Subject
Demon's crooked heart
From
Date
Body
But what Demon, in the goodness of his crooked heart, omitted to tell Marina was that the imbecile, in secret from his art adviser, Mr Aix, had acquired for a few thousand dollars from a gaming friend of Demon's, and with Demon's blessings, a couple of fake Correggios - only to resell them by some unforgivable fluke to an equally imbecile collector, for half a million which Demon considered henceforth as a loan his cousin should certainly refund him if sanity counted for something on this gemel planet. And, conversely, Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get 'something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology'). (1.38)
Van's and Ada's father, Demon is the son of Dedalus Veen. Daedalus being the architect who built the labyrinth for Minos, Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) jokingly calls his father-in-law Dementiy Labirintovich: Nu i balagur-zhe vi, Dementiy Labirintovich. (3.8)
In Merezhkovski's The Resurrection of Gods. Leonardo da Vinci (Book Seventeen, "Death: The Winged Forerunner", chapter VII) the king Francis I, looking at Leonardo's Mona Lisa, compares a woman's heart to Daedalus's labyrinth, a tangle that even the devil would not unravel:
- Чтобы написать такой портрет, - продолжал король, - мало быть великим художником, надо проникнуть во все тайны женского сердца - лабиринта Дедалова, клубка, которого сам чёрт не распутает! Вот ведь, кажется, тиха, скромна, смиренна, ручки сложила, как монахиня, воды не замутит, а поди-ка, доверься ей, попробуй угадать, - что у неё на душе!
Souvent femme varie,
Bien fol est qui s'y fiе
привёл он два стиха из собственной песенки, которую однажды, в минуту раздумья о женском коварстве, вырезал остриём алмаза на оконном стекле в замке Шамбор.
The king quotes two lines of his own song that he engraved with a diamond point on a windowpane in the Chambord castle.
In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Three: XXXVII: 13-14) Tatiana enamored with Onegin writes his monogram on the bemisted windowpane:
the dear soul
wrote with her charming finger
on the bemisted glass
the cherished monogram: an O and E.
Asking the advice of Bess, uncle Dan refers to Ada as "a half-Russian child." In EO (Two: XII: 4-5) Lenski is "half-Russian" for his neighbors:
all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
As they return from the Larins (EO, Three: V: 8-9), Onegin compares Lenski's bride Olga (Tatiana's younger sister) to a Vandyke Madonna:
In Olga's features there's no life,
just as in a Vandyke Madonna.
Onegin tells Lenski:
I'd have chosen the other,
if I had been like you a poet. (ibid., 6-7)
If Van were a poet, he, too, might have chosen the other (Ada younger sister Lucette). But Lucette is only eight when Van first comes to Ardis and falls in love with barely twelve-year-old Ada.
Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. (1.1) The older Demon grows, the younger are his mistresses:
'Extraordinary,' said Van, 'they had been growing younger and younger - I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.'
'You never loved your father,' said Ada sadly.
'Oh, I did and do - tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.' (3.8)
At Marina's cremation Demon tells Ada that he will not cheat the poor grubs. But he breaks his promise perishing in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. (3.7)
Attempting to escape from Cretes, Daedalus's son Icarus flew so high that his wings of wax (made by his father) melted from the heat of the sun and he plunged to his death in the sea.
Like the legendary Greek, Leonardo experimented with flying machines. In Merezhkovski's novel, one of Leonardo's pupils, Zoroastro (Astro) de Peretola, attempts a flight but falls down and remains crippled for life (and, which is even worse, goes mad). Another pupil, Giovanni Beltraffio, hangs himself using one of those firm silk laces that Leonardo used for his flying machines:
- Вот, - по-прежнему спокойно молвил Астро, указывая в глубину чердака, где было темно. И Леонардо увидел под одной из поперечных толстых балок Джованни, стоявшего прямо, неподвижно, странно вытянувшегося и как будто глядевшего на него в упор широко раскрытыми глазами.
- Джованни! - вскрикнул учитель и вдруг побледнел, голос пресёкся.
