At the dinner in Bellevue Hotel in Mont Roux Dorothy Vinelander (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Ada's sister-in-law) tells Van that her brother (Andrey Vinelander, Ada's husband) is redchayshiy chelovek (a most rare human being):
‘How did you like my brother?’ asked Dorothy. ‘On redchayshiy chelovek (he’s a most rare human being). I can’t tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks — as I think you also did — no, no, do not negate it! — because, as I have always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense’ (that cheerless smile again). ‘Ada is certainly a "perfect beauty," a real muirninochka — even when she winces like that — but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics — right, Professor? — in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.’
‘Drop her a curtsey,’ gloomily remarked Van to Ada.
‘Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her’ — (opening her palm in the wake of Ada’s retreating hand). ‘I’ve shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we’ve had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we’ve gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I’ve always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium — you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille? — our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other — that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?’
‘I don’t attend school any longer,’ said Van, stifling a yawn; ‘and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to "explain" anything, I merely describe.’
‘Still, you cannot deny that certain insights —’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): muirninochka: Hiberno-Russian caressive term.
potins de famille: family gossip.
In his essay Meteor literatury ("The Literary Meteor," 1961) N. L. Stepanov quotes Gogol's epigram on Pashchenko (Gogol's schoolmate at the Nezhin Lyceum), Nasmeshniku ne kstati ("To a Mocker out of Place"), that begins with the line Nash Vralkin v mire syom redchayshiy chelovek! (Our Vralkin is in this world a most rare human being!):
Эпиграмма "Насмешнику не кстати" принадлежала Гоголю. Он ее написал, имея в виду приятеля - Пащенко, который в своих рассказах весьма далеко отступал от истины:
Наш Вралькин в мире сем редчайший человек!
Подобного ему не сыщешь в целый век.
Как станет говорить - заслушаться всем надо,
Как станет - так и рай вдруг сделает из ада.
Был в Риме, в Лондоне... да где он не бывал,
Весь мир на языке искусно облетал...
Пащенко обиделся и в другом журнале ответил Гоголю столь же острой и язвительной эпиграммой.
Гоголь считал себя прежде всего поэтом и писал в гимназии много стихов. "Битва при Калке" являлась отрывком из его эпической поэмы "Россия под игом татар", над которой он долго работал, вдохновленный "Россиадой" Хераскова. Однако Гоголь пробовал свои силы не только в эпическом, но и лирическом жанре. Он написал чувствительную балладу "Две рыбки", в которой под двумя рыбками подразумевал себя и своего умершего брата.
In Gogol's comedy Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836) Vralkin ("Mr. Liar") will become Khlestakov. Among the juvenile stuff that Gogol wrote at the gymnasium was an epic poem Rossiya pod igom tatar ("Russia under the Yoke of the Tartars"). On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) ‘Russia’ is a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, and the territory of the Soviet Russia is occupied by Tartary, an independent inferno:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
On Antiterra the Russians must have lost the battle of Kulikovo (Sept. 8, 1380) and migrated, across "the ha-ha of a doubled ocean," to America. Novaya Amerika ("The New America," 1912) is a poem by Alexander Blok, the author of Na pole Kulikovom ("On the Field of Kulikovo," 1908), a cycle of five poems. In his essay Solntse nad Rossiey (“Sun above Russia,” 1908) written for Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday Blok mentions the pistols of d’Anthès and Martynov (the murderers of Pushkin and Lermontov), a vampire who came to suck the blood of dying Gogol and the Semyonovski Square (the place of Dostoevski's mock execution):
Всё привычно, знакомо, как во все великие дни, переживаемые в России. Вспоминается всё мрачное прошлое родины, всё, как подобает в великие дни. Чья мёртвая рука управляла пистолетами Дантеса и Мартынова? Кто пришёл сосать кровь умирающего Гоголя? В каком тайном и быстро сжигающем огне сгорели Белинский и Добролюбов? Кто увёл Достоевского на Семёновский плац и в мёртвый дом?
The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In Dostoevski’s story Son smeshnogo cheloveka (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” 1877) the narrator shoots himself dead in his dream and an angel takes him through space to a planet very much like Earth, but the earth before the Fall.