Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) says that he liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph:
Van spent the fall term of 1892 at Kingston University, Mayne, where there was a first-rate madhouse, as well as a famous Department of Terrapy, and where he now went back to one of his old projects, which turned on the Idea of Dimension & Dementia (‘You will "sturb," Van, with an alliteration on your lips,’ jested old Rattner, resident pessimist of genius, for whom life was only a ‘disturbance’ in the rattnerterological order of things — from ‘nertoros,’ not ‘terra’).
Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada] liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit dealing with the divorce between time and the contents of time (such as action on matter, in space, and the nature of space itself) and was contemplating moving to Manhattan (that kind of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication rather than a concession to some farcical ‘influence of environment’ endorsed by Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays), when he received an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment affected violently his entire pulmonary and systemic circulation. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): sturb: pun on Germ. sterben, to die.
In Chapter Eight (XIII: 2) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions okhota k peremene mest (the inclination to a change of places) that took hold of Onegin:
Предметом став суждений шумных,
Несносно (согласитесь в том)
Между людей благоразумных
Прослыть притворным чудаком,
Или печальным сумасбродом,
Иль сатаническим уродом,
Иль даже Демоном моим.
Онегин (вновь займуся им),
Убив на поединке друга,
Дожив без цели, без трудов
До двадцати шести годов,
Томясь в бездействии досуга
Без службы, без жены, без дел,
Ничем заняться не умел.
Им овладело беспокойство,
Охота к перемене мест
(Весьма мучительное свойство,
Немногих добровольный крест).
Оставил он свое селенье,
Лесов и нив уединенье,
Где окровавленная тень
Ему являлась каждый день,
И начал странствия без цели,
Доступный чувству одному;
И путешествия ему,
Как всё на свете, надоели;
Он возвратился и попал,
Как Чацкий, с корабля на бал.
When one becomes the subject
of noisy comments, it's unbearable
(you will agree) to pass among
sensible people for a feigned eccentric
or a sad crackbrain,
or a satanic monster,
or even for my Demon.
Onegin (let me take him up again),
having in single combat killed his friend,
having without a goal, without exertions,
lived to the age of twenty-six,
irked by the inactivity of leisure,
without employment, wife, or occupation,
could think of nothing to take up.
A restlessness took hold of him,
the inclination to a change of places
(a most excruciating property,
a cross that few deliberately bear).
He left his countryseat,
the solitude of woods and fields,
where an ensanguined shade
daily appeared to him,
and started upon travels without aim,
accessible to one sensation;
and to him journeys,
like everything on earth,
grew boring. He returned and found himself,
like Chatski, come from boat to ball.
In Pushkin's novel in verse Onegin kills Lenski in a pistol duel. In his story Duel' ("The Duel," 1891) Chekhov quotes verbatim a line from Pushkin's EO (Eight: XIII: 1): Im ovladelo bespokoystvo (A restlessness took hold of him). On the eve of his duel with von Koren, Laevsky is possessed by a feeling of uneasiness (im ovladelo bespokoystvo):
Но когда зашло солнце и стало темно, им овладело беспокойство. Это был не страх перед смертью, потому что в нем, пока он обедал и играл в карты, сидела почему-то уверенность, что дуэль кончится ничем; это был страх перед чем-то неизвестным, что должно случиться завтра утром первый раз в его жизни, и страх перед наступающею ночью... Он знал, что ночь будет длинная, бессонная и что придется думать не об одном только фон Корене и его ненависти, но и о той горе лжи, которую ему предстояло пройти и обойти которую у него не было сил и уменья. Похоже было на то, как будто он заболел внезапно; он потерял вдруг всякий интерес к картам и людям, засуетился и стал просить, чтобы его отпустили домой. Ему хотелось поскорее лечь в постель, не двигаться и приготовить свои мысли к ночи. Шешковский и почтовый чиновник проводили его и отправились к фон Корену, чтобы поговорить насчет дуэли.
