Describing the visit of an Andalusian architect to Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Russian ‘hrip’ (Spanish flu) that Uncle Dan had caught:
A gong bronzily boomed on a terrace.
For some odd reason both children were relieved to learn that a stranger was expected to dinner. He was an Andalusian architect whom Uncle Dan wanted to plan an ‘artistic’ swimming pool for Ardis Manor. Uncle Dan had intended to come, too, with an interpreter, but had caught the Russian ‘hrip’ (Spanish flu) instead, and had phoned Marina asking her to be very nice to good old Alonso.
‘You must help me!’ Marina told the children with a worried frown.
‘I could show him a copy, perhaps,’ said Ada, turning to Van, ‘of an absolutely fantastically lovely nature morte by Juan de Labrador of Extremadura — golden grapes and a strange rose against a black background. Dan sold it to Demon, and Demon has promised to give it to me on my fifteenth birthday.’
‘We also have some Zurbarán fruit,’ said Van smugly. ‘Tangerines, I believe, and a fig of sorts, with a wasp upon it. Oh, we’ll dazzle the old boy with shop talk!’
They did not. Alonso, a tiny wizened man in a double-breasted tuxedo, spoke only Spanish, while the sum of Spanish words his hosts knew scarcely exceeded half a dozen. Van had canastilla (a little basket), and nubarrones (thunderclouds), which both came from an en regard translation of a lovely Spanish poem in one of his schoolbooks. Ada remembered, of course, mariposa, butterfly, and the names of two or three birds (listed in ornithological guides) such as paloma, pigeon, or grevol, hazel hen. Marina knew aroma and hombre, and an anatomical term with a ‘j’ hanging in the middle. In consequence, the table-talk consisted of long lumpy Spanish phrases pronounced very loud by the voluble architect who thought he was dealing with very deaf people, and of a smatter of French, intentionally but vainly italianized by his victims. Once the difficult dinner over, Alonso investigated by the light of three torches held by two footmen a possible site for an expensive pool, put the plan of the grounds back into his briefcase, and after kissing by mistake Ada’s hand in the dark, hastened away to catch the last southbound train. (1.6)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lovely Spanish poem: really two poems — Jorge Guillén’s Descanso en jardin and his El otono: isla).
The Russian word for "flu" is gripp; hrip means "wheeze, wheezing." In his poem Davydovu ("To Davydov," 1824) Pushkin says that he loves Davydov's milyi hrip (dear hoarse voice):
Нельзя, мой толстый Аристипп:
Хоть я люблю твои беседы,
Твой милый нрав, твой милый хрип,
Твой вкус и жирные обеды,
Но не могу с тобою плыть
К брегам полуденной Тавриды.
Прошу меня не позабыть,
Любимец Вакха и Киприды!
Когда чахоточный отец
Немного тощей Энеиды
Пускался в море наконец,
Ему Гораций, умный льстец,
Прислал торжественную оду,
Где другу Августов певец
Сулил хорошую погоду.
Но льстивых од я не пишу;
Ты не в чахотке, славу богу:
У неба я тебе прошу
Лишь аппетита на дорогу.
Pushkin calls Davydov "my fat Aristippus" and says that he cannot join Davydov in a sea voyage to the South coast of the Crimea. In 1888 Percy de Prey (one of Ada's lovers, a fat young man) goes to the Crimean war and is killed by an old Tartar on the second day of the invasion:
(Bill Fraser, the son of Judge Fraser, of Wellington, witnessed Lieutenant de Prey’s end from a blessed ditch overgrown with cornel and medlar, but, of course, could do nothing to help the leader of his platoon and this for a number of reasons which he conscientiously listed in his report but which it would be much too tedious and embarrassing to itemize here. Percy had been shot in the thigh during a skirmish with Khazar guerillas in a ravine near Chew-Foot-Calais, as the American troops pronounced ‘Chufutkale,’ the name of a fortified rock. He had, immediately assured himself, with the odd relief of the doomed, that he had got away with a flesh wound. Loss of blood caused him to faint, as we fainted, too, as soon as he started to crawl or rather squirm toward the shelter of the oak scrub and spiny bushes, where another casualty was resting comfortably. When a couple of minutes later, Percy — still Count Percy de Prey — regained consciousness he was no longer alone on his rough bed of gravel and grass. A smiling old Tartar, incongruously but somehow assuagingly wearing American blue-jeans with his beshmet, was squatting by his side. ‘Bednïy, bednïy’ (you poor, poor fellow), muttered the good soul, shaking his shaven head and clucking: ‘Bol’no (it hurts)?’ Percy answered in his equally primitive Russian that he did not feel too badly wounded: ‘Karasho, karasho ne bol’no (good, good),’ said the kindly old man and, picking up the automatic pistol which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and then shot him in the temple. (One wonders, one always wonders, what had been the executed individual’s brief, rapid series of impressions, as preserved somewhere, somehow, in some vast library of microfilmed last thoughts, between two moments: between, in the present case, our friend’s becoming aware of those nice, quasi-Red Indian little wrinkles beaming at him out of a serene sky not much different from Ladore’s, and then feeling the mouth of steel violently push through tender skin and exploding bone. One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for flute, a series of ‘movements’ such as, say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian — sympathy — thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun — don’t... et cetera or rather no cetera... while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next to the pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.) (1.42)
The pitcher peri hints at Devushka s kuvshinom (“The Girl with a Pitcher”), a fountain in the park of Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin describes it in Tsarskoselskaya statuya ("A Statue in Tsarskoe Selo," 1830), a poem in hexameter:
Урну с водой уронив, об утёс её дева разбила.
