On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which VN's novel Ada, 1969, is set) Ilemna (a subarctic monastery town) was renamed Novostabia:
So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question. (3.8)
Iliamna Lake is the largest lake in Alaska (known on Demonia as Lyaska). There is Lyaska in plyaska (dance), a word used by Lermontov in the penultimate line of his poem Rodina ("Motherland," 1841):
Люблю отчизну я, но странною любовью!
Не победит её рассудок мой.
Ни слава, купленная кровью,
Ни полный гордого доверия покой,
Ни тёмной старины заветные преданья
Не шевелят во мне отрадного мечтанья.
Но я люблю — за что, не знаю сам —
Её степей холодное молчанье,
Её лесов безбрежных колыханье,
Разливы рек её, подобные морям;
Просёлочным путём люблю скакать в телеге
И, взором медленным пронзая ночи тень,
Встречать по сторонам, вздыхая о ночлеге,
Дрожащие огни печальных деревень;
Люблю дымок спалённой жнивы,
В степи ночующий обоз
И на холме средь жёлтой нивы
Чету белеющих берёз.
С отрадой, многим незнакомой,
Я вижу полное гумно,
Избу, покрытую соломой,
С резными ставнями окно;
И в праздник, вечером росистым,
Смотреть до полночи готов
На пляску с топаньем и свистом
Под говор пьяных мужичков.
I love my homeland, but in the strangest way;
My intellect could never conquer it.
The fame, earned with my blood and pain,
The peace, full of the proud fit,
The dark old age and its devoted tales
Won't stir in me the blithe inspiring gales.
But I do love, what for I do not know,
Its cold terrains' perpetuating quiet,
Its endless woodlands’ oscillation tired
The sea-like rivers' wild overflows.
Along the rural paths I favor taking rides,
And with a slow glance impaling morbid darks,
The trembling village lights discover on the side,
While thinking where this time for board I will park.
I like the smoke from garnered fields,
The sledges sleeping in the steppe,
The birches growing on the hill
That occupies the grassland gap.
With joy, that people fathom not,
I feel the rush of threshing scenes,
The covered with foliage huts,
The ornamented window screens.
And on the evening of the fete
I like to watch till the midnight
The dance with tapping and a chat
Of drunken fellows on the side.
(tr. B. Leyvi)
In his poem Posledniy syn vol'nosti ("The Last Son of Liberty," 1831) Lermontov twice mentions Lake Ilmen' (the largest lake in the Province of Novgorod):
Приходит осень, золотит
Венцы дубов. Трава полей
От продолжительных дождей
К земле прижалась, и бежит
Ловец напрасно по холмам:
Ему не встретить зверя там.
А если даже он найдет,
То ветер стрелы разнесет.
На льдинах ветер тот рожден,
Порывисто качает он
Сухой шиповник на брегах
Ильменя.
Всегда с поникшей головой,
Стыдом томима и тоской,
На отуманенный Ильмень
Смотрела Леда целый день
С береговых высоких скал.
Никто ее не узнавал:
Надеждой не дышала грудь,
Улыбки гордой больше нет,
На щеки страшно и взглянуть:
Бледны, как утра первый свет.
Она увяла в цвете лет!..
The title of Lermontov's poem brings to mind Bryullov's painting Posledniy den' Pompei ("The Last Day of Pompeii," 1833) and Pushkin's ode Vol'nost' ("To Liberty," 1817). Bryullov's painting is described by Pushkin in his poem Vezuviy zev otkryl ("Mount Vesuvius opened its mouth," 1834):
Везувий зев открыл — дым хлынул клубом — пламя
Широко развилось, как боевое знамя.
Земля волнуется — с шатнувшихся колонн
Кумиры падают! Народ, гонимый страхом,
Под каменным дождём, под воспалённым прахом,
Толпами, стар и млад, бежит из града вон.
Like Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stabiae was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Ilemna's new name, Novostabia seems to combine Stabiae with Novorzhev, a town in the Province of Pskov mentioned by Pushkin in the last line of his poem Est' v Rossii gorod Luga ("There is in Russia the town Luga," 1817):
Есть в России город Луга
Петербургского округа;
Хуже не было б сего
Городишки на примете,
Если б не было на свете
Новоржева моего.
There is in Russia the town Luga
of the St. Petersburg district.
One would never find
a worse town on the map,
if there were not in the world
my Novorzhev.
At the beginning of Ada Van mentions Lake Kitezh, near Luga:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns.
Daniel Veen’s mother was a Trumbell, and he was prone to explain at great length — unless sidetracked by a bore-baiter — how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell.’ Somehow or other he had ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer. He did not have — initially at least — any particular liking for paintings, had no aptitude for any kind of salesmanship, and no need whatever to jolt with the ups and downs of a ‘job’ the solid fortune inherited from a series of far more proficient and venturesome Veens. Confessing that he did not much care for the countryside, he spent only a few carefully shaded summer weekends at Ardis, his magnificent manor near Ladore. He had revisited only a few times since his boyhood another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally and which he owned jointly with his cousin, a great fisherman in his youth. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.
Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.
Just as in Lugano, Kaluga and Kalugano (where Van fights a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge) there is Luga, there is Lermontov in Palermontovia (a country mentioned by Van when he describes the torments of poor mad Aqua, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina):
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall. Commenting on their find, Ada mentions the Stabian flower girl:
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’ (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower gircl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
A Mr Brod or Bred who marries Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) brings to mind obman il' bred (deceit and raving) mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter One (XLIV: 7) of Eugene Onegin:
И снова, преданный безделью,
Томясь душевной пустотой,
Уселся он — с похвальной целью
Себе присвоить ум чужой;
Отрядом книг уставил полку,
Читал, читал, а всё без толку:
Там скука, там обман иль бред;
В том совести, в том смысла нет;
На всех различные вериги;
И устарела старина,
И старым бредит новизна.
Как женщин, он оставил книги,
И полку, с пыльной их семьей,
Задернул траурной тафтой.
And once again to idleness consigned,
oppressed by emptiness of soul,
he settled down with the laudable aim
to make his own another's mind;
he crammed a shelf with an array of books,
and read, and read — and all for nothing:
here there was dullness; there, deceit and raving;
this one lacked conscience; that one, sense;
on all of them were different fetters;
and outworn was the old, and the new raved
about the old.
As he'd left women, he left books
and, with its dusty tribe, the shelf
with funerary taffeta he curtained.
Note I ustarela starina, I starym bredit novizna (and outworn was the old, and the new raved about the old), the stanza's Lines 10-11. When Ada (now widowed) comes back to Mont Roux after her departure on the eve, Van calls her obmanshchitsa (deceiver):
When, ‘a little later,’ Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully, in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:
‘Did you really think I had gone?’
‘Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,’ Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety,
‘I told him to turn,’ she said, ‘somewhere near Morzhey (‘morses’ or ‘walruses,’ a Russian pun on ‘Morges’ — maybe a mermaid’s message), And you slept, you could sleep!’
‘I worked,’ he replied, ‘my first draft is done.’ (Part Four)