Он бросился к нему, увидел страшно искажённое лицо, прикоснулся к руке его, она была холодна. Тело качнулось: оно висело на крепком шёлковом шнурке, одном из тех, какие употреблял учитель для своих летательных машин, привязанном к новому железному крюку, видимо, недавно ввинченному в балку. Тут же лежал кусок мыла, которым самоубийца, должно быть, намылил петлю. (Book Sixteen, "Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael," chapter I)
Dead Giovanni, as he stands upright and seems to stare with wide-opened eyes at Leonardo, reminds one of Kirillov, a madman who shots himself dead in Dostoevski's Besy (The Possessed, 1872). Demon's poor mad wife Aqua resembles Maria Lebyadkin, a character in that novel.
Demon's death between the aquamarine abyss of the ocean and the ultramarine abyss of the sky brings to mind the last entry in Giovanni's diary:
"Белая Дьяволица - всегда, везде. Будь она проклята! Последняя тайна: два - едино. Христос и Антихрист - едино. Небо вверху и небо внизу. - Да не будет, да не будет сего! Лучше смерть. Предаю душу мою в руки Твои, Боже мой! Суди меня".
and the inscription on the emerald that Mona Cassandra shows to Giovanni:
На одной стороне изумруда вырезано было коптскими, на другой - древними эллинскими письменами четыре стиха:
Небо - вверху, небо - внизу,
Звёзды - вверху, звёзды - внизу.
Всё, что вверху, всё и внизу, -
Если поймёшь, благо тебе.
The sky is above, the sky is below,
the stars are above, the stars are below.
All what is above, is also below.
If you can grasp it, you are blessed. (Book Fifteen, "The Holy Inquisition," chapter II)
Demon is a gambler and a rake. The setting of Hodasevich's poem Zvyozdy (The Stars, 1925) is a cheap casino (the shameful puddle reflecting God's Day Four when he created the stars) where naked girls (seven stars of Ursa Major and a thin-legged comet) are dancing. On the other hand, Igrok (The Gambler, 1867) is a short novel by Dostoevski. One of its characters, la baboulinka (as de Grieux and Blanche nickname Polina's grandmother), plays roulette every time placing her bet on zero.
Uncle Dan dies an odd Boschean death. According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian), Dan's buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of 'play-zero' (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada's sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. (2.10)
"Play-zero" is a play on plaisir. Demon married Aqua "out of spite* and pity, a not unusual blend."
Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations. (1.3)
*the French call it par depit
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Van's and Ada's father, Demon is the son of Dedalus Veen. Daedalus being the architect who built the labyrinth for Minos, Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) jokingly calls his father-in-law Dementiy Labirintovich: Nu i balagur-zhe vi, Dementiy Labirintovich. (3.8)
In Merezhkovski's The Resurrection of Gods. Leonardo da Vinci (Book Seventeen, "Death: The Winged Forerunner", chapter VII) the king Francis I, looking at Leonardo's Mona Lisa, compares a woman's heart to Daedalus's labyrinth, a tangle that even the devil would not unravel:
- Чтобы написать такой портрет, - продолжал король, - мало быть великим художником, надо проникнуть во все тайны женского сердца - лабиринта Дедалова, клубка, которого сам чёрт не распутает! Вот ведь, кажется, тиха, скромна, смиренна, ручки сложила, как монахиня, воды не замутит, а поди-ка, доверься ей, попробуй угадать, - что у неё на душе!
Souvent femme varie,
Bien fol est qui s'y fiе
привёл он два стиха из собственной песенки, которую однажды, в минуту раздумья о женском коварстве, вырезал остриём алмаза на оконном стекле в замке Шамбор.
The king quotes two lines of his own song that he engraved with a diamond point on a windowpane in the Chambord castle.
In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Three: XXXVII: 13-14) Tatiana enamored with Onegin writes his monogram on the bemisted windowpane:
the dear soul
wrote with her charming finger
on the bemisted glass
the cherished monogram: an O and E.
Asking the advice of Bess, uncle Dan refers to Ada as "a half-Russian child." In EO (Two: XII: 4-5) Lenski is "half-Russian" for his neighbors:
all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
As they return from the Larins (EO, Three: V: 8-9), Onegin compares Lenski's bride Olga (Tatiana's younger sister) to a Vandyke Madonna:
In Olga's features there's no life,
just as in a Vandyke Madonna.
