Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions old Rattner, resident pessimist of genius:
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.
At the beginning of his poem Die Wanderratten ("The Wandering Rats," 1855) Heinrich Heine says that there are two kinds of rat (zwei Sorten Ratten):
Es gibt zwei Sorten Ratten:
Die hungrigen und satten.
Die satten bleiben vergnügt zu Haus,
Die hungrigen aber wandern aus.
There are two kinds of rat:
The hungry and the fat.
The fat ones stay content at home,
The hungry ones though, they hungrily roam.
In his conversation with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) at Kingston Van calls Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher and composer of genius who dies in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital) "the rat:"
‘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. (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 June, 1901, Lucette commits suicide by jumping into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff. On the Tobakoff Lucette compares herself to the Pied Piper (der Rattenfänger von Hameln, the Rat-Catcher of Hamelin) in Robert Browning's poem:
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.’
‘You looked to me kind of sandy allover when you were inspected in 1892,’ said Van.
‘I’m a brand-new girl now,’ she whispered. ‘A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at least till my next flow. I sent you a silly note to Kingston, just in case you didn’t turn up.’ (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Obst: Germ., fruit.
On the eve of Lucette's death she and Van watch Don Juan's Last Fling (a film in which Ada played the gitanilla) in the Tobakoff cinema hall. In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski goes mad after the suicide of his son Yasha. In his deathbed delirium Alexander Yakovlevich mentions Eine alte Geschichte ("An Old Story"), a film that he and his wife went to see the day before Yasha's death:
...Ничего в общем в жизни и не было, кроме подготовки к экзамену, к которому всё равно подготовиться нельзя. "Ужу, уму - равно ужасно умирать".
Неужели все мои знакомые это проделают? Невероятно! Eine alte Geschichte: название фильма, который мы с Сашей смотрели накануне его смерти.
…In general, there has been nothing in life except getting ready for an examination—which all the same nobody can get ready for. “Dreadful is death to man and mite alike.” Will all my friends go through it? Incredible! Eine alte Geschichte: the name of a film Sandra and I went to see the day before his death. (Chapter Five)
The movie’s name was borrowed from Heinrich Heine’s poem Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen (“A Boy loves a Girl”):
Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen Andern erwählt;
Der Andre liebt eine Andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.
Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.
Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.
A boy loves a girl
Who chooses another;
He in turn loves another
And marries her.
The girl, out of pique,
Takes the very first man
To come her way;
The boy is badly hurt.
It is an old story,
Yet remains ever new;
And he to whom it happens,
It breaks his heart in two.
(tr. R. Stokes)
Describing Alexander Yakovlevich's death, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character in "The Gift") says that life as a kind of journey is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home:
Когда однажды французского мыслителя Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почему он не обнажает головы (ne se découvre pas), он отвечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая (qu'elle se découvre la première). В этом есть метафизическая негалантность, но смерть большего не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, благоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым восходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и склоненная боязнь к нему обращает молитву. Религия имеет такое же отношение к загробному состоянию человека, какое имеет математика к его состоянию земному: то и другое только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я знаю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связана с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестности, какой является дерево или холм. Выйти как-нибудь нужно, "но я отказываюсь видеть в двери больше, чем дыру да то, что сделали столяр и плотник" (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная мысль, с которой давно свыкся чело веческий разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть глупая иллюзия: мы никуда не идем, мы сидим дома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовсе не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия. В земном доме, вместо окна - зеркало; дверь до поры до времени затворена; но воздух входит сквозь щели. "Наиболее доступный для наших домоседных чувств образ будущего постижения окрестности долженствующей раскрыться нам по распаде тела, это - освобождение духа из глазниц плоти и превращение наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зараз видящее все стороны света, или, иначе говоря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира при нашем внутреннем участии" (там же, стр. 64). Но все это только символы, символы, которые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгновение, как она приглядится к ним...