But when the sun had set and it grew dark, he was possessed by a feeling of uneasiness. It was not fear at the thought of death, because while he was dining and playing cards, he had for some reason a confident belief that the duel would end in nothing; it was dread at the thought of something unknown which was to happen next morning for the first time in his life, and dread of the coming night. . . . He knew that the night would be long and sleepless, and that he would have to think not only of von Koren and his hatred, but also of the mountain of lies which he had to get through, and which he had not strength or ability to dispense with. It was as though he had been taken suddenly ill; all at once he lost all interest in the cards and in people, grew restless, and began asking them to let him go home. He was eager to get into bed, to lie without moving, and to prepare his thoughts for the night. Sheshkovsky and the postal superintendent saw him home and went on to von Koren's to arrange about the duel. (Chapter XV)
Chapter XVII of Chekhov's story has an epigraph from Pushkin's poem Vospominanie ("Remembrance," 1828):
...в уме, подавленном тоской,
Теснится тяжких дум избыток;
Воспоминание безмолвно предо мной
Свой длинный развивает свиток.
И с отвращением читая жизнь мою,
Я трепещу и проклинаю,
И горько жалуюсь, и горько слезы лью,
Но строк печальных не смываю.
"Upon my mind, weighed down with woe,
Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds
Her long, long scroll before my eyes.
Loathing and shuddering I curse
And bitterly lament in vain,
And bitter though the tears I weep
I do not wash those lines away.
Old Rattner's words ‘You will "sturb," Van, with an alliteration on your lips’ bring to mind "Ich sterbe" ("I'm dying"), Chekhov's words in Badenweiler (a German spa where Chekhov died in July, 1904). Chekhov's last words were "Davno ya ne pil shampanskogo" ("It's been a long time since I drank champagne”). In his memoir essay Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1911) Amfiteatrov speaks of Chekhov's story Nenuzhnaya pobeda ("The Unnecessary Victory," 1882), in which the action takes place in Hungary, and compares young Chekhov's talent to champagne:
«Однажды в моем присутствии он <А. П. Чехов> держал пари с редактором „Будильника“, А. Д. Курепиным, что напишет повесть, которую все читатели примут за повесть Мавра Иокая, — и выиграл пари, хотя о Венгрии не имел не малейшего представления, никогда в ней не бывал. Его молодой талант играл, как шампанское, тысячами искр».
Nertoros (according to Van, "rattnerterological" comes from ‘nertoros,’ not ‘terra') is the Hungarian word for "nerdy." Van calls old Rattner "resident pessimist of genius." In his memoir essay Amfiteatrov calls Chekhov pessimisticheskiy potomok Ekkleziasta (a pessimistic descendant of Ecclesiastes):
Пессимистический потомок Экклезиаста, он носил его начертание в сердце своем: vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
In his humorous story Temperamenty (“Temperaments,” 1881) Chekhov says that the phrase Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas (translated by Chekhov as “the nonsense of nonsenses and all nonsense”) was invented by a phlegmatic:
Фраза «Vanitas vanitatum et omnie vanitas» (Чепуха чепух и всяческая чепуха) выдумана флегматиком.
In his review of Chekhov’s story Muzhiki (“Peasants,” 1897) V. K. Petersen (N. Ladozhski) compares the author to a vivisector:
Автор здесь как личность вполне и всецело отсутствует, изображая полнейшее спокойствие вивисектора и не показывая ни малейшего признака сострадания или негодования по отношению к точно наблюдаемому им явлению.
When she visits him at Kingston, Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) calls Van “Dr V. V. Sector:”
She unclicked her black-silk handbag, fished out a handkerchief and, leaving the gaping bag on the edge of the sideboard, went to the farthest window and stood there, her fragile shoulders shaking unbearably.
Van noticed a long, blue, violet-sealed envelope protruding from the bag.
‘Lucette, don’t cry. That’s too easy.’
She walked back, dabbing her nose, curbing her childishly humid sniffs, still hoping for the decisive embrace.
‘Here’s some brandy,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Where’s the rest of the family?’
She returned the balled handkerchief of many an old romance to her bag, which, however, remained unclosed. Chows, too, have blue tongues.
