Van's stage name, Mascodagama, is a play on Vasco da Gama,
the name of the Portuguese navigator. As I pointed out before, it is
garbled Vas'ka gde gamma ("Vaska, where is the gamut?") by a
character in Skitalets' story Oktava ("The Low Bass").
In his article Moskovskiy literaturno-khudozhestvennyi
kruzhok ("The Moscow Literature-and-Art Circle,"
1937) Khodasevich mentions Skitalets (the penname of Stepan Petrov,
1869-1941) calling him "a live cheap edition of Maxim Gorky:" Однажды видел я там Скитальца -- как бы живое удешевленное издание
Максима Горького: те же сапоги, блуза, ременный пояс, но на лице --
незначительность даже замечательная.
Gorky is the author of Vas'ka krasnyi ("Red Vaska,"
1900), the story about the unbelievably cruel red-haired
vyshibala (bouncer) in a Volgan brothel. Van's partner in his
Mascodagama dance, Rita, is a red-haired Karaite girl from Chufut Kale (in a
ravine near Chufut Kale a merciless Tartar shots dead Percy de Prey).
Note that in Nabokov's colored alphabet both M
(Mascodagama's initial) and V (Van Veen's, Vaska's and Vasco da Gama's
initial) belong to the red group. Typographically, M looks like V
with two side props (or two I's). If turned upside down, Roman V resembles the
Cyrillic counterpart of Roman L (Lucette's inital and that of the mysterious
disaster that happened on Antiterra in the beau millieu of the 19th
century).
In his Mascodagama stunt Van dances on his hands. Khodasevich
is the author of the famous lines:
Счастлив, кто падает вниз головой:
Мир
для него хоть на миг — а иной.
(Happy is he who falls
head-down:
The world for him - even if for a moment - is
different.)
Alexey Sklyarenko