On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which VN's novel Ada, 1969, 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, while the territory of the Soviet Russia, from Kurland to the Kuriles, is occupied by Tartary (the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate ruled by Khan Sosso):
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.
In Staryi mir i Rossiya ("The Old World and Russia," 1854), the three letters to William Linton (the editor of The English Republic who published them in his newspaper), Herzen speaks of politics and compares the United States and Russia to the two vast flatlands that, having bent Europe, touch each other with their napes:
Взгляните, например, на эти две огромные равнины, которые соприкасаются затылками, обогнув Европу. Зачем они так пространны, к чему они готовятся, что означает пожирающая их страсть к деятельности, к расширению? Эти два мира, столь противоположные и все же в чем-то схожие, — это Соединенные Штаты и Россия. Никто не сомневается, что Америка — продолжение европейского развития и не более как его продолжение. Лишенная всякой инициативы, всякой изобретательности, Америка готова принять у себя Европу, осуществить социальные идеи, но она не станет низвергать древнее здание... не покинет свои плодородные поля. (Letter One)
When Herzen wrote his letters to Linton, Alaska (known as Lyaska on Demonia) and Fort Ross in northern California were still a part of the Russian Empire. The United States purchased Alaska for a sum of $7.2 million (equivalent to $117 million in 2021) in 1867 (the year when William Linton emigrated to the US).
In a letter of Dec. 18-20, 1839, to his wife (and first cousin) Natalia Alexandrovna Alexander Herzen describes a stage version of Shakespeare's Hamlet (with the great Karatygin as Hamlet) that he saw on the eve in the Alexandrine Theater in St. Petersburg and mentions a scene in which Hamlet demonstrates Yorick's skull on the tip of his sword and says: "Here hung his lips, and now ha-ha!..." (Herzen quotes Hamlet's words in Polevoy's translation):
Велик, необъятен Шекспир! Я сейчас возвратился с «Гамлета», и, поверишь ли, не токмо слезы лились из глаз моих; но я рыдал. Нет, не читать, это надобно видеть (voir c'est avoir) для того, чтобы усвоить себе. Сцена с Офелией и потом та, когда Гамлет хохочет, после того как король убежал с представления, были превосходно сыграны Каратыгиным; и безумная Офелия была хороша. Что это за сила гения так уловить жизнь во всей необъятности ее от Гамлета до могильщика! А сам Гамлет страшный и великий. Прав Гёте: Шекспир творит, как бог, тут ни дополнять, ни возражать нечего, его создание есть потому, что есть, его создание имеет непреложную реальность и истинность... Я воротился домой весь взволнованный... Теперь вижу темную ночь и бледный Гамлет показывает на конце шпаги череп и говорит: «Тут были губы, а теперь ха-ха!..» Ты сделаешься больна после этой пьесы. — Завтра в Эрмитаж.
Abraham Milton (the founder of Amerussia) seems to be a cross between Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865, and John Milton (1608-74), the author of Paradise Lost (1667). On April 15, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre by John Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland. During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother, a professional actress) mentions Lincoln's second wife (actually it is Milton, the author of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, who was married twice):
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.
The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond of the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In Ada, January 3 is Lucette's birthday.
It seems that on Demonia the Russians were defeated in the battle of Kulikovo (Sept. 8, 1380) by the Tartars and migrated, across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean, to America. In his article Nabeg nemetskikh tatar v Tambovskuyu guberniyu ("A Raid of the German Tartars into the Province of Tambov," 1860) Herzen compares the Russian authorites to the Tartars who were promoted to the status of the Germans for conquering Russia:
Пятый лист «Под суд» напечатан. В нем рассказана возмутительная история бессмысленного и безнаказанного дранья розгами больше ста крестьян генерал-адъютантом Толстым, тамбовским губернатором Данзасом и разными подьячими гражданского ведомства и палачами военного. Дело изложено подробно, без фраз, простым деловым слогом. Оно требует изучения и вполне заслуживает его; в этой службе правительства кабакам выразилась вся безнравственность петербургского периода, отсутствие всех юридических понятий и человеческих чувств. Так, как при Петре I Меньшиков пристреливал стрельцов на кремлевских зубцах, не думая вовсе о том, что это работа палачова подмастерья, — так и теперь ни одному генерал-адъютанту, флигель-адъютанту, плац-адъютанту и просто адъютанту в голову не приходит, что сечь, даже и по высочайшему повелению, не совместно с достоинством порядочного человека. Они все еще представляют себя татарами, пожалованными в немцы за завоевание России.