‘Mamma dwells in her private Samsara. Dad has had another stroke. Sis is revisiting Ardis.’
‘Sis! Cesse, Lucette! We don’t want any baby serpents around.’
‘This baby serpent does not quite know what tone to take with Dr V.V. Sector. You have not changed one bit, my pale darling, except that you look like a ghost in need of a shave without your summer Glanz.’
And summer Mädel. He noticed that the letter, in its long blue envelope, lay now on the mahogany sideboard. He stood in the middle of the parlor, rubbing his forehead, not daring, not daring, because it was Ada’s notepaper.
‘Like some tea?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t stay long. Besides, you said something about a busy day over the phone. One can’t help being dreadfully busy after four absolutely blank years’ (he would start sobbing too if she did not stop).
‘Yes. I don’t know. I have an appointment around six.’
Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was’ We-have-so-much-to say’; the other was ‘We have absolutely nothing to say.’ But that sort of thing can change in one instant.
‘Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty,’ murmured Van, consulting a calendar he did not see.
‘Rattner on Terra!’ ejaculated Lucette. ‘Van is reading Rattner on Terra. Pet must never, never disturb him and me when we are reading Rattner!’
‘I implore, my dear, no impersonations. Let us not transform a pleasant reunion into mutual torture.’
What was she doing at Queenston? She had told him before. Of course. Tough course? No. Oh. From time to time both kept glancing askance at the letter to see if it was behaving itself — not dangling its legs, not picking its nose.
Return it sealed?
‘Tell Rattner,’ she said, gulping down her third brandy as simply as if it were technicolored water. ‘Tell him’ (the liquor was loosening her pretty viper tongue) —
(Viper? Lucette? My dead dear darling?)
— ‘Tell him that when in the old days you and Ada —’
The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.
‘— left me for him, and then came back, I knew every time that you vsyo sdelali (had appeased your lust, had allayed your fire).’
‘One remembers those little things much too clearly, Lucette. Please, stop.’
‘One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly than the big fatal ones. As for example the clothes you wore at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy’s shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as they always did after you’d been on Terra with Ada, with Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest — oh, they positively stank, you know, your little shorts of lavendered Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!’
Should that letter, now next to the brandy, listen to all this? Was it from Ada after all (there was no address)? Because it was Lucette’s mad, shocking letter of love that was doing the talking. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): cesse: cease.
Glanz: Germ., luster.
Mädel: Germ., girl.
vsyo sdelali: Russ., had done everything.
In his memoir essay Iz zapisnoy knizhki (O Chekhove), "From a Notebook (On Chekhov)," 1914, Amfiteatrov calls a mongoose (one of the two mongooses that Chekhov brought from Ceylon) "zveryok iz porody viper" ("a small animal of the viper family"):
По возвращении Антона Павловича с Сахалина был я у него в Москве на Малой Дмитровке, в доме, кажется, Фирганга. Я уже говорил об этом визите в "Записной книжке" своей. При свидании нашем присутствовал свидетель - живой, но безмолвный и преудивительный: зверек из породы випер - кажется, мангус его название, - которого Антон Павлович вывез из Сингапура. Более красивого и милого домашнего зверя вообразить себе нельзя; шкурка его была в точном смысле слова сизая - отливала по стальному общему фону оттенками радуги. Зверек этот - благодетель индусских хозяйств, ибо неутомимо истребляет змей и всякую иную тропическую гадину. Он и сам-то - какая-то полузмея или мохнатая, теплая ящерица, с странным гибким телом, которое, сужаясь, переходит в хвост, а не хвост к телу привешен, как у большинства зверей. Мускульная энергия мангуса поразительна, за его движениями не успеваешь следить - живая молния! И так как основная черта в характере мангуса - любопытство, то он ни минуты не посидит в покое, и радужная молния сверкает по комнате непрерывно. Я не успел войти в кабинет Антона Павловича, как мангус уже вскочил на меня, побывал рыльцем во всех карманах, уткнулся в ухо, в пуговицы, в сапоги и, успокоившись, улетел на полку с книгами. А уходя от Чехова, я обрел это сокровище нежно спящим в моей шляпе.
