Describing his visit to Brownhill (Ada's school for girls), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions soft-toned Miss Cleft, the headmistress:
The rules of her school were old-fashioned and strict to the point of lunacy, but they reminded Marina nostalgically of the Russian Institute for Noble Maidens in Yukonsk (where she had kept breaking them with much more ease and success than Ada or Cordula or Grace could at Brownhill). Girls were allowed to see boys at hideous teas with pink cakes in the headmistress’s Reception Room three or four times per term, and any girl of twelve or thirteen could meet a gentleman’s son in a certified milk-bar, just a few blocks away, every third Sunday, in the company of an older girl of irreproachable morals.
Van braced himself to see Ada thus, hoping to use his magic wand for transforming whatever young spinster came along into a spoon or a turnip. Those ‘dates’ had to be approved by the victim’s mother at least a fortnight in advance. Soft-toned Miss Cleft, the headmistress, rang up Marina who told her that Ada could not possibly need a chaperone to go out with a cousin who had been her sole companion on day-long rambles throughout the summer. ‘That’s exactly it,’ Cleft rejoined, ‘two young ramblers are exceptionally prone to intertwine, and a thorn is always close to a bud.’
‘But they are practically brother and sister,’ ejaculated Marina, thinking as many stupid people do that’ practically’ works both ways — reducing the truth of a statement and making a truism sound like the truth. ‘Which only increases the peril,’ said soft Cleft. ‘Anyway, I’ll compromise, and tell dear Cordula de Prey to make a third: she admires Ivan and adores Ada — consequently can only add zest to the zipper’ (stale slang — stale even then).
‘Gracious, what figli-migli’ (mimsey-fimsey), said Marina, after having hung up. (1.27)
Soft-toned Miss Cleft brings to mind odnorukiy kleftik (one-armed little "kleft," a Greek insurgent in the Ottoman Empire) mentioned by Apollon Maykov in his poem Potseluy ("The Kiss," 1860):
Между мраморных обломков,
Посреди сребристой пыли,
Однорукий клефтик тешет
Мрамор нежный, словно пена,
Прибиваемая морем.
Мимо девица проходит,
Златокудрая, что солнце,
Говорит: "Зачем одною
Ты работаешь рукою?
Ты куда ж девал другую?"
"Полюбилась мне девица,
Роза первая Стамбула!
Поцелуй один горячий -
И мне руку отрубили!
В свете есть еще девица,
Златокудрая, что солнце...
Поцелуй один бы только -
И руби другую руку!"
In Maykov's poem kleftik lost his arm because he kissed a girl, the first rose of Stambul. He is ready to part with the second arm, if he is allowed to kiss the girl who asked him why he was one-armed. At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" Marina's lover Pedro (a young Latin actor) says that pale beauty is the beauty for which many men would cut off their members:
She had been casting sidelong glances, during that dreadful talk, and now saw pure, fierce Van under the tulip tree, quite a way off, one hand on his hip, head thrown back, drinking beer from a bottle. She left the pool edge, with its corpse, and moved toward the tulip tree making a strategic detour between the authoress, who — still unaware of what they were doing to her novel — was dozing in a deckchair (out of whose wooden arms her chubby fingers grew like pink mushrooms), and the leading lady, now puzzling over a love scene where the young chatelaine’s ‘radiant beauty’ was mentioned.
‘But,’ said Marina, ‘how can one act out "radiant," what does radiant beauty mean?’
‘Pale beauty,’ said Pedro helpfully, glancing up at Ada as she passed by, ‘the beauty for which many men would cut off their members.’
‘Okay,’ said Vronsky. ‘Let us get on with this damned script. He leaves the pool-side patio, and since we contemplate doing it in color —’ (1.32)
Les Enfants Maudits ("The Accursed Children"), Mlle Larivière's novel that Marina, G. A. Vronsky (the movie man) and Pedro make into a film, brings to mind Molchite, proklyatye struny! ("Be silent, the accursed strings!"), the refrain in Maykov's poem Menestrel ("The Minstrel," 1869). This line was used by Alexander Blok as the epigraph to his poem Druz'yam ("To My Friends," 1908). The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) is a narrative poem in six cantos with copious antiquarian notes by Walter Scott. Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) prefers Walter Scott to Dickens and does not think highly of Russian novelists.
Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University), Van mentions the speechless eunuch in "Stambul, my bulbul:"
‘She abandoned me,’ continued Lucette, tchucking on one side of the mouth and smoothing up and down with an abstract palm her flesh-pale stocking, ‘Yes, she started a rather sad little affair with Johnny, a young star from Fuerteventura, c’est dans la famille, her exact odnoletok (coeval), practically her twin in appearance, born the same year, the same day, the same instant —’
That was a mistake on silly Lucette’s part.
