In VN's novel Ada (1969) Sig Leymanksi (the main character in Van Veen's novel Letters from Terra) curtails his name and becomes Professor Leyman:
Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor. When Leymanski’s obsession turned into love, and one’s sympathy got focused on his enchanting, melancholy, betrayed wife (née Antilia Glems), our author found himself confronted with the distressful task of now stamping out in Antilia, a born brunette, all traces of Ada, thus reducing yet another character to a dummy with bleached hair.
After beaming to Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart, a graceful microorganism extending transparent appendages toward his huge humid eye. Alas, the testibulus (test tube — never to be confused with testiculus, orchid), with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid, is ‘accidentally’ thrown away by Professor Leyman’s (he had trimmed his name by that time) assistant, Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun.
(Antilia later regained her husband, and Flora was weeded out. Ada’s addendum.)
On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young.
No doubt much of that information, gleaned by our terrapists (as Van’s colleagues were dubbed), came in a botched form; but the strain of sweet happiness could be always distinguished as an all-pervading note. Now the purpose of the novel was to suggest that Terra cheated, that all was not paradise there, that perhaps in some ways human minds and human flesh underwent on that sibling planet worse torments than on our much maligned Demonia. In her first letters, before leaving Terra, Theresa had nothing but praise for its rulers — especially Russian and German rulers. In her later messages from space she confessed that she had exaggerated the bliss; had been, in fact, the instrument of ‘cosmic propaganda’ — a brave thing to admit, as agents on Terra might have yanked her back or destroyed her in flight had they managed to intercept her undissembling ondulas, now mostly going one way, our way, don’t ask Van by what method or principle. Unfortunately, not only mechanicalism, but also moralism, could hardly be said to constitute something in which he excelled, and what we have rendered here in a few leisurely phrases took him two hundred pages to develop and adorn. We must remember that he was only twenty; that his young proud soul was in a state of grievous disarray; that he had read too much and invented too little; and that the brilliant mirages, which had risen before him when he felt the first pangs of bookbirth on Cordula’s terrace, were now fading under the action of prudence, as did those wonders which medieval explorers back from Cathay were afraid to reveal to the Venetian priest or the Flemish philistine. (2.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Sig Leymanski: anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction.
In Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) Komarovski (the lawyer who debauches Lara Guichard when she is a girl of sixteen) curtails his name and becomes Comrade Komarov:
— А мне правда есть что порассказать. Будто не из простых я, сказывали. Чужие ли мне это сказали, сама ли я это в сердце сберегла, только слышала я, будто маменька моя, Раиса Комарова, женой были скрывающегося министра русского в Беломонголии, товарища Комарова. Не отец, не родной мне был, надо полагать, этот самый Комаров. Ну, конечно, я девушка неученая, без папи, без мами росла сиротой. Вам, может быть, смешно, что я говорю, ну только говорю я, что знаю, надо войти в мое положение.
Да. Так значит было все это, про что я вам дальше расскажу, это было за Крушинцами, на другом конце Сибири, по ту сторону казатчины, поближе к Китайской границе. Когда стали мы, то есть, наши красные, к ихнему главному городу белому подходить, этот самый Комаров министр посадил маменьку со всей ихнею семьей в особенный поезд литерный и приказали увезть, ведь маменька были пуганые и без них не смели шагу ступить.
А про меня он даже не знал, Комаров. Не знал, что я такая есть на свете. Маменька меня в долгой отлучке произвели и смертью обмирали, как бы кто об том ему не проболтался. Он ужасть как того не любил, чтобы дети, и кричал и топал ногами, что это одна грязь в доме и беспокойство. Я, кричал, этого терпеть не могу.