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)
Old Rattner is a pessimist of genius. The characters in VN's story Podlets ("An Affair of Honor," 1927) include Leontiev, a pessimist:
- Здравствуйте, Антон Петрович,- раздался мягкий голос над самым его ухом.
Он так вздрогнул, что нога соскользнула с подставки. Нет, ничего, ложная тревога. Это был некий Леонтьев, человек, которого он встречал раза три-четыре, журналист, кажется, или что-то вроде этого. Болтливый, но безобидный человек. Говорят, что ему жена изменяет с кем попало. - Гуляете? - спросил Леонтьев, меланхолично пожимая ему руку.
- Да. Нет, у меня всякие дела,- ответил Антон Петрович и подумал: если он сейчас не поклонится и не уйдет, это будет безобразно.
Леонтьев посмотрел в одну сторону, потом в другую и сказал, просияв, словно сделал счастливое открытие: - Прекрасная погода!
Вообще же он был пессимист и, как всякий пессимист, человек до смешного не наблюдательный. Лицо у него было плохо выбритое, желтоватое, длинное, и весь он был какой-то неладный, тощий и унылый, словно у природы ныли зубы, когда она создавала его.
“Dobryy den’ [Good day], Anton Petrovich,” came a gentle voice right above his ear.
He gave such a start that his foot slipped off the stand. No, it was all right—false alarm. The voice belonged to a certain Leontiev, a man he had met three or four times, a journalist or something of the sort. A talkative but harmless fellow. They said his wife deceived him right and left.
“Out for a stroll?” asked Leontiev, giving him a melancholy handshake.
“Yes. No, I have various things to do,” replied Anton Petrovich, thinking at the same time, “I hope he proceeds on his way, otherwise it will be quite dreadful.”
Leontiev looked around, and said, as if he had made a happy discovery, “Splendid weather!”
Actually he was a pessimist and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man. His face was ill-shaven, yellowish and long, and all of him looked clumsy, emaciated, and lugubrious, as if nature had suffered from toothache when creating him. (Chapter II)
Like all pessimists, Leontiev is a ridiculously unobservant man. In Chapter Five of "The Gift" Fyodor describes his meeting with Shirin, a ridiculously unobservant novelist:
Федор Константинович собрался было во-свояси, когда его сзади окликнул шепелявый голос: он принадлежал Ширину, автору романа "Седина" (с эпиграфом из книги Иова), очень сочувственно встреченного эмигрантской критикой. ("Господи, отче - --? По Бродваю, в лихорадочном шорохе долларов, гетеры и дельцы в гетрах, дерясь, падая, задыхаясь, бежали за золотым тельцом, который, шуршащими боками протискиваясь между небоскребами, обращал к электрическому небу изможденный лик свой и выл. В Париже, в низкопробном притоне, старик Лашез, бывший пионер авиации, а ныне дряхлый бродяга, топтал сапогами старуху-проститутку Буль-де-Сюиф. Господи отчего - --? Из московского подвала вышел палач и, присев у конуры, стал тюлюкать мохнатого щенка: Махонький, приговаривал он, махонький... В Лондоне лорды и лэди танцевали джими и распивали коктайль, изредка посматривая на эстраду, где на исходе восемнадцатого ринга огромный негр кнок-оутом уложил на ковер своего белокурого противника. В арктических снегах, на пустом ящике из-под мыла, сидел путешественник Эриксен и мрачно думал: Полюс или не полюс?.. Иван Червяков бережно обстригал бахрому единственных брюк. Господи, отчего Вы дозволяете все это?"). Сам Ширин был плотный, коренастый человек, с рыжеватым бобриком, всегда плохо выбритый, в больших очках, за которыми, как в двух аквариумах, плавали два маленьких, прозрачных глаза, совершенно равнодушных к зрительным впечатлениям. Он был слеп как Мильтон, глух как Бетховен, и глуп как бетон. Святая ненаблюдательность (а отсюда - полная неосведомленность об окружающем мире - и полная неспособность что-либо именовать) - свойство, почему-то довольно часто встречающееся у русского литератора-середняка, словно тут действует некий благотворный рок, отказывающий безталанному в благодати чувственного познания, дабы он зря не изгадил материала. Бывает, конечно, что в таком темном человеке играет какой-то собственный фонарик, - не говоря о том, что известны случаи, когда по прихоти находчивой природы, любящей неожиданные приспособления и подмены, такой внутренний свет поразительно ярок - на зависть любому краснощекому таланту. Но даже Достоевский всегда как-то напоминает комнату, в которой днем горит лампа.
