The narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada (1969), Van Veen calls his and Ada's ear-trumpet age our "dot-dot-dotage:"
Not only in ear-trumpet age — in what Van called their dot-dot-dotage — but even more so in their adolescence (summer, 1888), did they seek a scholarly excitement in establishing the past evolution (summer, 1884) of their love, the initial stages of its revelations, the freak discrepancies in gappy chronographies. She had kept only a few — mainly botanical and entomological — pages of her diary, because on rereading it she had found its tone false and finical; he had destroyed his entirely because of its clumsy, schoolboyish style combined with heedless, and false, cynicism. Thus they had to rely on oral tradition, on the mutual correction of common memories. ‘And do you remember, a tï pomnish’, et te souviens-tu’ (invariably with that implied codetta of ‘and,’ introducing the bead to be threaded in the torn necklace) became with them, in their intense talks, the standard device for beginning every other sentence. Calendar dates were debated, sequences sifted and shifted, sentimental notes compared, hesitations and resolutions passionately analyzed. If their recollections now and then did not tally, this was often owing to sexual differences rather than to individual temperament. Both were diverted by life’s young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time. Ada tended to see those initial stages as an extremely gradual and diffuse growth, possibly unnatural, probably unique, but wholly delightful in its smooth unfolding which precluded any brutish impulses or shocks of shame. Van’s memory could not help picking out specific episodes branded forever with abrupt and poignant, and sometimes regrettable, physical thrills. She had the impression that the insatiable delectations she arrived at, without having expected or summoned them, were experienced by Van only by the time she attained them: that is, after weeks of cumulative caresses; her first physiological reactions to them she demurely dismissed as related to childish practices which she had indulged in before and which had little to do with the glory and tang of individual happiness. Van, on the contrary, not only could tabulate every informal spasm he had hidden from her before they became lovers, but stressed philosophic and moral distinctions between the shattering force of self-abuse and the overwhelming softness of avowed and shared love. (1.18)
Thomas Edison (1847-1931), the inventor, nicknamed his first two children, Marion and Thomas, "Dot" and "Dash," referring to telegraphic terms. Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time), Van mentions Erasmus Veen (Uncle Dan's grandfather), the inventor of the clockwork luggage carts:
Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout — as red as a fire engine! — only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van. (1.19)
Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a poet (the author of The Botanic Garden, 1791) and inventor. Telega zhizni ("The Cart of Life," 1823) is a poem by Pushkin in which Time is compared to the coachman. The characters in Ada include Ben Wright ("the Bengal Ben"), the English coachman in "Ardis the First," and Trofim Fartukov, the Russian coachman in "Ardis the Second" who marries Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis). Trofim and Blanche have a blind child. Describing the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday, Van mentions vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) that Daniel Veen's grandmother (Olga Zemski, the wife of Erasmus Veen), an engineer of great genius, made the Redmount rill carry through a system of platinum segments:
Marina’s contribution was more modest, but it too had its charm. She showed Van and Lucette (the others knew all about it) the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested, communicating with Ardis Hall. After the banning of ‘currents and circuits,’ she said (rapidly but freely, with an actress’s désinvolture pronouncing those not quite proper words — while puzzled Lucette tugged at the sleeve of Van, of Vanichka, who could explain everything), her husband’s grandmother, an engineer of great genius, ‘tubed’ the Redmount rill (running just below the glade from a hill above Ardis). She made it carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments. These produced, of course, only one-way messages, and the installation and upkeep of the ‘drums’ (cylinders) cost, she said, a Jew’s eye, so that the idea was dropped, however tempting the possibility of informing a picnicking Veen that his house was on fire. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.
Electricity was banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century (1.3). The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In his essay on Dostoevski (in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Ayhenvald mentions volny i vibratsii (waves and vibrations) that the world is sending to Dostoevski:
Мир посылает ему все свои волны и вибрации, мучит его обнажённые нервы, мир раздражает его. Порог раздражения лежит для него очень низко.
During Van's first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
At the age of ten Van struggled to keep back his tears when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad (a Caucasian chieftain), is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
VN's poem Tolstoy (1928) begins as follows:
Картина в хрестоматии: босой
старик. Я поворачивал страницу,
моё воображенье оставалось
холодным. То ли дело - Пушкин: плащ,
cкала, морская пена... Слово "Пушкин"
стихами обрастает, как плющом,
и муза повторяет имена,
вокруг него бряцающие: Дельвиг,
Данзас, Дантес, - и сладостно-звучна
вся жизнь его, - от Делии лицейской
до выстрела в морозный день дуэли.
A picture in a school anthology:
an old man, barefoot. As I turned the page,
unkindled still was my imagination.