Tambovskaya kaznacheysha ("The Tambov Treasurer's Wife," 1838) is a poem by Lermontov written in the Eugene Onegin stanza. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua, Van mentions Palermontovia (a country that blends Palermo, the largest city in and capital of Sicily, with Lermontov):
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)
In several poems Alexander Blok (1880-1921) uses the phrase shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound). Blok is the author of Na pole Kulikovom ("In the Field of Kulikovo," 1908), a cycle of five poems, and of Novaya Amerika ("The New America," 1912). In his poem Blok calls Russia "the new America."
In his prophetical poem Predskazanie ("Prediction," 1830) Lermontov (a poet whose name begins with an L) predicted the fall of the Russian monarchy in February 1917 and the October Revolution. Pamyati Gertsena ("In Memory of Herzen," 1912) is an article by Lenin ("the powerful man" mentioned by Lermontov in his poem) written for the centenary of Herzen's birth. According to Van, a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another exists between Terra and Antiterra.
After the L disaster electricity was banned on Demonia. According to Pyotr Sergeyenko, in 1908 Leo Tolstoy told him that Herzen (whom Tolstoy visited in London in March 1861) struck him by his appearance of a small, fattish man and by the inner electricity that emanated from him:
«Он поразил Льва Николаевича своей внешностью небольшого, толстенького человека и внутренним электричеством, исходившим из него.
— Живой, отзывчивый, умный, интересный, — пояснил Лев Николаевич, по обыкновению иллюстрируя оттенки своих мыслей движениями рук, — Герцен сразу заговорил со мною так, как будто мы давно знакомы, и сразу заинтересовал меня своею личностью… Я не встречал более таких обаятельных людей, как он. Он неизмеримо выше всех политических деятелей того и этого времени» (П. А. Сергеенко, "Толстой и его современники," 1911, с. 13-14).
By the L disaster Van does not mean Elevated. 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 (see the image in my previous post).
Ada is addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen. In a letter of August 24, 1898, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he fears Sergeyenko (Chekhov's former schoolmate in a Taganrog gymnasium, a wag who became a boring person when he imagined that he was a great writer and friend of Tolstoy) and compares Sergeyenko (1854-1930) to pogrebal'nye drogi (a bier) placed vertically:
Я строю еще новую школу, по счету третью. Мои школы считаются образцовыми говорю это, чтобы Вы не подумали, что Ваши 200 р. я истратил на какую-нибудь чепуху. 28 августа я не буду у Толстого, во-первых, оттого, что холодно и сыро ехать к нему, и во-вторых зачем ехать? Жизнь Толстого есть сплошной юбилей, и нет резона выделять какой-нибудь один лень; в-третьих, был у меня Меньшиков, приехавший прямо из Ясной Поляны, и говорил, что Л. Н. морщится и крякает при одной мысли, что к нему могут приехать 28 августа поздравители; и, в-четвертых, я не поеду в Ясную Поляну, потому что там будет Сергеенко. С Сергеенко я учился вместе в гимназии; то был комик, весельчак, остряк, но как только он вообразил себя великим писателем и другом Толстого (которого, кстати сказать, он страшно утомляет), то стал нуднейшим в мире человеком. Я боюсь его, это погребальные дроги, поставленные вертикально.
In her song in Shakespeare's Hamlet (4.5) mad Ophelia mentions the bier:
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear:--
Fare you well, my dove!
You must sing a-down a-down,
An you call him a-down-a.
O, how the wheel becomes it!
It is the false steward,
that stole his master's daughter.
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha' mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls,
I pray God.
God be wi' ye.
Describing Aqua's torments, Van says that the L disaster followed by the Great Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times:
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).
Shved (Mysl' i otkrovenie), "The Swede (A Thought and Revelation)," is an essay by Herzen (who worked on it in the late 1830s) that did not reach us. The Swede in Herzen's piece must be Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic, the author of "Other Planets (Earths in the Universe)," Planets or Worlds in Our Solar System, and Worlds in the Starry Heavens, and Their Inhabitants, as Well as the Spirits and Angels There: Drawn from Things Heard and Seen (1758). Swedenborg became best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). Aqua's last note was signed "My sister’s sister who teper’ iz ada (‘now is out of hell’):"
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bar (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
It seems that Aqua went mad, because she was poisoned by her sister Marina. According to Marina, she used to love history. In Herzen's story Doctor Krupov (1847) Dr Krupov (the author of a work entitled "On Mental Disorders in General and on their Epidemic Progression in Particular") says that history is the autobiography of a madman:
История -- горячка, производимая благодетельной натурой, посредством которой человечество пытается отделываться от излишней животности; но как бы реакция ни была полезна, все же она -- болезнь. Впрочем, в наш образованный век стыдно доказывать простую мысль, что история -- аутобиография сумасшедшего.
