Questions for study and discussion:
1. Did both palms leave the ground when Van, while
reversed, seemed actually to 'skip' on his hands?
2. Was Van's adult incapacity to 'shrug' things off
only physical or did it 'correspond' to some archetypal character of his
'undersoul'?
3. Why did Ada burst into tears at the height of Van's
performance? (Ada,
1.13)
As a Chose student of psychiatry Van begins to
perform in variety shows dancing on his hands: On
February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so
sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama's performance as 'the
most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.'
It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the
programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition 'Foreign eccentric' gave
any indication either of the exact nature of the 'stunt' or of the performer's
identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama's friends,
diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the
Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large
Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve
of the Crimean War)...
Sometime in August he was offered a
contract for a series of matinees and nights in a famous London theater during
the Christmas vacation and on weekends throughout the winter
season...
For the tango, which completed his number on his
last tour, he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer in a very short
scintillating frock cut very low on the back... Fragile, red-haired 'Rita' (he never learned her real name), a
pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale, where, she nostalgically said, the Crimean
cornel, kizil', bloomed yellow among the arid rocks, bore an odd
resemblance to Lucette as she was to look ten years later. (1.30)
Vekchelo is an anagram of chelovek (Russ., man,
person, human being). Chelovek (Man, 1902) is a poem in
prose by Maxim Gorky. In his memoir essay V. I. Lenin (1924) Gorky
writes that Lenin loved ekstsentrika (eccentricity on
stage):
One evening in London when we had nothing
particular to do a group of us went to see a show at a small, democratic
theatre. Vladimir Ilyich laughed heartily at the clowns and the comic numbers,
looked at most of the others with indifference, and keenly watched the scene
where a couple of lumberjacks from British Columbia felled a tree. The stage
depicted a lumber camp, and these two strapping fellows axed through a treetrunk
over a yard thick in a minute.
“That’s only for the public, of course. In real
life they can’t work that fast,” commented Vladimir Ilyich. “It’s obvious,
though, that they use axes over there too, reducing a lot of good wood to
useless chips. That’s the cultured British for you!”
He talked about the anarchy of production under
the capitalist system, about the enormous percentage of wasted raw materials,
and concluded with an expression of regret that no one had yet thought of
writing a book about it. The idea was not entirely clear to me, but before I
could ask any questions he was off on the subject of “eccentricity” as a special
form of theatrical art.
“It is a satirical or sceptical attitude to the
conventional, a desire to turn it inside out, - to twist it a little, and
disclose what is illogical in the customary. It’s intricate - and
interesting.”
Gorky is the author of the famous aphorism:
Rozhdyonnyi polzat' - letat' ne mozhet! (He who was born to creep can
not fly!) In the same Pesnya o sokole (Song of the Falcon,
1899) Gorky (or rather Nadyr-Ragim-ogly, the old Crimean Tartar who "tells"
him this song) exclaims: Bezumstvu khrabrykh poyom my pesnyu! (We
sing a song to the recklessness of the brave!)
One of Ada's lovers, brave Percy de Prey perishes in the
Crimean War: Percy had been shot in the thigh during a
skirmish with Khazar guerillas in a ravine near Chew-Foot-Calais, as the
American troops pronounced 'Chufutkale,' the name of a fortified rock. He had,
immediately assured himself, with the odd relief of the doomed, that he had got
away with a flesh wound. Loss of blood caused him to faint, as we fainted, too,
as soon as he started to crawl or rather squirm toward the shelter of the oak
scrub and spiny bushes, where another casualty was resting comfortably. When a
couple of minutes later, Percy - still Count Percy de Prey - regained
consciousness he was no longer alone on his rough bed of gravel and grass. A
smiling old Tartar, incongruously but somehow assuagingly wearing American
blue-jeans with his beshmet, was squatting by his side. 'Bednïy,
bednïy' (you poor, poor fellow), muttered the good soul, shaking his shaven
head and clucking: 'Bol'no (it hurts)?' Percy answered in his equally
primitive Russian that he did not feel too badly wounded: 'Karasho, karasho
ne bol'no (good, good),' said the kindly old man and, picking up the
automatic pistol which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and
then shot him in the temple. (1.42)
Another lover of Ada is Philip Rack, the composer (and
Lucette's music teacher). Like Rack and Captain Tapper (a member of the
Do-Re-La country club with whom Van has a pistol duel in Kalugano: 1.42),
Lenin loved music:
...Listening to Beethoven’s sonatas played by Isai
Dobrowein at the home of Y. P. Peshkova in Moscow one evening, Lenin
remarked:
“I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and
could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always
makes me proud, perhaps naively so, to think that people can work such
miracles!”
Wrinkling up his eyes, he smiled rather sadly,
adding:
“But I can’t listen to music very often, it
affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people
who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can’t pat anyone on
the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the
head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to
people. Hm - what a hellishly difficult job!”
Rack dies in the Kalugano hospital where Van (who can
never walk on his hands again) recovers from the wound he received in his
duel with Tapper. According to Dr Fitzbishop, poor Rack was poisoned by his wife
(1.42). VN (see Lectures on Russian Literature) seems to have
believed that, like Pushkin's Mozart or the hero of Gorky's own
story O tarakanakh (On Cockroaches,
1926), Burevestnik Revolyutsii ("the stormy petrel of
Revolution," as the author of Song of the Stormy Petrel
and Song of the Falcon was called) was
poisoned.
While Van sits at Rack's death-bed and talks to
him, the male nurse Dorofey (who rolled Van in a wheelchair to Rack's ward)
reads the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos): Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article
that engrossed him - 'A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),'
or else 'The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.' (1.42) Demon's wrestling master, King Wing is obviously
Chinese.
golos = logos
kolos = sokol
volos = slovo
Lady Erminin = Lenin + myriad
Lady Erminin + p = Lenin + pyramid
(golos - Russ., voice; kolos - Russ., ear, spike; sokol
- Russ., falcon; volos - Russ., hair;
slovo - Russ., word)
Alexey Sklyarenko