-----Mensagem Original-----
Enviada em: Terça-feira, 27 de Abril de
2004 17:51
Assunto: Fw:ADA's Mascodagama and
Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" (Besy)
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:47 AM
Subject: Mascodagama
Nabokov once said that he prefers Joyce
to Dostoevsky. But the maniambulation in ADA seems to refer to both Joyce's
Ulysses and Dostoevsky's _Besy_ (The Possessed, or, literally, "The
Demons").
You remember that, at Chose, Van appears on stage as
Mascodagama - a masked giant who walks, or rather runs, and finally
even dances, on his hands (1.30). Now, in Besy , there is a famous scene of
the "literature quadrille" (kadril' literatury) at the charity ball (Part
Three, chapter 2: "End of the festival"). It consists of some six pairs of
masks. One of the masked dancers, who later turns out to be Lyamshin (a
minor character, one of the novel's demons), plays in that quadrille
the allegorical part of a "non-Petersburger but formidable newspaper"
(nepeterburgskoe, no groznoe izdanie - in fact, Katkov's "Moskovskie
vedomosti"), with a heavy club in his hands. In the quadrille's last
figure, under the stare of the bespectacled "upright Russian thought"
(chestnaya Russkaya mysl' - the magazine "Delo"), Lyamshin turns head over
heels and walks on his hands. This should allegorically mean a permanent
topsy-turvical distortion of the common sense in the non-Petersburger but
formidable newspaper. That hand-walking in front of the governor's wife
happens to be the last drop which overflowes the cup and scandalizes
the public at the ball. Somebody shouts: "Flibustiery!" (freebooters,
pirates, rather than "filibusters").
Now, I wonder if Van's stage name (if not his whole circus
stunt) that puns on the name of the famous Portuguese navigator, Vasco
da Gama, c1460-1524, wasn't somehow (subconsiously) inspired to him by that
hand-walking and the subsequent mad cry in Besy. Van studies in the Chose
University "terrology" - a branch of psychiatry that deals with the problems
of Terra, a mysterious sibling planet of Demonia, aka Antiterra, the setting
of ADA. On Antiterra, its twin, Terra, is usually believed to exist only in
the minds of the insane. Its notion is sometimes confused there with that of
the Otherworld. Its name (Earth in Latin) seems to hint, quite
clearly, at our planet, Earth. But as I prove in a series of articles
(see for instance my notes "Traditions of a Russian Family in Ada"
and "A Window onto Terra" in the forthcoming spring issue of The
Nabokovian), the Terra planet ows its existence at least as much to
Dostoevsky and some French naturalist writers as it does to Earth.
Returning to the Dostoevsky novel, let me also point out that the poor
governor, who is present at this charity ball that ends in
a Dostoevskian nightmarish scandal, goes mad right here, after that
quadrille. Simultanously, the big fire begins in the town and, on the
morning, the Lebyadkin couple, brother and sister, is found murdered (the
house where they lived doesn't burn down, but they are stabbed by an escaped
convict, Fed'ka katorzhnyi, who thinks that he acts upon Stavrogin's will).
Ignat Lebyadkin is a wretched poet who attempts to blackmail the demonic
Stavrogin, his sister Maria's husband (Stavrogin's marriage to
Maria Lebyadkin is a secret to the public), just like "Black
Miller" blackmails Demon in ADA sending him the examples of his
verse.
There are many other parallels between Demon's marriage to Aqua in ADA
and the "krovopiytsa" (blood-sucker) Stavrogin's marriage to poor Maria in
Besy.
I quite agree with Brian Boyd (who has told me that he
dislikes Dostoevsky) and with Nabokov himself (whose dislike of Dostoevsky
is well-known) that Besy is a very dull novel. But it is worth reading once
as if "through Nabokov's spectacles." Nabokov was a man of total recall (at
least in everything what concerned literature), and I assure everybody that
there are many allusions in ADA to Besy and other novels and stories of
Dostoevsky. And I still think that Van Veen (in his writings) and F. M.
Dostoevsky shared the favors of the same muse.
I hope I have murdered nobody with my reckless English,
Alexey
Sklyarenko