Сейчас, идя вместе с Шириным через парк, Федор Константинович безкорыстно наслаждался смешной мыслью, что его спутник - глухой слепец с заткнутыми ноздрями, но к этому состоянию относится совершенно равнодушно, хотя иногда не прочь наивно вздохнуть о разобщенности интеллигента с природой: недавно Лишневский рассказывал, что Ширин назначил ему деловое свидание в Зоологическом саду и, когда, после часового разговора, Лишневский случайно обратил его внимание на клетку с гиеной, обнаружилось, что тот едва ли сознавал, что в Зоологическом саду бывают звери, а вскользь посмотрев на клетку машинально заметил: "Плохо, плохо наш брат знает мир животных", - и сразу продолжал обсуждать то, что его особенно в жизни волновало: деятельность и состав Правления Общества Русских Литераторов в Германии. И теперь он находился в крайней степени этого волнения, так как "назревало некоторое событие".
Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete unin-formedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day.
As he walked now across the park with Shirin, Fyodor derived disinterested pleasure from the amusing thought that he had for companion a deaf and blind man with blocked nostrils who regarded this state with complete indifference, although he was not averse at times to sighing naively about the intellectual’s alienation from nature: recently Lishnevski had related that Shirin had arranged to meet him about some business in the Zoological Garden and when after an hour’s conversation Lishnevski had casually drawn his attention to a hyena in its cage, it transpired that Shirin had hardly realized that one keeps animals in a zoological garden, and glancing briefly at the cage had remarked automatically: “Yes, the likes of us don’t know much about the animal world,” and immediately continued discussing that which particularly disturbed him in life: the activities and composition of the Committee of the Society of Russian Writers in Germany. And now he was in an extreme degree of agitation since “a certain event had come to a head.”
In a conversation with Fyodor Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's step-father, Fyodor's landlord) mentions a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал... Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, - но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, - знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, - знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, - и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать - соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем - просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, - и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" - и Борис Иванович, обрати в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (Chapter Three)
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert falls in love with a little girl and marries her widowed mother. The characters in Lolita include Mrs. Pratt, the headmistress of the Beardsley School for girls. Old Rattner seems to blend Mrs. Pratt with Plattner, the hero of H. G. Wells' The Plattner Story (1896). The story is an early example of science fiction in which a parallel world is described. The protagonist reaches this world by moving through the fourth dimension, a concept described in 1880 by Charles Howard Hinton, a mathematician and writer of science fiction, in his essay "What is the Fourth Dimension?".
The poet Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940) is sometimes called "the British Heine." Humbert Wolfe died on his fifty-fifth birthday (January 5, 1940). January 5 is also Vera Nabokov's birthday. When VN first met her in 1923 at a Berlin ball, Vera Slonim wore a wolf mask. In Ada Demon's affair with Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868:
Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Kingston (Van's American University) and Queenston (Lucette's nearby College for girls) seem to hint at the King and the Queen in Heinrich Heine's poem Es war ein alter König ("There was an old King):
Es war ein alter König,
Sein Herz war schwer, sein Haupt war grau;
Der arme alte König,
Er nahm eine junge Frau.
Es war ein schöner Page,
Blond war sein Haupt, leicht war sein Sinn;
Er trug die seidne Schleppe
Der jungen Königin.