“And it’s true I’ve got things to tell. I’m not from simple folk, I was told. Either other people told me, or I tucked it away in my heart, only I heard that my mama, Raissa Komarova, was the wife of a Russian minister, Comrade Komarov, who was hiding in White Mongolia. He wasn’t my father, wasn’t my kin, you can only suppose, this same Komarov. Well, of course, I’m an uneducated girl, grew up an orphan, with no father or mother. It may seem funny to you that I say it, well, I’m only saying what I know, you’ve got to put yourselves in my position. Yes. So, it all happened, what I’m going to tell you now, beyond Krushitsy, at the other end of Siberia, beyond Cossack country, closer to the Chinese border. When we—our Red Army, that is—started approaching the main town of the Whites, this same Komarov the minister put mama and all their family on a special reserved train and had it take
them away, because mama was forever frightened and didn’t dare take a step without him. “And he didn’t even know about me, Komarov didn’t. Didn’t know there was anybody like me in the world. Mama produced me during a long absence and was scared to death that somebody might let it slip to him. He terribly disliked having children around, and shouted and stamped his feet that it was all just filth in the house and a big bother. I can’t stand it, he shouted." (Part Sixteen, Epilogue, 4)
Raissa Komarova is Lara's name in her second marriage. Tanya (who tells her story to Gordon and Dudorov) is Lara's daughter by Zhivago. Btw., Van does not suspect that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, 'little violet,' and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.
Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions his new lawyer, Mr Gromwell, a nephew of the Great Grombchevski:
His new lawyer, Mr Gromwell, whose really beautiful floral name suited somehow his innocent eyes and fair beard, was a nephew of the Great Grombchevski, who for the last thirty years or so had managed some of Demon’s affairs with good care and acumen. Gromwell nursed Van’s personal fortune no less tenderly; but he had little experience in the intricacies of book-publishing matters, and Van was an absolute ignoramus there, not knowing, for example, that ‘review copies’ were supposed to go to the editors of various periodicals or that advertisements should be purchased and not be expected to appear by spontaneous generation in full-page adulthood between similar blurbs boosting The Possessed by Miss Love and The Puffer by Mr Dukes.
For a fat little fee, Gwen, one of Mr Gromwell’s employees, was delegated not only to entertain Van, but also to supply Manhattan bookstores with one-half of the printed copies, whilst an old lover of hers in England was engaged to place the rest in the bookshops of London. The notion that anybody kind enough to sell his book should not keep the ten dollars or so that every copy had cost to manufacture seemed unfair and illogical to Van. Therefore he felt sorry for all the trouble that underpaid, tired, bare-armed, brunette-pale shopgirls had no doubt taken in trying to tempt dour homosexuals with his stuff (‘Here’s a rather fancy novel about a girl called Terra’), when he learned from a careful study of a statement of sales, which his stooges sent him in February, 1892, that in twelve months only six copies had been sold — two in England and four in America. Statistically speaking no reviews could have been expected, given the unorthodox circumstances in which poor Terra’s correspondence had been handled. Curiously enough, as many as two did appear. One, by the First Clown in Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly, popped up in a survey entitled, with a British journalist’s fondness for this kind of phoney wordplay, ‘Terre à terre, 1891,’ and dealt with the year’s ‘Space Romances,’ which by that time had begun to fine off. He sniffed Voltemand’s contribution as the choicest of the lot, calling it (alas, with unerring flair) ‘a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale.’
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical name — ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist, as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his talent.’
Upon being cornered, Gwen, a fat little fille de joie (by inclination if not by profession), squealed on one of her new admirers, confessing she had begged him to write that article because she could not bear to see Van’s ‘crooked little smile’ at finding his beautifully bound and boxed book so badly neglected. She also swore that Max not only did not know who Voltemand really was, but had not read Van’s novel. Van toyed with the idea of challenging Mr Medlar (who, he hoped, would choose swords) to a duel at dawn in a secluded corner of the Park whose central green he could see from the penthouse terrace where he fenced with a French coach twice a week, the only exercise, save riding, that he still indulged in; but to his surprise — and relief (for he was a little ashamed to defend his ‘novelette’ and only wished to forget it, just as another, unrelated, Veen might have denounced — if allowed a longer life — his pubescent dream of ideal bordels) Max Mushmula (Russian for ‘medlar’) answered Van’s tentative cartel with the warm-hearted promise of sending him his next article, ‘The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell). (2.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): fille de joie: whore.