Dr Krupov brings to mind Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin's wife, 1869-1939). In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev mentions not only fat Herzen (whom Chernyshevski visited in London), but also Lunacharski (the minister of education in Lenin's government, 1875-1933) and Krupskaya:
Ленин считал, что Чернышевский "единственный действительно великий писатель, который сумел с пятидесятых годов вплоть до 1888 (скостил ему один) остаться на уровне цельного философского материализма". Как то Крупская, обернувшись на ветру к Луначарскому, с мягкой грустью сказала ему: "Вряд ли кого-нибудь Владимир Ильич так любил... Я думаю, что между ним и Чернышевским было очень много общего". "Да, несомненно было общее, - добавляет Луначарский, сначала было отнесшийся к этому замечанию скептически. - Было общее и в ясности слога, и в подвижности речи... в широте и глубине суждений, в революционном пламени... В этом соединении огромного содержания и внешней скромности, и наконец в моральном облике обоих этих людей". Статью Чернышевского "Антропологический принцип в философии" Стеклов называет "первым философским манифестом русского коммунизма"; знаменательно, что этим первым манифестом был школьный пересказ, ребяческое суждение о труднейших моральных вопросах. "Европейская теория утилитаризма, - говорит Страннолюбский, несколько перефразируя Волынского, - явилась у Чернышевского в упрощенном, сбивчивом, карикатурном виде. Пренебрежительно и развязно судя о Шопенгауере, под критическим ногтем которого его философия не прожила бы и секунды, он из всех прежних мыслителей, по странной ассоциации идей и ошибочным воспоминаниям, признает лишь Спинозу и Аристотеля, которого он думает, что продолжает".
Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy day, Krupskaya turned to Lunacharski and said to him with soft sorrow: “There was hardly anyone Vladimir Ilyich liked so much… I think he had a great deal in common with Chernyshevski.” “Yes, they undoubtedly had much in common,” adds Lunacharski, who had tended at first to treat this remark with skepticism. “They had in common both clarity of style and mobility of speech… breadth and depth of judgement, revolutionary fire… that combination of enormous content with a modest exterior, and finally their joint moral makeup.” Steklov calls Chernyshevski’s article, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy,” the “first philosophical manifesto of Russian communism”; it is significant that this first manifesto was a schoolboy’s rendering, an infantile assessment of the most difficult moral questions. “The European theory of materialism,” says Strannolyubski, rephrasing Volynski somewhat, “took on with Chernyshevski a simplified, muddled, and grotesque form. Passing scornful and impertinent judgment on Schopenhauer, under whose critical fingernail his own saltatory thinking would not have survived for a second, he recognized out of all former thinkers, by a strange association of ideas and according to his mistaken memories, only Spinoza and Aristotle, whom he imagined himself to be continuing.”
In the surname Lunacharski there is luna (moon) and Charski, the lawyer in The Gift and a character in Pushkin's unfinished novella Egipetskie nochi ("The Egyptian Nights," 1835). In The Life of Chernyshevski Fyodor quotes Charski's words to the improvvisatore in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights:
Пушкина нет в списке книг, доставленных Чернышевскому в крепость, да и немудрено: несмотря на заслуги Пушкина ("изобрел русскую поэзию и приучил общество ее читать"), это всё-таки был прежде всего сочинитель остреньких стишков о ножках (причем "ножки" в интонации шестидесятых годов - когда вся природа омещанилась, превратившись в "травку" и "пичужек" - уже значило не то, что разумел Пушкин, - а скорее немецкое "фюсхен"). Особенно возмутительным казалось ему (как и Белинскому), что Пушкин стал так "бесстрастен" к концу жизни. "Прекратились те приятельские отношения, памятником которых осталось стихотворение "Арион", вскользь поясняет Чернышевский, но как полно было священного значения это вскользь для читателя "Современника" (которого мы вдруг представили себе рассеянно и жадно кусающим яблоко, - переносящим на яблоко жадность чтения и опять глазами рвущим строки). Поэтому Николая Гавриловича немало должно быть раздражала, как лукавый намек, как посягательство на гражданские лавры, которых производитель "пошлой болтовни" (его отзыв о "Стамбул гяуры нынче славят") был недостоин, авторская ремарка в предпоследней сцене "Бориса Годунова": "Пушкин идет, окруженный народом".
