ADA'S SPIRITS: THE AMERICAN 'GORY MARY'
Before tasting liquor in the barroom, let's visit a
doss-house. Satin, a character in Maxim Gorky's play Na dne ("At
the bottom," 1902), famously says: "Chelovek - eto zvuchit gordo"
("Man, this [word] sounds proudly!"). The adverb gordo
("proudly") is an anagram of the noun gorod ("city"). In his
essay Gorod zhyoltogo d'yavola ("City of the Yellow
Devil," 1906), Gorky calls thus New
York.* On Demonia (Earth's twin planet, on which Ada is set), New
York is known as Manhattan, or simply Man. By renaming New York Man,
Nabokov seems to give a new meaning to Satin's phrase: "Man, Gorod
Zhyoltogo D'yavola tozh,** this sounds proudly!"
It is the
same shuler (card-sharpener) and p'yanitsa
(drunkard) Satin whom Gorky makes to utter another aphorism: Lozh'
- religiya rabov i khozyaev. Pravda - Bog svobodnogo cheloveka ("Lie is the
religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the God of a free
man"). SATIN = SAINT = STAIN = NITSA = STALIN - L = ISTINA -
I = AIST + N = ASTI + N... (Nitsa is the Russian name of Nice
transliterated in Latin characters; istina is a synonym of pravda
and means "truth;" aist is Russian for "stork," the
bird believed by children to bring babies; Asti is Asti
spumante, the much-sung Italian wine, mentioned by Nabokov
in "The University poem," 1927, by Mandelstam in his poem "I'm drinking to the military asters, to everything I was rebuked
for..." 1931, and by Khodasevich in his essay on Gorky, 1937; other words,
being familiar, need no explanation). Let's turn to Ada now. It is in
Nice that the duel between Demon Veen and Baron d'Onsky takes place (1.2).
One of the seconds in that duel fought with swords is a certain
Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, whose short-sleeves, like those of another
second, the charming Monsieur de Pastrouil's, are
bespattered with a kind of American 'Gory Mary' (an alcoholic cocktail, to
which the mix of Demon Veen's Irish and d'Onsky's Polish blood is
compared).
The cocktail's name***
reminds me not only of Mary Tudor (1516-1558, queen of England known as
'Bloody Mary') and Mary Pickford (the Holliwood actress, after whom
the mix of vodka and tomato juice is said to have been called), but
also of Gorky (Gory = Gorky - k), whose second wife was the
actress Maria Andreeva and whose secretary and last love was Baroness Maria
Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg (H. G. Wells' mistress and a GPU agent), as
well as of another fight in literature. It is held by the
characters of Pushkin's poem "Gavriliada" (1821), the Satan and the Archangel
Gavril, and witnessed by Maria (the Virgin Mary, who, in Pushkin's version
of the events, first makes love to the devil, who seduces her with clever
sophisms, then to Gavril, who was sent by God
to tell her about his love and to prepare her to his visit,****
but who goes a little too far carrying out God's commission, and with
whom Maria gets enamored, before she is visited, in a pigeon's
disguise, and impregnated by God; all this happening on one and the same day).
The Archangel wins this fight by managing to seize hold
of his foe's most sensitive organ, "the arrogant member with which the
devil sinned" (cf. in Ada: "and Skonky***** died, not 'of his
wounds'... but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them,
possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin..."), makes the
Satan plead for mercy and flee to the Hell. When, a
little later, Gavril leaves Maria in raptures, she is reposing on a rumpled
bed sheet. I may have a dirty imagination, but, because Maria's husband, the old
carpenter, never watered his young
wife's secret flower****** with his old watering-can (as
Pushkin puts it in the beginning of his a bit too frivolous piece),
the bed sheet must be blood-stained.