Дева печально сидит, праздный держа черепок.
Чудо! не сякнет вода, изливаясь из урны разбитой;
Дева, над вечной струёй, вечно печальна сидит.
A miracle! The water doesn’t dry up, pouring off from the broken urn;
over the perpetual current the maiden sits perpetually sad.
In his Epistle to Davydov Pushkin calls Virgil chakhotochnyi otets nemnogo toshchey Eneidy ("the consumptive father of the rather thin Aeneid"). In a letter to Van (written after the suicide of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette) Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) calls Chekhov "consumptive Anton:"
Son:
I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress. (3.6)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) VN's Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg (1.13, et passim). The number 342 reappears in Lolita three times. 342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. 342 is Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). According to Humbert Humbert, between July 5 and November 18, 1949, he registered (if not actually stayed) at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes.
In a letter of November 12, 1889, to Suvorin (who invited Chekhov to St. Petersburg) Chekhov says that he is frightened at the thought of 343 visits that he will have to make in Petersburg:
Я бы с удовольствием приехал к Вам повидаться, да меня пугает мысль о 343 визитах, которые мне придется делать в Петербурге.
In the same letter to Suvorin Chekhov says that horses, like humans, can have the flu:
Influenza — болезнь, давно уже известная врачам, а потому врачи и не находят нужным кричать о ней. Это грипп; болеют им и люди, и лошади.
In a conversation with Van in "Ardis the Second" Marina says that the Zemskis were terrible rakes, one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments (was crazy about one of his mares):
The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.
‘I could never stand that breed,’ remarked Van. ‘Dackelophobia.’
‘But girls — do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but — Why do you laugh?’
‘Nothing,’ said Van. ‘I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?’
‘How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way-don’t ask me how’ (double hand gesture of horrified ignorance ‘— when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though — I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little "stylized" (stilizovanï), as your father used to say, an irrisistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games — who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember — not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!’ (1.37)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.
On Van's first day at Ardis Ada shows to him the portrait of her favorite ancestor, Prince Vseslav Zemski:
They went back to the corridor, she tossing her hair, he clearing his throat. Further down, a door of some playroom or nursery stood ajar and stirred to and fro as little Lucette peeped out, one russet knee showing. Then the doorleaf flew open — but she darted inside and away. Cobalt sailing boats adorned the white tiles of a stove, and as her sister and he passed by that open door a toy barrel organ invitingly went into action with a stumbling little minuet. Ada and Van returned to the ground floor — this time all the way down the sumptuous staircase. Of the many ancestors along the wall, she pointed out her favorite, old Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699-1797), friend of Linnaeus and author of Flora Ladorica, who was portrayed in rich oil holding his barely pubescent bride and her blond doll in his satin lap. An enlarged photograph, soberly framed, hung (rather incongruously, Van thought) next to the rose-bud-lover in his embroidered coat. The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert. (1.6)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from ‘sumerki’ (‘dusk’ in Russian).
In Kim Beauharnais' album Van and Ada find Sumerechnikov (who took sumerographs of Marina's brother) and a photograph of Alonso, the swimming-pool expert:
A photograph of an oval painting, considerably diminished, portrayed Princess Sophia Zemski as she was at twenty, in 1775, with her two children (Marina’s grandfather born in 1772, and Demon’s grandmother, born in 1773).
‘I don’t seem to remember it,’ said Van, ‘where did it hang?’
‘In Marina’s boudoir. And do you know who this bum in the frock coat is?’
‘Looks to me like a poor print cut out of a magazine. Who’s he?’
‘Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago.’
‘The Twilight before the Lumières. Hey, and here’s Alonso, the swimming-pool expert. I met his sweet sad daughter at a Cyprian party — she felt and smelt and melted like you. The strong charm of coincidence.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Sumerechnikov: His name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight; see also p.37.
A Cyprean party brings to mind lyubimets Vakkha i Kipridy ("a pet of Bacchus and Cypris"), as in his Epistle to Davydov Pushkin calls Davydov.
V sumerkakh ("In the Twilight," 1887) is a collection of stories by Chekhov. In the same letter of Nov. 12, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov calls his story Uchitel' slovestnosti (“The Teacher of Literature,” 1894) “an unserious trifle from the life of provincial guinea pigs:”
Посылаю рассказ для фельетона. Несерьезный пустячок из жизни провинциальных морских свинок. Простите мне баловство... Между прочим, сей рассказ имеет свою смешную историю. Я имел в виду кончить его так, чтобы от моих героев мокрого места не осталось, но нелегкая дернула меня прочесть вслух нашим; все взмолились: пощади! пощади! Я пощадил своих героев, и потому рассказ вышел так кисел. В фельетон он влезет, а если не влезет, то придется мне сократить его...
In Marina's bedroom there is a picture of her brother cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands):
A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bayronka: from Bayron, Russ., Byron.