In his essay The Texture of Time (1924) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) refuses to grant the future the status of Time:
Here a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman’s driving license, how did the ‘Prof’ reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since ‘it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.’
Throw him out. Who said I shall die?
Refuting the determinist’s statement more elegantly: unconsciousness, far from awaiting us, with flyback and noose, somewhere ahead, envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable sides, being a character not of Time itself but of organic decline natural to all things whether conscious of Time or not. That I know others die is irrelevant to the case. I also know that you, and, probably, I, were born, but that does not prove we went through the chronal phase called the Past: my Present, my brief span of consciousness, tells me I did, not the silent thunder of the infinite unconsciousness proper to my birth fifty-two years and 195 days ago. My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon style plafond peint. (Part Four)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): et trève etc.: and enough of that painted-ceiling style of mine.
In Staryi mir i Rossiya ("The Old World and Russia," 1854), the three letters to William Linton (the editor of The English Republic), Iskander (Alexander Herzen's penname) speaks of politics and says that there is nothing that would be absolutely necessary, that the future may not come, because a geological cataclysm may destroy not only the Eastern question, but also all other questions - for the absence of those who ask questions:
Нет ничего абсолютно необходимого. Будущее не бывает неотвратимо предрешено; неминуемого предназначения нет. Будущее может и вовсе не наступить. Геологический катаклизм вполне может уничтожить не только восточный вопрос, но и все прочие, — за отсутствием задающих вопросы.
Будущее слагается из элементов, имеющихся под рукой, из окружающих условий; оно продолжает прошедшее; общие устремления, смутно выраженные, изменяются в зависимости от обстоятельств. Обстоятельства решают, как это произойдет, и неясная возможность становится совершившимся фактом. Россия точно так же может овладеть Европою до Атлантического океана, как и подвергнуться европейскому нашествию до Урала. (Letter Two)
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-70) is the author of Kto vinovat? ("Who is to Blame?", 1847), S togo berega ("From the Other Shore," 1848-50) and Byloe i Dumy ("Bygones and Meditations," 1852-70). The Russian title of VN's autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) is Drugie berega ("Other Shores"). After the October Revolution of 1917 the Bolshaya Morskaya street in St. Petersburg where VN was born in 1899 was renamed the Herzen street.
Brother and sister, Van and Ada are life-long lovers. Herzen's first wife, born Natalia Aleksandrovna Zakharyin (1817-52), was Herzen's first cousin.
In The Texture of Time Van mentions Alice in the Camera Obscura, a book that was given to him on his eighth birthday:
The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered all over the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge’s prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three, confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven — except, perhaps, in one matter which happens to be hard to settle. Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed — and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance — so exact that the ‘something’ which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it ‘somehow’ to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the ‘e.g.’ worked — he was my father’s former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday). (Part Four)
Alice in the Camera Obscura seems to blend Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) with Camera Obscura (1932), VN’s novel translated into English by the author as Laughter in the Dark (1938). In 1923, at the age of twenty-four, VN translated (as Anya v strane chudes) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (known on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set, as Palace in Wonderland) into Russian.
According to Van Veen, he was born on January 1, 1870; but, if Van’s eighth birthday is January 1, 1908, he was born on January 1, 1900. In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December, 1899, in the former capital of his half-brother’s country. Like Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Sebastian Knight was born na bregakh Nevy (upon the Neva’s banks). In a letter to Van Ada mentions the legendary river of Old Rus:
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the legendary river of Old Rus. Da. (2.1)
Da is "yes" in Russian. In Dutch the surname Veen means what Neva means in Finnish: “peat bog.” A son of Ivan Yakovlev (1767-1846), Herzen brings to mind myn Herz ("my Heart"), as Prince Menshikov addressed the tsar Peter I (the founder of St. Petersburg who studied shipbuilding in Holland).
For Herzen's monthly Polyarnaya zvezda (The Polar Star) William James Linton (1812-97) drew the profile portraits of the five Decembrists (Pestel, Ryleev, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Muravyov-Apostol and Kakhovski) who were hanged on the eastern rampart of the Kronverk on July 13, 1826:
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions Ryleev (1795-1826):
The estate of Batovo enters history in 1805 when it becomes the property of Anastasia Matveevna Rïleev, born Essen. Her son, Kondratiy Fyodorovich Rïleev (1795–1826), minor poet, journalist, and famous Decembrist, spent most of his summers in the region, addressed elegies to the Oredezh, and sang Prince Aleksey’s castle, the jewel of its banks. Legend and logic, a rare but strong partnership, seem to indicate, as I have more fully explained in my notes to Onegin, that the Rïleev pistol duel with Pushkin, of which so little is known, took place in the Batovo park, between May 6 and 9 (Old Style), 1820. Pushkin, with two friends, Baron Anton Delvig and Pavel Yakovlev, who were accompanying him a little way on the first lap of his long journey from St. Petersburg to Ekaterinoslav, had quietly turned off the Luga highway, at Rozhestveno, crossed the bridge (hoof-thud changing to brief clatter), and followed the old rutty road westward to Batovo. There, in front of the manor house, Rïleev was eagerly awaiting them. He had just sent his wife, in her last month of pregnancy, to her estate near Voronezh, and was anxious to get the duel over—and, God willing, join her there. I can feel upon my skin and in my nostrils the delicious country roughness of the northern spring day which greeted Pushkin and his two seconds as they got out of their coach and penetrated into the linden avenue beyond the Batovo platbands, still virginally black. I see so plainly the three young men (the sum of their years equals my present age) following their host and two persons unknown, into the park. At that date small crumpled violets showed through the carpet of last year’s dead leaves, and freshly emerged Orange-tips settled on the shivering dandelions. For one moment fate may have wavered between preventing a heroic rebel from heading for the gallows, and depriving Russia of Eugene Onegin; but then did neither. (3.2)