In the narrative
of "Gavriliada" there are several digressions, in
which Pushkin reviews his personal amorous past and, in the
poem's closing lines, prophesies his own future. For this or some
other reason, but I'm reminded of the phrase "to wash one's dirty
linen in public."******* Now, linen = Lenin = Nile + N = line + N =
nine + L (Nile is a river in Africa, the longest in the world; cf. Van's words
to Ada investigatig his erected penis: "the Nile is settled:" 1.19; nine is
a number; cf. the nine circles of Dante's inferno). The next
step: Lenin + vinograd = vino + Leningrad (vinograd
is Russian for "vine" and "grapes;" it is also the title of Pushkin's 1825
poem alluded to in Ada: 1.38; cf. E. A. Vinograd, Pasternak's
mistress to whom the poems of one of the sections of "My
sister life," 1922, are addressed; vino is Russian for "wine," but
can mean any strong liquor). St. Petersburg, Nabokov's home city (in which
Pushkin's fatal duel took place), was renamed Leningrad by the
Bolsheviks, and Nizhniy Novgorod, the home city of A. M.
Peshkov, Gorky (gorky is Russian for "bitter," while the only
word we hear the Antiterran Pushkin exclaim in Yukonsk******** is
sladko, "sweet;" note that Pushkin's estate Boldino was situated in the
province of Nizhniy Novgorod). In the pre-Revolutionary Russia, the natives
of Nizhniy Novgorod were called vodokhlyoby ("tee-totallers,"
literally: "water-swillers"). But even the ancients knew that the truth,
whoever's God it might be and if it existed at all,********* was in wine,
not in water.
*By zhyoltyi
d'yavol ("the yellow devil") Gorky means gold. Note that GOD
= DOG = GOLD - L; LOG = GOLD - D = DOLG - D = OLEG - E; GOLD = DOLG =
GOLOD - O (on Demonia, Log, apparently the curtailed "Logos," is a Supreme
Being; dolg is Russian for "duty" and "debt;" Oleg is a male given
name; cf. Pushkin's "A Song about the Prince Oleg's Prophesy,"
1822; golod is Russian for "hunger;" in the old Russian
alphabet, the name of the letter L was lyudi, "men," of the letter
D, dobro, "good," of the letter E, est', "to be," of the
letter O, on, "he").
**Also known as City of The Yellow
Devil (re that tozh particle, cf. Marina's words: "After that we shall
go to Housaie, Gollivud-tozh:" 1.39).
***Known as "Bloody Mary" among cocktail
lovers.
****Telling about the errand on which God sends
Gavril, Pushkin refers to an obscure Armenian legend. Note that Marina =
Armina = Ariman = Armenia - E; Venera = Erevan (Marina is the name of Demon's
and d'Onsky's mistress; Armina is the name of Demon's Mediterranean
villa; Ariman is the Russian spelling of Ahriman, the evil spirit
in the Zoroastrianism; Armenia is a country in Transcaucasia; a
cycle of poems by Mandelstam, 1930; Venera is the Russian name of
Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the planet of the solar system;
Erevan is the Russian spelling of Yerevan, the modern capital of
Armenia). Note that Mount Ararat, the landing place of Noah's ark where
Noah first made wine after the Deluge, is situated in what in the
ancient times was Armenia.
*****D'Onsky's nick-name, anagram of
konsky ("of a horse").
******Note the water-and-flower theme discussed in
my note on Garshin and Dostoevsky re-appearing again.
*******The word "linen" also occurs in
Ada. "The professor [Van's invented professor of literature, in an
imagined lecture on Proust] concludes that a novel which can be appreciated
only by quelque petite blanchisseuse who has examined the author's
dirty linen is, artistically, a failure." (1.27)
********A nothern town on Demonia (Antiterra). Note
that Yukonsk = Skonky + U. Cf. Belokonsk, the Antiterran twin of Whitehorse
(a fortune-teller once predicted Pushkin that he will die because of a
white head or a white horse).
*********According to Salieri, the character in
Pushkin's play "Mozart and Salieri" (1830), Net pravdy na zemle, no pravdy
net i vyshe ("There is no truth on Earth, but higher there's no
truth either"). The Bolsheviks would have disagreed with this, for their main
organ of the press, the newspaper Pravda, did certainly exist (and
may still exist).
If you are not sick of my anagrams, I may
continue to translate odds and ends of my 300-page-long "The Truth is in
Wine" piece sometime in the future.
Alexey Sklyarenko