Ardis, the fabulous country estate of Van's art-collecting uncle Daniel Veen, hints at paradise.
 
To Peter the First St. Petersburg seemed a paradise. The tsar used to call the city he had founded in the Neva's estuary Paradiz:
 
Воистину, этот противоестественный город, страшный Парадиз, как называет его царь, основан на костях человеческих!
(Merezhkovski, "Peter and Alexey", Book Three "The Diary of Prince Alexey", part I "The Diary of the Lady in Waiting Arnheim")
 
Но Петру новый город казался Парадизом, именно вследствие обилия вод. Сам он любил их, как водяная птица, и подданных своих надеялся здесь скорее, чем где-либо, приучить к воде. (ibid., Book Four "The Flood", chapter I)
 
In Greek, ardis means "the point of an arrow". A leitmotif of "Peter and Alexey" is the song that Pyotr Andreich Tolstoy sings in the ear of Princess Cherkasski, as they are dancing a minuet:
 
Пётр Андреич Толстой, который шёл в менуэте с княгинею Черкасскою, напевал ей на ухо своим бархатным голосом под звуки музыки:

Покинь, Купидо, стрелы:
Уже мы все не целы,
Но сладко уязвленны
Любовною стрелою
Твоею золотою,
Любви все покоренны.
И, жеманно приседая перед кавалерами, как того требовал чин менуэта, хорошенькая княгиня отвечала томной улыбкой пастушки Хлои семидесятилетнему юноше Дафнису.
("Cupid, abandon your arrows, we all are not intact anymore..." Book One "The St. Petersburg Venus", chapter III)
 
Around 1715 VN's family estate Rozhdestveno (in the district of Tsarskoe Selo, now Pushkin, about fifty miles south from St. Petersburg) had been the property of Prince Alexey, the unfortunate son of that archbully, Peter the First... From that palace, along that highway leading to Poland and Austria, the prince had escaped only to be lured back from as far south as Naples to the paternal house by the Tsar's agent, Count Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, one-time ambassador in Constantinople (where he had obtained for his master the little blackamoor whose great-grandson was to be Pushkin). (Speak, Memory, Chapter Three, 2; for more detail see Merezhkovski's "Peter and Alexey", Book Six "Tsarevich on the Run")
 
Like Pushkin's Onegin, VN was born upon the Neva's banks. In Finnish, Neva ("the legendary river of Old Rus", 2.1) means what Veen means in Dutch, "peat bog". 
 
Alexey Sklyarenko (who was also born in Paradise City, renamed Leningrad, and who will die here, as his royal namesake did)
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