Shumikha reaktsionnoy propagandy vokrug literaturnogo sornyaka ("The Hype of Reactionary Propaganda around the Literary Weed") is an article that appeared in Pravda on October 26, 1958, soon after Pasternak (whose surname means in Russian "parsnip" and whom the article's author calls "the weed") had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Before parting with Greg Erminin, Van mentions the Lebon Academy Prize that Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse) has just been awarded:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L’ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.
Luc is cul (Fr., ass), Lebon is Nobel in reverse. There is ami (Fr., friend) in Amis. Sig Leymanski is an anagram of Kingsley Amis (a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction). Amis + comic = ami + cosmic.
Guvernantka belletristka brings to mind beloemigrantskaya belletristika (the belles-lettres of the White Russian emigration) mentioned by D. Zaslavski in his Pravda article "The Hype of Reactionary Propaganda around the Literary Weed:"
Роман Пастернака - это политический пасквиль, а пасквиль - это не художественная литература. Можно, обмакнув квач в деготь, густо вымазать забор, но это не искусство, деготь - не краска и квач - не кисть художника. Роман Пастернака - это реакционная публицистика низкого пошиба, облеченная в форму литературного произведения. Повести, романы и рассказы такого рода, ничего общего не имеющие с художественной литературой, печатались в белоэмигрантской беллетристике двадцать и тридцать лет назад. Белоэмигрантщина выродилась, ее литература полностью выдохлась и исчезла, а живущий в Советском Союзе Б. Пастернак, этот "внутренний эмигрант", повторяет ее зады. Он всегда кокетничал своей лирической "утонченностью", а тут проявил примитивную вульгарность.
According to the critic, Pasternak, this "inner émigré," povtoryaet zady (repeats the tails) of the literature of the Russian emigration. Zady is plural of zad (hindquarters; ass).
In March, 1905, Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (Van does not realize that his father died because Ada, who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up, managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair). Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father, Van mentions two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell):
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict.
The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
Grombchevski blends Mikhail Gromnitski, a lawyer, with Nikolay Karabchevski, another lawyer (Gromwell hints at Cromwell). In his memoirs Chto glaza moi videli (“What My Eyes Saw,” 1921) Karabchevski mentions VN’s father (“the starched Anglophile”), also a jurust, and quotes VDN’s words in the First Duma (Russian parliament) “May the executive authorities submit to the legislative authorities:”
На ряду с этим деятельность революционных запевал в наших трех государственных думах находила себе вполне отрицательную оценку у того же Пассовера.
О Винавере он иначе не выражался как: о "хитроумном гомункулусе", считая вообще всю партию "кадетов" "головастиками", совершенно не знающими и непонимающими России и ее интересов. Накрахмаленный англоман В. Д. Набоков, с его холостым выстрелом: "власть исполнительная, да подчинится власти законодательной", снискавшая ему лавры героического либерализма, возбуждал в нем всегда ироническое замечание: "попал пальцем в небо"! (Volume Two, Part 4)
According to Passover (a lawyer whose words are quoted by Karabchevski), VDN popal pal'tsem v nebo (was wide of the mark). Nebo is Russian for "sky." Demon dies in an airplane disaster. Pal'tsem is Instr. sing. of palets (finger). Describing his imaginary duel with Andrey Vinelander, Van uses the phrase po pal'tsam (finger-counting):
Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four — say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway’s bullet struck the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot — that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly — a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller. (3.8)
Les Enfants Maudits is a novel by Mlle Larivière (made into a film by G. A. Vronsky, the movie man, as The Young and the Doomed).