Onegin tells Lenski:
I'd have chosen the other,
if I had been like you a poet. (ibid., 6-7)
If Van were a poet, he, too, might have chosen the other (Ada younger sister Lucette). But Lucette is only eight when Van first comes to Ardis and falls in love with barely twelve-year-old Ada.
Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. (1.1) The older Demon grows, the younger are his mistresses:
'Extraordinary,' said Van, 'they had been growing younger and younger - I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.'
'You never loved your father,' said Ada sadly.
'Oh, I did and do - tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.' (3.8)
At Marina's cremation Demon tells Ada that he will not cheat the poor grubs. But he breaks his promise perishing in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. (3.7)
Attempting to escape from Cretes, Daedalus's son Icarus flew so high that his wings of wax (made by his father) melted from the heat of the sun and he plunged to his death in the sea.
Like the legendary Greek, Leonardo experimented with flying machines. In Merezhkovski's novel, one of Leonardo's pupils, Zoroastro (Astro) de Peretola, attempts a flight but falls down and remains crippled for life (and, which is even worse, goes mad). Another pupil, Giovanni Beltraffio, hangs himself using one of those firm silk laces that Leonardo used for his flying machines:
- Вот, - по-прежнему спокойно молвил Астро, указывая в глубину чердака, где было темно. И Леонардо увидел под одной из поперечных толстых балок Джованни, стоявшего прямо, неподвижно, странно вытянувшегося и как будто глядевшего на него в упор широко раскрытыми глазами.
- Джованни! - вскрикнул учитель и вдруг побледнел, голос пресёкся.
Он бросился к нему, увидел страшно искажённое лицо, прикоснулся к руке его, она была холодна. Тело качнулось: оно висело на крепком шёлковом шнурке, одном из тех, какие употреблял учитель для своих летательных машин, привязанном к новому железному крюку, видимо, недавно ввинченному в балку. Тут же лежал кусок мыла, которым самоубийца, должно быть, намылил петлю. (Book Sixteen, "Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael," chapter I)
Dead Giovanni, as he stands upright and seems to stare with wide-opened eyes at Leonardo, reminds one of Kirillov, a madman who shots himself dead in Dostoevski's Besy (The Possessed, 1872). Demon's poor mad wife Aqua resembles Maria Lebyadkin, a character in that novel.
Demon's death between the aquamarine abyss of the ocean and the ultramarine abyss of the sky brings to mind the last entry in Giovanni's diary:
"Белая Дьяволица - всегда, везде. Будь она проклята! Последняя тайна: два - едино. Христос и Антихрист - едино. Небо вверху и небо внизу. - Да не будет, да не будет сего! Лучше смерть. Предаю душу мою в руки Твои, Боже мой! Суди меня".
and the inscription on the emerald that Mona Cassandra shows to Giovanni:
На одной стороне изумруда вырезано было коптскими, на другой - древними эллинскими письменами четыре стиха:
Небо - вверху, небо - внизу,
Звёзды - вверху, звёзды - внизу.
Всё, что вверху, всё и внизу, -
Если поймёшь, благо тебе.
The sky is above, the sky is below,
the stars are above, the stars are below.
All what is above, is also below.
If you can grasp it, you are blessed. (Book Fifteen, "The Holy Inquisition," chapter II)
Demon is a gambler and a rake. The setting of Hodasevich's poem Zvyozdy (The Stars, 1925) is a cheap casino (the shameful puddle reflecting God's Day Four when he created the stars) where naked girls (seven stars of Ursa Major and a thin-legged comet) are dancing. On the other hand, Igrok (The Gambler, 1867) is a short novel by Dostoevski. One of its characters, la baboulinka (as de Grieux and Blanche nickname Polina's grandmother), plays roulette every time placing her bet on zero.
Uncle Dan dies an odd Boschean death. According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian), Dan's buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of 'play-zero' (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada's sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. (2.10)
"Play-zero" is a play on plaisir. Demon married Aqua "out of spite* and pity, a not unusual blend."
Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations. (1.3)
*the French call it par depit
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/