дорогое, бессердечное, навсегда потерянное твое лицо.
Если бы зверьки могли знать, в каком важном официальном письме я пользуюсь их австралийским языком, они, конечно, были бы очень горды. Я был бы уже давно мертв, а они бы все еще веселились, приплясывали и хлопали в свои маленькие ладошки.
"Ногоуважаемый господин комиссар. Добровольно, в не особенно трезвом уме, но в твердой, очень твердой памяти я кончаю праздновать свои именины. Сам частица мирового уродства,-- я не вижу смысла его обвинять. Я хотел бы прибавить еще, перефразируя слова новобрачного Толстого: "Это было так бессмысленно, что не может кончиться со смертью". С удивительной, неотразимой ясностью я это понимаю сейчас. Но,-- опять переходя на австралийский язык,-- это вашего высокоподбородия не кусается."
Like Lucette, the hero of G. Ivanov's poem in prose commits suicide.
When he meets Cordula in Paris, Van hails her with the stale but appropriate lines: Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, a Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami ("The Veens speak only to Tobaks, but Tobaks speak only to dogs"). In G. Ivanov's poem Bredyot starik na rybnyi rynok ("The old man plods along to a fish market," 1957) lay sobak (the barks of dogs) rhymes with tabak (tobacco):
Бредет старик на рыбный рынок
Купить полфунта судака.
Блестят мимозы от дождинок,
Блестит зеркальная река.
Провинциальные жилища.
Туземный говор. Лай собак.
Все на земле — питье и пища,
Кровать и крыша. И табак.
Даль. Облака. Вот это — ангел,
Другое — словно водолаз,
А третье — совершенный Врангель,
Моноклем округливший глаз.
Но Врангель, это в Петрограде,
Стихи, шампанское, снега…
О, пожалейте, Бога ради:
Склероз в крови, болит нога.
Никто его не пожалеет,
И не за что его жалеть.
Старик скрипучий околеет,
Как всем придется околеть.
Но все-таки… А остальное,
Что мне дано еще, пока —
Сады цветущею весною,
Мистраль, полфунта судака?
The poem's last words, polfunta sudaka (half a pound of zander), bring to mind sudak mentioned by Van at the family dinner in "Ardis the Second:"
'Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing... Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but "court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?’
‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.’
(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)
‘Ah!’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.’ (1.38)
Byron is the author of Don Juan (1819-24), a satirical epic poem that remained unfinished. In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Byron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, o without regret," 1927) G. Ivanov mentions blednyi ogon' (pale fire):
Как в Грецию Байрон, о, без сожаленья,
Сквозь звезды и розы, и тьму,
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья…
— И ты не поможешь ему.
Сквозь звезды, которые снятся влюбленным,
И небо, где нет ничего,
В холодную полночь — платком надушенным.
— И ты не удержишь его.
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья,
Как Байрон за бледным огнем,
Сквозь полночь и розы, о, без сожаленья…
— И ты позабудешь о нем.
Fire is the element that destroys Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions). In Lucette's Tobakoff cabin there is a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up:’
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain! (3.5)
In their old age (even on the last day of their long lives) Van and Ada translate Shade's poem Pale Fire into Russian:
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)