Chekhov is the author of Tapyor ("The Ballroom Pianist," 1885). In the conversation with Van at Kingston Lucette mentions Van's pistol duel with Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La Country Club):
‘I want to see you again soon,’ said Van, biting his thumb, brooding, cursing the pause, yearning for the contents of the blue envelope. ‘You must come and stay with me at a flat I now have on Alex Avenue. I have furnished the guest room with bergères and torchères and rocking chairs; it looks like your mother’s boudoir.’
Lucette curtseyed with the wicks of her sad mouth, à l’Américaine.
‘Will you come for a few days? I promise to behave properly. All right?’
‘My notion of propriety may not be the same as yours. And what about Cordula de Prey? She won’t mind?’
‘The apartment is mine,’ said Van, ‘and besides, Cordula is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here’s her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Denmark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.’
‘Who cares for Sustermans,’ observed Lucette, with something of her uterine sister’s knight move of specious response, or a Latin footballer’s rovesciata.
No, it’s an elm. Half a millennium ago.
‘His ancestor,’ Van pattered on, ‘was the famous or fameux Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which, it was so long ago, half a millennium.’
‘I mentioned her only because an old sweetheart is easily annoyed by the wrong conclusions she jumps at like a cat not quite making a fence and then running off without trying again, and stopping to look back.’
‘Who told you about that lewd cordelude — I mean, interlude?’
‘Your father, mon cher — we saw a lot of him in the West. Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name — that you fought your duel with another person — but that was before anybody heard of the other person’s death in Kalugano. Demon said you should have simply cudgeled him.’
‘I could not,’ said Van, ‘the rat was rotting away in a hospital bed.’
‘I meant the real Tapper,’ cried Lucette (who was making a complete mess of her visit), ‘not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his impotence.’
‘Driblets,’ said Van.
‘Not necessarily his,’ said Lucette. ‘His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book’ (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) ‘and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you — Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ said Van.
Pause (about fifteen minutes to go to the end of the act). (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): making follies: Fr. ‘faire des folies’, living it up.
komondi: Russian French: ‘comme on dit’, as they say.
In the Kalugano hospital (where he recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge) Van visits Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie (and who dies in Ward Five where hopeless cases are kept). In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov calls Chekhov, the author Ward Six (1892), pevets beznadezhnosti (a poet of hopelessness):
Чтобы в двух словах определить его тенденцию, я скажу: Чехов был певцом безнадежности. Упорно, уныло, однообразно в течение всей своей почти 25-летней литературной деятельности Чехов только одно и делал: теми или иными способами убивал человеческие надежды. В этом, на мой взгляд, сущность его творчества.
To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Chekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Chekhov was doing one alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his work. (I)
In his essay Shestov points out that the doctor in Chekhov’s story Ward Six dies beautifully: before his death he sees a herd of deer, etc.:
И, кажется, “Палату № 6” в своё время очень сочувственно приняли. Кстати прибавим, что доктор умирает очень красиво: в последние минуты видит стадо оленей и т. п.
Chekhov had openly repented and renounced the theory of non-resistance; and, I believe, Ward No. 6 met with a sympathetic reception at the time. In passing I would say that the doctor dies very beautifully: in his last moments he sees a herd of deer... (VI)
At the end of Ada (1969) Van mentions a doe at gaze in the ancestral park:
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
Van and Ada die immediately after completing their family chronicle. Old Rattner was right when he said that Van would die with an alliteration on his lips.
Btw., at the beginning of his humorous story I prekrasnoe dolzhno imet' predely ("The Beautiful, Too, Should Have Limits," 1884) Chekhov (the author of My Life, 1895) mentions poryadok veshchey (the order of things):
В записной книжке одного мыслящего коллежского регистратора, умершего в прошлом году от испуга, было найдено следующее:
Порядок вещей требует, чтобы не только злое, но даже и прекрасное имело пределы. Поясню примерами...
"The order of things requires that not only the evil, but even the beautiful has limits. I'll explain this by examples" (from the notebook of a thinking clerk who died last year from a fright).