Kennst du das alte Liedchen?
Es klingt so süß, es klingt so trüb!
Sie mußten beyde sterben,
Sie hatten sich viel zu lieb.
There was a king, now ageing,
With heart of lead, and head so grey.
He took a wife, the old king,
A young wife too, men say.
There was a handsome pageboy
With hair of gold, and thoughts so free:
He bore the silks with joy
That trailed behind the queen.
Do you know the ancient singing?
It rings so true: it rings so sweet!
Both had to die, of loving,
Of love that was too deep.
On the other hand, Kingston and Queenston make one think of Claudius (the King of Denmark) and Gertrude (the Queen of Denmark) in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Killing Polonius (Ophelia's father whom Hamlet mistakes for the King), Hamlet calls him "a rat:"
"How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!" (3.4)
Durring her visit to Kingston Lucette is punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans (as Van puts it). Describing Lucette's suicide in his letter to Ada, Van compares his and Ada's half-sister to Ophelia:
As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not hove drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand. Impersonally I believe she would have died in her bed, gray and serene, had V. loved her; but since he did not really love the wretched little virgin, and since no amount of carnal tenderness could or can pass for true love, and since, above all, the fatal Andalusian wench who had come, I repeat, into the picture, was unforgettable, I am bound to arrive, dear Ada and dear Andrey, at the conclusion that whatever the miserable man could have thought up, she would have pokonchila soboy (‘put an end to herself’) all the same. In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed. (3.6)
Voltemand is Van's penname (after a courtier in Hamlet) under which he published his novel Letters from Terra (2.2). Describing his novel, Van mentions all kinds of 'Star Rats:'
Ada’s letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van’s Letters from Terra, ‘a philosophical novel,’ showed no sign of life whatsoever.
(I disagree, it’s a nice, nice little book! Ada’s note.)
He had written it involuntarily, so to speak, not caring a dry fig for literary fame. Neither did pseudonymity tickle him in reverse — as it did when he danced on his hands. Though ‘Van Veen’s vanity’ often cropped up in the drawing-room prattle among fan-wafting ladies, this time his long blue pride feathers remained folded. What, then, moved him to contrive a romance around a subject that had been worried to extinction in all kinds of ‘Star Rats,’ and ‘Space Aces’? We — whoever ‘we’ are — might define the compulsion as a pleasurable urge to express through verbal imagery a compendium of certain inexplicably correlated vagaries observed by him in mental patients, on and off, since his first year at Chose. Van had a passion for the insane as some have for arachnids or orchids. (2.2)
In "Ardis the Second" Van is reading Rattner's book on Terra (Demonia's twin planet):
It was raining. The lawns looked greener, and the reservoir grayer, in the dull prospect before the library bay window. Clad in a black training suit, with two yellow cushions propped under his head, Van lay reading Rattner on Terra, a difficult and depressing work. Every now and then he glanced at the autumnally tocking tall clock above the bald pate of tan Tartary as represented on a large old globe in the fading light of an afternoon that would have suited early October better than July. Ada, wearing an unfashionable belted macintosh that he disliked, with her handbag on a strap over one shoulder, had gone to Kaluga for the whole day — officially to try on some clothes, unofficially to consult Dr Krolik’s cousin, the gynecologist Seitz (or ‘Zayats,’ as she transliterated him mentally since it also belonged, as Dr ‘Rabbit’ did, to the leporine group in Russian pronunciation). Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired the sheath-like contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barber-shops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell. Still he felt anxious — and was cross with his anxiety — and Rattner, who halfheartedly denied any objective existence to the sibling planet in his text, but grudgingly accepted it in obscure notes (inconveniently placed between chapters), seemed as dull as the rain that could be discerned slanting in parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation, borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park. (1.37)
In the conversation with Van at Kingston Lucette mentions Rattner and his book:
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.