‘Ah, that cannot be,’ interrupted morose Van and after rocking this side and that with clenched hands and furrowed brow (how one would like to apply a boiling-water-soaked Wattebausch, as poor Rack used to call her limp arpeggiation, to that ripe pimple on his right temple), ‘that simply cannot be. No damned twin can do that. Not even those seen by Brigitte, a cute little number I imagine, with that candle flame flirting with her exposed nipples. The usual difference in age between twins’ — he went on in a madman’s voice so well controlled that it sounded overpedantic — ‘is seldom less than a quarter of an hour, the time a working womb needs to rest and relax with a woman’s magazine, before resuming its rather unappetizing contractions. In very rare cases, when the matrix just goes on pegging away automatically, the doctor can take advantage of that and ease out the second brat who then can be considered to be, say, three minutes younger, which in dynastic happy events — doubly happy events — with all Egypt agog — may be, and has been, even more important than in a marathon finish. But the creatures, no matter how numerous, never come out à la queue-leu-leu. "Simultaneous twins" is a contradiction in terms.’
‘Nu uzh ne znayu (well, I don’t know),’ muttered Lucette (echoing faithfully her mother’s dreary intonation in that phrase, which seemingly implied an admission of error and ignorance, but tended somehow — owing to a hardly perceptible nod of condescension rather than consent — to dull and dilute the truth of her interlocutor’s corrective retort).
‘I only meant,’ she continued, ‘that he was a handsome Hispano-Irish boy, dark and pale, and people mistook them for twins. I did not say they were really twins. Or "driblets."
Driblets? Driblets? Now who pronounced it that way? Who? Who? A dripping ewes-dropper in a dream? Did the orphans live?’ But we must listen to Lucette.
‘After a year or so she found out that an old pederast kept him and she dismissed him, and he shot himself on a beach at high tide but surfers and surgeons saved him, and now his brain is damaged; he will never be able to speak.’
‘One can always fall back on mutes,’ said Van gloomily. ‘He could act the speechless eunuch in "Stambul, my bulbul" or the stable boy disguised as a kennel girl who brings a letter.’
‘Van, I’m boring you?’
‘Oh, nonsense, it’s a gripping and palpitating little case history.’
Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years — besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot — Adiana! Wonder whom she’ll bag next. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Wattebausch: Germ., piece of cottonwool.
à la queue etc.: in Indian file.
On the other hand, odnorukiy kleftik brings to mind d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, whom Ada met at Marina's funeral:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): D’Onsky: see p.17.
comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
In Eugene Onegin (Ten: IX: 3-4) Pushkin mentions bezrukiy knyaz' (the one-armed prince), Alexander Ypsilanti (1792-1828), a Phanariot who served in the Russian army and lost his right arm in the Battle of Dresden (1813):
Безрукий князь друзьям Мореи
Из Кишинёва уж мигал.
the one-armed prince to the friends of Morea
from Kishinev already winked.
The Morea is the old name of the Peloponnese peninsula. Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel, Baron d'Onsky (one-armed d'Onsky's father) seems to be a cross between Prince Dmitri Donskoy (who deteated Khan Mamay in the Battle of Kulikovo, 1380) and Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion):
Сначала все к нему езжали;
Но так как с заднего крыльца
Обыкновенно подавали
Ему донского жеребца,
Лишь только вдоль большой дороги
Заслышат их домашни дроги, —
Поступком оскорбясь таким,
Все дружбу прекратили с ним.
«Сосед наш неуч; сумасбродит;
Он фармазон; он пьет одно
Стаканом красное вино;
Он дамам к ручке не подходит;
Все да да нет; не скажет да-с
Иль нет-с». Таков был общий глас.
At first they all would call on him,
but since to the back porch
habitually a Don stallion
for him was brought
as soon as one made out along the highway
the sound of their domestic runabouts —
outraged by such behavior,
they all ceased to be friends with him.
“Our neighbor is a boor; acts like a crackbrain;
he's a Freemason; he
drinks only red wine, by the tumbler;
he won't go up to kiss a lady's hand;
'tis all ‘yes,’ ‘no’ — he'll not say ‘yes, sir,’
or ‘no, sir.’ ” This was the general voice. (EO, Two: V)
Stambul gyaury nynche slavyat… (“The giaurs nowadays praise Stambul…” 1829) is a poem by Pushkin.