With Pushkin things are different: there’s the cloak,
the cliff, the foaming surf … The surname “Pushkin”
grows over, ivylike, with poetry,
and repetitiously the muse cites names
that echo noisily around him: Delvig,
Danzas, d’Anthès—and his whole life has a
romantic ring, from school-day Delia to
the pistol shot, that chill day of the duel.
(DN's translation)
In his poem VN says that our grandchildren will unwisely envy us and mentions Tolstoy's recorded voice:
А мы еще не можем отказаться
от слишком лестной близости к нему
во времени. Пожалуй, внуки наши
завидовать нам будут неразумно.
Коварная механика порой
искусственно поддерживает память.
Еще хранит на граммофонном диске
звук голоса его: он вслух читает,
однообразно, торопливо, глухо,
и запинается на слове «Бог»,
и повторяет: «Бог», и продолжает
чуть хриплым говорком, — как человек,
что кашляет в соседнем отделенье,
когда вагон на станции ночной,
бывало, остановится со вздохом.
Есть, говорят, в архиве фильмов ветхих,
теперь мигающих подслеповато,
яснополянский движущийся снимок:
старик невзрачный, роста небольшого,
с растрепанною ветром бородой,
проходит мимо скорыми шажками,
сердясь на оператора. И мы
довольны. Он нам близок и понятен.
Мы у него бывали, с ним сидели.
Совсем не страшен гений, говорящий
о браке или о крестьянских школах…
One should say, too, that people’s memory
must lose material contact with the past
in order to make gossip into epic
and to transmute the muteness into music,
while we are still unable to renounce
too-flattering proximity to him
in time. It’s likely our grandchildren will
regard us with unreasonable envy.
Insidious technology sometimes
can bolster memory artificially.
A phonograph recording still preserves
the cadence of his voice: he reads aloud,
monotonously, hastily, opaquely,
and stumbling when he comes to the word “God,”
repeating “God,” and then continuing—
a slightly husky, almost senseless sound,
like someone coughing in the next compartment
when, in the old days, at a nighttime station,
your railroad car would make a sighing stop.
In an archive of ancient films, they say
(which blink, these days, as though with dimming vision)
there is a Yasnaya Polyana sequence:
a nondescript old man of modest stature,
his beard disheveled by the wind, who walks
by with accelerated little steps,
disgruntled by the cameraman. And we’re
content. He’s close and comprehensible.
In his old age Van regrets that his and Ada's dialogues were not recorded on magnetic tape:
Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned allover the world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class families (in the British and Brazilian sense) to which the Veens and Durmanovs happened to belong, and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important ‘utilities’ — telephones, motors — what else? — well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker with lolling tongues, breathing faster than gundogs (for it’s quite a long sentence), such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires (Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls) were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved ‘minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make. Had our erudite lovers been allowed by common propriety and common law to knock into working order the mysterious box they had once discovered in their magic attic, they might have recorded (so as to replay, eight decades later) Giorgio Vanvitelli’s arias as well as Van Veen’s conversations with his sweetheart. Here, for example, is what they might have heard today — with amusement, embarrassment, sorrow, wonder.
(Narrator: on that summer day soon after they had entered the kissing phase of their much too premature and in many ways fatal romance, Van and Ada were on their way to the Gun Pavilion alias Shooting Gallery, where they had located, on its upper stage, a tiny, Oriental-style room with bleary glass cases that had once lodged pistols and daggers — judging by the shape of dark imprints on the faded velvet — a pretty and melancholy recess, rather musty, with a cushioned window seat and a stuffed Parluggian Owl on a side shelf, next to an empty beer bottle left by some dead old gardener, the year of the obsolete brand being 1842.)
‘Don’t jingle them,’ she said, ‘we are watched by Lucette, whom I’ll strangle some day.’
They walked through a grove and past a grotto.
Ada said: ‘Officially we are maternal cousins, and cousins can marry by special decree, if they promise to sterilize their first five children. But, moreover, the father-in-law of my mother was the brother of your grandfather. Right?’
‘That’s what I’m told,’ said Van serenely.
‘Not sufficiently distant,’ she mused, ‘or is it?’
‘Far enough, fair enough.’
‘Funny — I saw that verse in small violet letters before you put it into orange ones — just one second before you spoke. Spoke, smoke. Like the puff preceding a distant cannon shot.’
‘Physically,’ she continued, ‘we are more like twins than cousins, and twins or even siblings can’t marry, of course, or will be jailed and "altered," if they persevere.’
‘Unless,’ said Van, ‘they are specially decreed cousins.’
(Van was already unlocking the door — the green door against which they were to bang so often with boneless fists in their later separate dreams.) (1.24)
According to Ada, she saw the verse ‘Far enough, fair enough’ in small violet letters before Van put it into orange ones. Because love is blind, Van (who is sterile and cannot hope to have an offspring) fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband, a namesake of Van's Russian tutor) 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.