Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill:
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
Richard Leonard Churchill blends Winston Churchill with Richard the Lionheart. In his poem Upal krestonosets sred' kopiy i dyma ("The crusader fell amidst the spears and the smoke") G. Ivanov mentions l'vinoe serdtse (the lionheart) that trembles as if it were a sheep's heart:
Упал крестоносец средь копий и дыма,
Упал, не увидев Иерусалима.
У сердца прижата стальная перчатка,
И на ухо шепчет ему лихорадка:
– Зароют, зароют в глубокую яму,
Забудешь, забудешь Прекрасную Даму,
Глаза голубые, жемчужные плечи...
И львиное сердце дрожит как овечье.
А шепот слышнее: – Ответь на вопросец:
Не ты ли о славе мечтал, крестоносец,
О подвиге бранном, о битве кровавой?
Так вот, умирай же, увенчанный славой!
At Chose (Demon's and Van's English University) Van plays poker with Dick C., a cardsharp:
In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel).
Sometime during the winter of 1886-7, at dismally cold Chose, in the course of a poker game with two Frenchmen and a fellow student whom we shall call Dick, in the latter’s smartly furnished rooms in Serenity Court, he noticed that the French twins were losing not only because they were happily and hopelessly tight, but also because milord was that ‘crystal cretin’ of Plunkett’s vocabulary, a man of many mirrors — small reflecting surfaces variously angled and shaped, glinting discreetly on watch or signet ring, dissimulated like female fireflies in the undergrowth, on table legs, inside cuff or lapel, and on the edges of ashtrays, whose position on adjacent supports Dick kept shifting with a negligent air — all of which, as any card sharper might tell you, was as dumb as it was redundant. (1.28)
Dick is a form of Richard. In his epigram (1931) on G. Ivanov VN mentions sem’ya zhurnal’nykh shulerov (a family of the literary cardsharps):
— Такого нет мошенника второго
Во всей семье журнальных шулеров!
— Кого ты так? — Иванова, Петрова,
Не всё ль равно? — Позволь, а кто ж Петров?
“You could not find in all of Grub Street
a rogue to match him vile enough!”
“Whom do you mean – Petrov, Ivanov?
No matter… Wait, though – who’s Petrov?”
(transl. by Vera Nabokov and DN)
In his poem "On Stalin's Death" (1953) G. Ivanov calls Stalin "velikiy iz velikikh" ("the greatest of the great"):
…И вот лежит на пышном пьедестале,
Меж красных звёзд, в сияющем гробу,
“Великий из великих” — Оська Сталин,
Всех цезарей превозойдя судьбу.
А перед ним в почётном карауле
Стоят народа меньшие “отцы”,
Те, что страну в бараний рог согнули, —
Ещё вожди, но тоже мертвецы.
Какие отвратительные рожи,
Кривые рты, нескладные тела:
Вот Молотов. Вот Берия, похожий
На вурдалака, ждущего кола…
В безмолвии у сталинского праха
Они дрожат. Они дрожат от страха,
Угрюмо пряча некрещёный лоб, —
И перед ними высится, как плаха,
Проклятого “вождя” — проклятый гроб.
G. Ivanov translated into Russian S. T. Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). The Good, Great Man is a poem (that Pushkin began to translate) by Coleridge:
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains."
REPLY TO THE ABOVE
For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? three treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,
And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!
A certain Crimean Khan about whom Richard Leonard Churchill wrote a novel brings to mind Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan.