At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" Ada tells Pedro (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, a young Latin actor whom Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina had brought from Mexico) "On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien" ("one does not speak like that in front of a dog"):
The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G.A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.
Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.
If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.
Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocation of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.
He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did.
Now, at fifteen, she was an irritating and hopeless beauty; a rather unkempt one, too; only twelve hours ago, in the dim toolroom he had whispered a riddle in her ear: what begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant? She was eccentric in habits and clothing. She cared nothing for sunbathing, and not a tinge of the tan that had californized Lucette could be traced on the shameless white of Ada’s long limbs and scrawny shoulder blades.
A remote cousin, no longer René’s sister, not even his half-sister (so lyrically anathematized by Monparnasse), she stepped over him as over a log and returned the embarrassed dog to Marina. The actor, who quite likely would run into some body’s fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.
‘Du sollst nicht zuhören,’ murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the ‘accursed children.’ ‘On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien,’ added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap. (1.32)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Les Enfants Maudits: the accursed children.
du sollst etc.: Germ., you must not listen.
on ne parle pas etc.: one does not speak like that in front of a dog.
In Chekhov's story V rodnom uglu ("At Home," 1897) Aunt Dasha asks Vera not to talk to a servant, "Il ne faut pas parler aux gens:"
В саду пахло горячими вишнями. Уже зашло солнце, жаровню унесли, но все еще в воздухе держался этот приятный, сладковатый запах. Вера сидела на скамье и смотрела, как новый работник, молодой прохожий солдат, делал, по ее приказанию, дорожки. Он резал лопатой дерн и бросал его в тачку.
— Ты где был на службе? — спросила у него Вера.
— В Бердянске.
— А куда идешь теперь? Домой?
— Никак нет, — ответил работник. — У меня нет дома.
— Но ты где родился и вырос?
— В Орловской губернии. До службы я жил у матери, в доме вотчима; мать — хозяйка, ее уважали, и я при ней кормился. А на службе получил письмо: померла мать... Идти мне теперь домой как будто уж и неохота. Не родной отец, стало быть, и дом чужой.
— А твой родной отец умер?
— Не могу знать. Я незаконнорожденный.
В это время в окне показалась тетя и сказала:
— Иль не фо па парле о жанс... Иди, любезный, в кухню, — обратилась она к солдату. — Там расскажешь.
The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal stove had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her express orders, making new paths. He was cutting the turf with a spade and heaping it up on a barrow.
"Where were you serving?" Vera asked him.
"At Berdyansk."
"And where are you going now? Home?"
"No," answered the labourer. "I have no home."
"But where were you born and brought up?"
"In the province of Oryol. Till I went into the army I lived with my mother, in my step-father's house; my mother was the head of the house, and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared for. But while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. . . . And now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not my own father, so it's not like my own home."
"Then your father is dead?"
"I don't know. I am illegitimate."
At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said:
"Il ne faut pas parler aux gens. . . . Go into the kitchen, my good man. You can tell your story there," she said to the soldier. (Chapter III)
Aunt Dasha (who speaks French with a Russian accent) sounds the final 's' in gens. Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Marina tells Demon (Van's and Ada's father): ‘Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,' sounding the final ‘s’ in gens:
Puffing rhythmically, Jones set one of his beautiful dragon-entwined flambeaux on the low-boy with the gleaming drinks and was about to bring over its fellow to the spot where Demon and Marina were winding up affable preliminaries but was quickly motioned by Marina to a pedestal near the striped fish. Puffing, he drew the curtains, for nothing but picturesque ruins remained of the day. Jones was new, very efficient, solemn and slow, and one had to get used gradually to his ways and wheeze. Years later he rendered me a service that I will never forget.
‘She’s a jeune fille fatale, a pale, heart-breaking beauty,’ Demon confided to his former mistress without bothering to discover whether the subject of his praise could hear him (she did) from the other end of the room where she was helping Van to corner the dog — and showing much too much leg in the process. Our old friend, being quite as excited as the rest of the reunited family, had scampered in after Marina with an old miniver-furred slipper in his merry mouth. The slipper belonged to Blanche, who had been told to whisk Dack to her room but, as usual, had not incarcerated him properly. Both children experienced a chill of déjà-vu (a twofold déjà-vu, in fact, when contemplated in artistic retrospect).
‘Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,’ said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final ‘s’ as her granddams had done); and when the slow fish-mouthed footman had gone carrying away, supine, high-chested Dack and his poor plaything, she continued: ‘Really, in comparison to the local girls, to Grace Erminin, for example, or Cordula de Prey, Ada is a Turgenevian maiden or even a Jane Austen miss.’
‘I’m Fanny Price, actually,’ commented Ada.
‘In the staircase scene,’ added Van.
‘Let’s not bother about their private jokes,’ said Marina to Demon. ‘I never can understand their games and little secrets. Mlle Larivière, however, has written a wonderful screenplay about mysterious children doing strange things in old parks — but don’t let her start talking of her literary successes tonight, that would be fatal.’
‘I hope your husband won’t be too late,’ said Demon. ‘He is not at his best after eight p.m., summertime, you know. By the way, how’s Lucette?’
At this moment both battants of the door were flung open by Bouteillan in the grand manner, and Demon offered kalachikom (in the form of a Russian crescent loaf) his arm to Marina. Van, who in his father’s presence was prone to lapse into a rather dismal sort of playfulness, proposed taking Ada in, but she slapped his wrist away with a sisterly sans-gêne, of which Fanny Price might not have approved. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): devant les gens: in front of the servants.
Fanny Price: the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Vera's aunt Dasha in Chekhov's story "At Home" has a lot in common with Dasha Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law). Van's conversation with the Vinelanders at the dinner in Bellevue Hotel in Mont Roux is a parody of Chekhov's mannerisms:
During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three), he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called ‘the face’ — a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count). Ada on the other hand could not help her dark eyes from turning to him every other moment, as if, with each glance, she regained her balance; but when the company went back to the lounge and finished their coffee there, difficulties of focalization began to beset Van, whose points de repère disastrously decreased after the three cinematists had left.
ANDREY: Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopïtno (it cannot fail to interest him).
ADA (as if coming out of a trance): O chyom tï (you were saying something)?
ANDREY: Ya govoryu, razskazhi emu pro tvoyo zhit’yo bït’yo (I was saying, tell him about your daily life, your habitual existence). Avos’ zaglyanet k nam (maybe he’d look us up).
ADA: Ostav’, chto tam interesnago (what’s so interesting about it)?
DASHA (turning to Ivan): Don’t listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men’she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). Nashi sel’skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows) — eto tselaya kollektsiya predmetov modernoy skul’pturï i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do.
IVAN (to Andrey): I know nothing about farming but thanks all the same.
(A pause.)
IVAN (not quite knowing what to add): Yes, I would certainly like to see your machinery some day. Those things always remind me of long-necked prehistoric monsters, sort of grazing here and there, you know, or just brooding over the sorrows of extinction — but perhaps I’m thinking of excavators —
DOROTHY: Andrey’s machinery is anything but prehistoric! (laughs cheerlessly).
ANDREY: Slovom, milosti prosim (anyway, you are most welcome). Budete zharit’ verhom s kuzinoy (you’ll have a rollicking time riding on horseback with your cousin).
(Pause.)
IVAN (to Ada): Half-past nine tomorrow morning won’t be too early for you? I’m at the Trois Cygnes. I’ll come to fetch you in my tiny car — not on horseback (smiles like a corpse at Andrey).
DASHA: Dovol’no skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada’s visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I’m sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva. (3.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): (a pause): This and the whole conversation parody Chekhov’s mannerisms.
Ada's husband, Andrey Andreevich Vinelander is a namesake of Andrey Andreich, Nadya Shumin's fiancé in Chekhov's story Nevesta ("The Betrothed," 1903). Ugol being Russian for "corner," Chekhov's story V rodnom uglu (which literally means "in the native corner") brings to mind Henry James' story In the Jolly Corner (1908). One of the three blind characters in Ada, Spencer Muldoon, seems to blend Spencer Brydon (the main character in The Jolly Corner) with Mrs. Muldoon, Spencer Brydon's old housekeeper. A footman in "Ardis the Second" who later becomes a policeman at Ladore, Jones helps Van to blind Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis who spies on Van and Ada and attempts to blackmail Ada). A French handmaid at Ardis, Blanche marries Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in "Ardis the Second") and they have a blind child (2.7). On his first night in "Ardis the Second" (just before the patio party) Van promises to Ada that they will live quietly, she as his housekeeper, he as her epileptic:
‘Chto, vïspalsya, Vahn (well, slept your fill, Van)? said Ada, beautifully mimicking her mother’s voice, and she continued in her mother’s English: ‘By your appetite, I judge. And, I think, it is only the first brekfest.’
‘Okh,’ grumbled Van, ‘my kneecaps! That bench was cruel. And I am hongry.’
They sat, facing each other, at a breakfast table, munching black bread with fresh butter, and Virginia ham, and slices of genuine Emmenthaler cheese — and here’s a pot of transparent honey: two cheerful cousins, ‘raiding the icebox’ as children in old fairy tales, and the thrushes were sweetly whistling in the bright-green garden as the dark-green shadows drew in their claws.
‘My teacher,’ she said, ‘at the Drama School thinks I’m better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!’
‘There is nothing to know,’ retorted Van. ‘Nothing, nothing has changed! But that’s the general impression, it was too dim down there for details, we’ll examine them tomorrow on our little island: "My sister, do you still recall..."’
‘Oh shut up!’ said Ada. ‘I’ve given up all that stuff — petits vers, vers de soie...’
‘Come, come,’ cried Van, ‘some of the rhymes were magnificent arcrobatics on the part of the child’s mind: "Oh! qui me rendra, ma Lucile, et le grand chêne and zee big hill." Little Lucile,’ he added in an effort to dissipate her frowns with a joke, ‘little Lucile has become so peachy that I think I’ll switch over to her if you keep losing your temper like that. I remember the first time you got cross with me was when I chucked a stone at a statue and frightened a finch. That’s memory!’
She was on bad terms with memory. She thought the servants would be up soon now, and then one could have something hot. That fridge was all fudge, really.
‘Why, suddenly sad?’
Yes, she was sad, she replied, she was in dreadful trouble, her quandary might drive her insane if she did not know that her heart was pure. She could explain it best by a parable. She was like the girl in a film he would see soon, who is in the triple throes of a tragedy which she must conceal lest she lose her only true love, the head of the arrow, the point of the pain. In secret, she is simultaneously struggling with three torments — trying to get rid of a dreary dragging affair with a married man, whom she pities; trying to nip in the bud — in the sticky red bud — a crazy adventure with an attractive young fool, whom she pities even more; and trying to keep intact the love of the only man who is all her life and who is above pity, above the poverty of her feminine pity, because as the script says, his ego is richer and prouder than anything those two poor worms could imagine.
What had she actually done with the poor worms, after Krolik’s untimely end?
‘Oh, set them free’ (big vague gesture), ‘turned them out, put them back onto suitable plants, buried them in the pupal state, told them to run along, while the birds were not looking — or alas, feigning not to be looking.
‘Well, to mop up that parable, because you have the knack of interrupting and diverting my thoughts, I’m in a sense also torn between three private tortures, the main torture being ambition, of course. I know I shall never be a biologist, my passion for creeping creatures is great, but not all-consuming. I know I shall always adore orchids and mushrooms and violets, and you will still see me going out alone, to wander alone in the woods and return alone with a little lone lily; but flowers, no matter how irresistible, must be given up, too, as soon as I have the strength. Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs — probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters, teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.’
‘Well, that bit about spinsters is rot,’ said Van, ‘we’ll pull it off somehow, we’ll become more and more distant relations in artistically forged papers and finally dwindle to mere namesakes, or at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, "we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds."’
‘Did you find them all, Uncle Van?’ she inquired, sighing, laying her dolent head on his shoulder. She had told him everything.
‘More or less,’ he replied, not realizing she had. ‘Anyway, I made the best study of the dustiest floor ever accomplished by a romantic character. One bright little bugger rolled under the bed where there grows a virgin forest of fluff and fungi. I’ll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days. I have lots of things to buy — a gorgeous bathrobe in honor of your new swimming pool, a cream called Chrysanthemum, a brace of dueling pistols, a folding beach mattress, preferably black — to bring you out not on the beach but on that bench, and on our isle de Ladore.’
‘Except,’ she said, ‘that I do not approve of your making a laughingstock of yourself by looking for pistols in souvenir shops, especially when Ardis Hall is full of old shotguns and rifles, and revolvers, and bows and arrows — you remember, we had lots of practice with them when you and I were children.’ (1.31)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Uncle Van: allusion to a line in Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya: We shall see the sky swarming with diamonds.
petits vers etc.: fugitive poetry and silk worms.
Btw., in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN points out that the grandparents of the Nabokovs' dachshund Box II that followed its masters into exile were Dr Anton Chekhov's Quina and Brom.
Chekhov's story V rodnom uglu and Henry James' story The Jolly Corner bring to mind Van's quip "corners are never round:"
In a dark mood, unwarned of what to expect (strategic foreknowledge might have helped to face the ordeal), Van waited for Ada in the school lane, a dismal back alley with puddles reflecting a sullen sky and the fence of the hockey ground. A local high-school boy, ‘dressed to kill,’ stood near the gate, a little way off, a fellow waiter.
Van was about to march back to the station when Ada appeared — with Cordula. La bonne surprise! Van greeted them with a show of horrible heartiness (‘And how goes it with you, sweet cousin? Ah, Cordula! Who’s the chaperone, you, or Miss Veen?’). The sweet cousin sported a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea. A tiny round patch did not quite hide a pimple on one side of her chin. Her breath smelled of ether. Her mood was even blacker than his. He cheerily guessed it would rain. It did — hard. Cordula remarked that his trench coat was chic. She did not think it worth while to go back for umbrellas — their delicious goal was just round the corner. Van said corners were never round, a tolerable quip. Cordula laughed. Ada did not: there were no survivors, apparently. (1.27)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): la bonne surprise: what a good surprise.
In 1901, when he meets Cordula (now married to Ivan G. Tobak) in Paris, Van quotes the stale but appropriate lines Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, a Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami:
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs. (3.2)
In "Ardis the First" Ada calls Dack (the dackel at Ardis) nehoroshaya sobaka (a bad dog):
Uncle Dan in an overstuffed chair was trying to read, with the aid of one of the dwarf dictionaries for undemanding tourists which helped him to decipher foreign art catalogues, an article apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper somebody on the train had abandoned opposite him — when an abominable tumult started to spread from room to room through the whole house.
The sportive dackel, one ear flapping, the other upturned and showing its gray-mottled pink, rapidly moving his comical legs, and skidding on the parquetry as he executed abrupt turns, was in the act of carrying away, to a suitable hiding place where to worry it, a sizable wad of blood-soaked cottonwool, snatched somewhere upstairs. Ada, Marina and two maids were pursuing the merry animal but he was impossible to corner among all the baroque furniture as he tore through innumerable doorways. Suddenly the whole chase veered past Uncle Dan’s armchair and shot out again.
‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed, on catching sight of the gory trophy, ‘somebody must have chopped off a thumb!’ Patting his thighs and his chair, he sought and retrieved — from under the footstool — the vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to look up ‘groote,’ which he had been groping for when disturbed.
The simplicity of its meaning annoyed him.
Through an open french door Dack led his pursuers into the garden. There, on the third lawn, Ada overtook him with the flying plunge used in ‘American football,’ a kind of Rugby game cadets played at one time on the wet turfy banks of the Goodson River. Simultaneously, Mlle Larivière rose from the bench where she had been paring Lucette’s fingernails, and pointing her scissors at Blanche who had rushed up with a paper bag, she accused the young slattern of a glaring precedent — namely of having once dropped a hairpin in Lucette’s cot, un machin long comme ça qui faillit blesser l’enfant à la fesse. Marina, however, who had a Russian noblewoman’s morbid fear of ‘offending an inferior,’ declared the incident closed.
‘Nehoroshaya, nehoroshaya sobaka,’ crooned Ada with great aspiratory and sibilatory emphasis as she gathered into her arms the now lootless, but completely unabashed. ‘bad dog.’ (1.11)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): groote: Dutch, ‘great’.
un machin etc.: a thing as long as this that almost wounded the child in the buttock.