Describing his childhood trips with his father, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a cummerbunded Dutchman who told another that Demon was a famous gambler:
In 1880, Van, aged ten, had traveled in silver trains with showerbaths, accompanied by his father, his father’s beautiful secretary, the secretary’s eighteen-year-old white-gloved sister (with a bit part as Van’s English governess and milkmaid), and his chaste, angelic Russian tutor, Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (‘AAA’), to gay resorts in Louisiana and Nevada. AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune, put it back in your face, sir, she said. He also recalled hearing a cummerbunded Dutchman in the hotel hall telling another that Van’s father, who had just passed whistling one of his three tunes, was a famous ‘camler’ (camel driver — shamoes having been imported recently? No, ‘gambler’). (1.24)
A cummerbund is a broad waist sash. In Rembrandt's painting "The Night Watch" Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (who leads a company of city guardsmen) is dressed in black, with a red sash, and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch is dressed in yellow, with a white sash. Describing his arrival in Ardis in 1888, Van mentions three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes:
Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black — the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other — for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles? — and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps. (1.31)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Yellow-blue Vass: the phrase is consonant with ya lyublyu vas (‘I love you’ in Russian).
In the same chapter Van mentions old Sore, the Burgundian night watchman:
The situation was repeated in a much more pleasing strain a few hours later. For supper Ada wore another dress, of crimson cotton, and when they met at night (in the old toolroom by the glow of a carbide lantern) he unzipped her with such impetuous force that he nearly tore it in two to expose her entire beauty. They were still fiercely engaged (on the same bench covered with the same tartan lap robe — thoughtfully brought) when the outside door noiselessly opened, and Blanche glided in like an imprudent ghost. She had her own key, was back from a rendezvous with old Sore, the Burgundian night watchman, and stopped like a fool gaping at the young couple. ‘Knock next time,’ said Van with a grin, not bothering to pause — rather enjoying, in fact, the bewitching apparition: she wore a miniver cloak that Ada had lost in the woods. Oh, she had become wonderfully pretty, and elle le mangeait des yeux — but Ada slammed the lantern shut, and with apologetic groans, the slut groped her way to the inner passage. His true love could not help giggling; and Van resumed his passionate task. (ibid.)
elle le mangeait etc.: she devoured him with her eyes.
A French handmaid at Ardis (and a cook's daughter), Blanche marries Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in "Ardis the Second") and they have a blind child. In his mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne (“A Small Cottage in Kolomna,” 1830) Pushkin mentions the new cook's fartuk (apron):
За нею следом, робко выступая,
Короткой юбочкой принарядясь,
Высокая, собою недурная,
Шла девушка и, низко поклонясь,
Прижалась в угол, фартук разбирая.
«А что возьмешь?» — спросила, обратясь,
Старуха. — Всё, что будет вам угодно, —
Сказала та смиренно и свободно. (XXX)
Describing Parasha's mother, Pushkin says that he has seen such faces a hundred times in Rembrandt's paintings:
Старушка (я стократ видал точь-в-точь
В картинах Ре́мбрандта такие лица)
Носила чепчик и очки. Но дочь
Была, ей-ей, прекрасная девица:
Глаза и брови — темные как ночь,
Сама бела, нежна, как голубица;
В ней вкус был образованный. Она
Читала сочиненья Эмина... (XIII)
Parasha's eyes and eyebrows are as dark, as night, and she herself is white and tender, like a dove. Pushkin's Parasha has an educated taste and has read sochinen'ya Emina (the works of Emin). Nikolay Emin's novel Roza ("The Rose," 1788) brings to mind "Eros, the rose and the sore" mentioned by Van when he describes Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University):
As he awaited her, walking the whole length of his brown-carpeted suite and back again, now contemplating the emblazed trees, that defied the season, through the northeast casement at the end of the passage, then returning to the sitting room which gave on sun-bordered Greencloth Court, he kept fighting Ardis and its orchards and orchids, bracing himself for the ordeal, wondering if he should not cancel her visit, or have his man convey his apologies for the suddenness of an unavoidable departure, but knowing all the time he would go through with it. With Lucette herself, he was only obliquely concerned: she inhabited this or that dapple of drifting sunlight, but could not be wholly dismissed with the rest of sun-flecked Ardis. He recalled, in passing, the sweetness in his lap, her round little bottom, her prasine eyes as she turned toward him and the receding road. Casually he wondered whether she had become fat and freckled, or had joined the graceful Zemski group of nymphs. He had left the parlor door that opened on the landing slightly ajar, but somehow missed the sound of her high heels on the stairs (or did not distinguish them from his heartbeats) while he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge’ back to the ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore,’ I am ill at these numbers, but e’en rhymery is easier ‘than confuting the past in mute prose.’ Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest! ‘All our old loves are corpses or wives.’ All our sorrows are virgins or whores. (2.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): qui prend etc.: that takes wing.
all our old etc.: Swinburne.