"A
Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaures [at Aqua's last hospital in
Centaur, Arizona], who may have been an émigré
brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in
the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man..." (1.3)
The split
of Sigmund Freud's personality on Antiterra is matched
by the reduplication in the name of the village from which Dr Froit
hails. Interestingly, the repetition of the same exclamation (but in two
languages: French and German) can be found in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden
Calf." To Vasisualiy Lokhankin's protests that he has hired out the room
not to three men (Bender, Panikovsky and Balaganov) but to one cultured
bachelor Ostap Bender replies: "Mon Dieu, Vasisualiy Andreevich... don't
torment yourself. Of the three of us I alone am cultured, so the
clause has been observed." To his landlord's further complaints
Bender says: "Mein Gott, dear Vasisualiy! Perhaps there is a great plain
truth (velikaya sermyazhnaya pravda, the phrase in which the failure
Lokhankin used to find some consolation) in this" (chapter XV:
"Antlers and hooves").*
On the other hand, Bender tells the monarchist Khvorob'yev who can not escape
from the Soviet reality even in his dreams and suffers from everynight
nightmares that he happened to treat his friends and acquaintances using
Freudean method. "The dream is nothing. The main thing is to eliminate the
dream's cause. The chief cause [of your bad dreams] is the existence of the
Soviet régime. But at the present moment I can not
eliminate it. I simply have no time. You see, I am a sportsman-tourist, who has
to make some repairs in his car... And as to the cause, do not worry about
it. I will eliminate it on the return journey. Only let me finish the
motor-race" ("The Golden Calf," chapter VIII: "The Crisis of the
Genre").
I think that more or less similar things (a sportsman, who has no time
for politics) could be said to characterize some of VN heroes
(Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, for example), if not Nabokov himself. By the
way, the duality of worlds in Ada, the existence of one of them
(Terra) being questioned, also goes back to "The Golden** Calf." After
he has received his million from Koreiko, the frustrated Ostap (he doesn't know
what to do with his money) tells Balaganov: "All this is an invention.
There is no Rio-de-Janeiro, and no America, and no Europe, nothing. Earth's
terminal city is Shepetovka against which the waves of the Atlantic are
breaking... One doctor has explained to me everything. Foreign
countries are a myth about the afterlife. Those who get there, never come back."
"That's simply a circus!" exclaims Balaganov, who didn't understand
anything (chapter XXXII: "The Gates of Great Possibilities"). Cf. Van
Veen and his circus stunt: Van dances on his hands while his partner, Rita,
sings the tango tune, "Pod znoinym nebom Argentiny" (1.30), to which in
"The Golden Calf" Ostap dances solo before visiting
Koreiko.
Below
are a few anagrams that may amuse you:
DEMON =
MONDE
= OMEN + D (dobro) = NEMO (Jule Verne's hero, "Mr. Nobody") + D
DEMON
+
MONDE
= DEMI-MONDE
+ NO
– I
MON
DIEU
= MONDE
+ OUI
(yes) – O
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU
= SIGMUND*** + INEY (hoar-frost) + MONDE + OUI
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU
+ C
+ LOLITA
+ L
+ OR
+ DR
FROID
+ VINUM
= CYGNUS
OLOR
+ DEMI-MONDE
+ DU
(you) + I
+ DR
FROIT
+ LUNA
+ ILI
(or) +
VINO
(wine) + M
(I
= 1, L = 50, C = 100, M = 1000)
ARDENNES
+ AVRORA (Aurora, the name of the ship the canon shot from which was a
signal to the 1917 coup d'état) = ARDOR + VARENNES (cf.
King's Loui XVI terminated flight to Varennes) + A
*
Also, cf. Chekhov's story Pervyi lyobovnik ("Jean premier,"
1886), Podzharov's words: "And women! Mon dieu [French in the
original], what women!" Note that Lokhankin's favorite book, the only
thing that he saves from the fire when "The Raven's Nest" burns down,
is the heavy volume "Man and Woman."
**cf.
the "Golden Veil" separating the Antiterran Tartary from the rest of the
world.
***In
the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, Sigmund is brother and lover of
Signy, daughter of Volsung (grandson of Odin); in the German
Niebelungenlied, Sigmund is a king of the Netherlands, father of
Sigfried.
Alexey
Sklyarenko