Durmanova, the family name of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina
and her twin sister Aqua, comes from durman, Russian for "thorn-apple."
The fragrant and attractive but perilous flowers of Datura
stramonium (thorn-apple) are mentioned in Turgenev's story "Затишье"
("The Lull," 1854):
- Как датуры... Помнишь, Маша, как
хороши были датуры у нас на балконе, при луне, с своими длинными белыми цветами.
Помнишь, какой из них лился запах, сладкий, вкрадчивый и коварный.
- Коварный запах! - воскликнул Владимир Сергеич.
- Да, коварный. Чему вы удивляетесь? Он, говорят, опасен, а
привлекает. Отчего злое может привлекать? Злое не должно быть
красивым!*
Nadezhda Alekseevna (a character in Turgenev's story)
compares datura to the upas tree (another poisonous plant), after Vladimir
Astakhov (the story's hero) recited Pushkin's poem "Анчар" ("The Upas Tree").
Анчар + о = ранчо + а (ранчо - ranch). When Van meets the Vinelanders (Andrey, his
wife Ada and sister Dorothy who calls Van le
beau ténébreux - just as in Turgenev's play "Месяц в деревне"** Natalia Petrovna
calls her confidant Rakitin), Andrey and Dorothy invite him to visit
their Agavia Ranch in Arizona (3.8). The name of the Vinelanders'
ranch comes from agave, a tree mentioned in Khodasevich's poem
"Соррентинские фотографии" ("The Sorrento Snapshots," 1926):
Я вижу скалы и
агавы
а в них, сквозь них и между
них...
(I see rocks and
agaves
and in them, through them and between
them...)
In 1924-25 Khodasevich lived in Sorrento with
Gorky and his family. In his essay "Gorky" (incuded in Necropolis,
1939) Khodasevich mentions Gorky's story "О тараканах" ("On Cockroaches,"
1926), in which the author made some changes taking Khodasevich's
advice. The story's hero cleverly poisoned cockroaches in childhood, but,
when he grew up, is poisoned himself. On the other hand, the sailor who
kills Gorky's Klim Samgin by trampling him down, calls him tarakan
(a cockroach).
Marina remarked once that at Van's age she
would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read,
for example, Turgenev's Smoke (1.21). Нет дыма без огня (there's no
smoke without fire). This saying seems to suggest that
Marina, who collected flowers near Aqua's first sanatorium (1.1), is
responsible for the deterioration of her sister's health and, in the long
run, her death (poor Aqua committed suicide by taking poison: 1.3). Similarly,
Ada is responsible for the death of her lovers Percy de Prey (who is killed
in a distant war***) and Philip Rack (who is poisoned by his
wife), and Van and Ada are both responsible for the death of their
half-sister Lucette (who took an overdose of Quietus pills before jumping into
the Atlantic from the Tobakoff: 3.5).
Today is the 34th anniversary of VN's
death. It's a shame that the city fathers who never heard of Nabokov
(and even if they did hear of Lolita, they never read it) made
July 2 "the Dostoevsky Day" in St.
Petersburg.
*I also quote this dialogue (alas, I failed to find
an English translation of Turgenev's story in the Internet) in my Russian
article "The Poisonous Family Tree in Nabokov's
Ada" (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyarenko4.doc). I might have quoted it
in my more recent article (also available in Zembla) "The Red Flower of Evil in
Nabokov's Ada."
**"A Month in the Country" (1850)
***in "The Poisonous Family Tree" I compare Percy's
lot to that of Yakov Pasynkov, the eponymous hero of Turgenev's story
(1855)
Alexey Sklyarenko