«Перечитывая самые бранчивые критики, – писал как-то Пушкин осенью, в Болдине, – я нахожу их столь забавными, что не понимаю, как я мог на них досадовать; кажется, если бы я хотел над ними посмеяться, то ничего не мог бы лучшего придумать, как только их перепечатать без всякого замечания». Да ведь именно это и сделал Чернышевский со статьей Юркевича: карикатурное повторение? И вот, «кружащаяся пылинка попала в пушкинский луч, проникающий между штор русской критической мысли», по образному и злому выражению биографа. Мы имеем в виду следующую магическую гамму судьбы: в саратовском дневнике Чернышевский применил к своему жениховству цитату из «Египетских ночей», с характерным для него, бесслухого, искажением и невозможным заключительным слогом: «Я принял вызов наслаждения, как вызов битвы принял бы». За это «бы» судьба, союзница муз (сама знающая толк в этой частице), ему и отомстила, – да с какой изощренной незаметностью в нарастании кары!
Казалось, какое имеет отношение к этой злосчастной цитате замечание Чернышевского (в 62 году), что: «Если бы человек мог все свои мысли, касающиеся общественных дел, заявлять в… собраниях, ему бы незачем делать из них журнальных статей»? Однако Немезида здесь уже просыпается. «Вместо того, чтобы писать, он бы говорил, – продолжает Чернышевский, – а если мысли эти должны быть известны всем, не принимавшим участия в собрании, их бы записал стенограф». И развивается возмездие в Сибири, где одни лиственницы да якуты слушали его, ему не давал покоя образ «эстрады» и «залы», в которой так удобно собрана, так отзывчиво зыблется публика, ибо, в конце концов, он, как пушкинский импровизатор (с поправкой на «бы»), профессией своей – а потом несбыточным идеалом – избрал рассуждения на заданную тему; на самом закате жизни он сочиняет произведение, в котором мечту воплощает: из Астрахани, незадолго до смерти, он отправляет Лаврову свои «Вечера у княгини Старобельской» для «Русской Мысли» (не нашедшей возможным их напечатать), а затем посылает «Вставку» – прямо в типографию:
«К тому месту, где говорится, что общество перешло из столового салона в салон, приготовленный для слушания сказки Вязовского, и описывается устройство этой аудитории… распределение стенографов и стенографисток на два отдела по двум столам или не обозначено там или обозначено неудовлетворительно. В моей черновой рукописи это место читается так: “По сторонам эстрады стояли два стола для стенографов… Вязовский подошел к стенографам, пожал им руки, и разговаривал с ними, пока общество выбирало места”. Те строки беловой рукописи, которые по смыслу соответствуют цитируемому мною месту черновой, должны быть заменены следующими строками: “Мужчины стесненной рамою стали у подмостков, вдоль стен за последними стульями; музыканты со своими пюпитрами занимали обе стороны подмостков… Импровизатор, встреченный оглушительным плеском, поднявшимся со всех сторон…”. Виноват, виноват, мы тут все спутали, – подвернулась выписка из “Египетских Ночей”. Восстановим: “Между эстрадой и передним полукругом аудитории (пишет Чернышевский в несуществующую типографию), несколько правее и левее эстрады, стояли два стола; за тем, который был налево перед эстрадой, если смотреть из середины полукругов к эстраде…”» и т.д. и т.д. – еще много слов в таком же роде, все равно не выражающих ничего.
«Вот вам тема, – сказал ему Чарский: – поэт сам избирает предметы для своих песен: толпа не имеет права управлять его вдохновением».
