Dolly had inherited her mother's beauty and
temper but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom
deplorable, taste, well reflected, for instance, in the names she gave her
daughters: Aqua and Marina... (Ibid.)
Aqua means in Latin "water" and Marina,
"of the sea."
Erminia + Aqua +
Marina = Armenia + aquamarine
In the last year of his life Pushkin met
the young painter Ivan Ayvazovsky (Ovannes Ayvazyan), an Armenian from Feodosia
who was to become a celebrated marinist. Ayvazovski is mentioned in Speak,
Memory (Chapter Three, 3):
One of my mother's happier
girlhood recollections was having traveled one summer with her aunt Praskovia to
the Crimea, where her paternal grandfather had an estate near Feodosia. Her aunt
and she went for a walk with him and another old gentleman, the well-known
seascape painter Ayvazovski. She remembered the painter saying (as he had said
no doubt many times) that in 1836, at an exhibition of pictures in St.
Petersburg, he had seen Pushkin, "an ugly little fellow with a tall handsome
wife." That was more than half a century before, when Ayvazovski was an art
student, and less than a year before Pushkin's death. She also remembered the
touch nature added from its own palette-the white mark a bird left on the
painter's gray top hat. The aunt Praskovia, walking beside her, was her mother's
sister, who had married the celebrated syphilologist V. M. Tarnovski (1839-1906)
and who herself was a doctor, the author of works on psychiatry, anthropology
and social welfare. One evening at Ayvazovski's villa near Feodosia, Aunt
Praskovia met at dinner the twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Anton Chekhov whom she
somehow offended in the course of a medical conversation. She was a very
learned, very kind, very elegant lady, and it is hard to imagine how exactly she
could have provoked the incredibly coarse outburst Chekhov permits himself in a
published letter of August 3, 1888, to his sister. Aunt Praskovia, or Aunt
Pasha, as we called her, often visited us at Vyra. She had an enchanting way of
greeting us, as she swept into the nursery with a sonorous "Bonjour, les
enfants!" She died in 1910. My mother was at her bedside, and Aunt Pasha's
last words were: "That's interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water,
vsyo - voda."
Poor mad Aqua's suicide note was signed "My
sister's sister who teper' iz ada ('now is out of hell')" (1.3).
Chekhov signed some of his early stories, including Zhenshchiny s tochki
zreniya p'yanitsy (Women from the Point of View of a Drunkard, 1885), "My
brother's brother." In Blok's poem Neznakomka (Incognita,
1906) p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (drunks with the eyes of rabbits)
cry out "in vino veritas!" In Ada, Dr Krolik is an amateur entomologist
who lives near Ardis (the estate of Daniel Veen, Van's and Ada's uncle,
Lucette's father). On the other hand, in a letter to his wife Pushkin mentions
krasnoglazyi krolik (a red-eyed rabbit) Smirnov, whose wife just gave
birth to twins. Like Greg and Grace Erminin, Aqua and Marina are
twins.
In The Fragments of Onegin's Journey
([XVII]: 13-14) Pushkin confesses that he has admixed a lot of water unto
his poetic goblet. Nevertheless, his Eugene Onegin does intoxicate the
reader. And so do VN's novels, Ada being one of the most potent of
them.
Alexey
Sklyarenko