Pushkin does not figure in the list of books sent to Chernyshevski at the fortress, and no wonder: despite Pushkin’s services (“he invented Russian poetry and taught society to read it”—two statements completely untrue), he was nevertheless above all a writer of witty little verses about women’s little feet—and “little feet” in the intonation of the sixties—when the whole of nature had been Philistinized into travka (diminutive of “grass”) and pichuzhki (diminutive of “birds”)—already meant something quite different from Pushkin’s “petits pieds” something that had now become closer to the mawkish “Füsschen” It seemed particularly astonishing to him (as it did also to Belinski) that Pushkin became so “aloof” toward the end of his life. “An end was put to those friendly relations whose monument has remained the poem ‘Arion,’” explains Chernyshevski in passing, but how full of sacred meaning was this casual reference to the forbidden subject of Decembrism for the reader of The Contemporary (whom we suddenly imagine as absentmindedly and hungrily biting into an apple—transferring the hunger of his reading to the apple, and again eating the words with his eyes). Therefore Nikolay Gavrilovich must have been more than a little irritated by a stage direction in the penultimate scene of Boris Godunov, a stage direction resembling a sly hint and an encroachment upon civic laurels hardly deserved by the author of “vulgar driver (see Chernyshevski’s remarks on the poem “Stamboul is by the giaours now lauded”): “Pushkin comes surrounded by the people.”
“Reading over the most abusive critics,” wrote Pushkin during an autumn at Boldino, “I find them so amusing that I don’t understand how I could have been angry at them; meseems, if I wanted to laugh at them, I could think of nothing better than just to reprint them with no comment at all.” Curiously enough, that is exactly what Chernyshevski did with Professor Yurkevich’s article: a grotesque repetition! And now “a revolving speck of dust has got caught in a ray of Pushkin’s light, which has penetrated between the blinds of Russian critical thought,” to use Strannolyubski’s caustic metaphor. We have in mind the following magic gamut of fate: in his Saratov diary Chernyshevski applied two lines from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights” to his courtship, completely misquoting the second one, with a characteristic (for him who had no ear) distortion: “I [he] met the challenge of delight / As warfare’s challenge met I’d have (instead of “As he would meet in days of war / The challenge of a savage battle”). For this “I’d have,” fate—the ally of the muses (and herself an expert in conditional forms), took revenge on him—and with what refined stealth in the evolution of the punishment!
What connection, it seems, could there be between this ill-starred misquotation and Chernyshevski’s remark ten years later (in 1862): “If people were able to announce all their ideas concerning public affairs at… meetings there would be no need to make magazine articles out of them”? However, at this point Nemesis is already awakening. “Instead of writing, one would speak,” continues Chernyshevski, “and if these ideas had to reach everyone who had not taken part in the meeting they could be noted down by a stenographer.” And vengeance unfolds: in Siberia, where his only listeners were the larches and the Yakuts, he was haunted by the image of a “platform” and a “lecture hall,” in which it was so convenient for the public to gather and where the latter would ripple so responsively, for, in the final analysis, he, as Pushkin’s Improvvisatore (he of the “Egyptian Nights”) but a poorer versificator, had chosen for his profession—and later as an unrealizable ideal—variations on a given theme; in the very twilight of his life he composes a work in which he embodies his dream: from Astrakhan, not long before his death, he sends Lavrov his “Evenings at the Princess Starobelski’s” for the literary review Russian Thought (which did not find it possible to print them), and follows this up with “An Insertion”—addressed straight to the printer:
In that part where it says that the people have gone from the salon dining room into the salon proper, which has been prepared for them to listen to Vyazovski’s fairy tale, and there is a description of the arrangement of the auditorium… the distribution of the male and female stenographers into two sections at two tables either is not indicated or else is indicated unsatisfactorily. In my draft this part reads as follows: “Along the sides of the platform stood two tables for the stenographers… Vyazovski went up to the stenographers, shook hands with them, and stood chatting with them while the company took their places.” The lines in the fair copy whose sense corresponds to the passage quoted from my draft should be replaced now by the following lines: “The men, forming a constricted frame, stood near the stage and along the walls behind the last chairs; the musicians with their stands occupied both sides of the stage…. The improvvisatore, greeted by deafening applause rising from all sides…”
Sorry, sorry, we’ve mixed everything up—got hold of an extract from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights.” Let us restore the situation: “Between the platform and foremost hemicycle of the auditorium [writes Chernyshevski to a nonexistent printer], a little to the right and left of the platform, stood two tables; at the one which was on the left in front of the platform, if you looked from the middle of the hemicycles toward the platform …” etc., etc.—with many more words of the same sort, none of them really expressing anything.
“Here is a theme for you,” said Charski to the improvvisatore. “The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems; the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.” (The Gift, Chapter Four)