Lucette to Van: '...otherwise I haven't
once kissed male epithelia in all my love - I mean, life. Look, I can swear I
never have, by - by William Shakespeare' (extending dramatically one hand toward
a shelf with a set of thick red books).
'Hold it!' cried Van. 'That's the
Collected Works of Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor.' (Ada,
2.5)
In Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act One, scene
III) the clown says that "honesty be no puritan."
The clown's words are quoted by Marx (who is known on
Antiterra as Marx père, the popular author of 'historical'
plays) in "The Holy Family" (Chapter V, section 4, "The
Mystery of Probity and Piety"):
"The notary is the secular confessor. He is a puritan by
profession, and "honesty", Shakespeare says, is "no Puritan".' He is at the same
time the go-between for all possible purposes, the manager of all civil
intrigues and plots."
Years later, when Lucette is dead, Van uses the
(fictitious) appointment with a lawyer (whose name Van invents
impromptu) as a pretext to meet Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in
secret from her husband:
'Tomorrow morning, je veux vous
accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps,
informed you, Lucette's accounts in several Swiss banks -' and he trotted out a
prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. 'I suggest,'
he added, 'that if you have no other engagements' - (sending a questioning
glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three
cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) - 'you and I go to see
Maître Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me,
my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here - who has
given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh
- I mean sign with a sigh - the matter is tedious. All right? All right.' (3.8)
The Russian title of Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends
Well" is Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya. At first Tolstoy
(who famously disliked Shakespeare and who, of course, was not a
Marxist) wanted to entitle his "War and Peace" Vsyo horosho, chto
horosho konchaetsya (see Tolstoy's letter of May 10-20, 1866, to A. A.
Fet).
Horosho ("Good!" 1927) is a poem by Mayakovski
written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It is
parodied by VN in Tyrants Destroyed (1938):
Хорошо-с, а помните, граждане,
как хирел наш край без отца?...
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
The word horosho (in the sense "all right") occurs in
Ada (1.23):
On the following day Ada informed her mother that
Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her
governess liked it or not. 'Horosho,' said Marina (while getting ready
to receive a neighbor and his protégé, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina
style), 'but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had
been since the eighteenth century) and don't let her stay in it longer than ten
or twelve minutes.'
...The two elder children, having locked the door of
the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its
lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle,
which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but
barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that
hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf,
when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking
on the door: Mlle Larivière wanted some hot water too.
The name of Lucette's governess, Larivière, means "the river". At the
beginning of Horosho Mayakovski suggests that the reader has a
drink from the river called "Fact":
Время - вещь необычайно длинная, -
были времена -
прошли былинные.
Ни былин, ни эпосов, ни
эпопей.
Телеграммой лети, строфа!
Воспалённой губой припади и
попей
из реки по имени "Факт".
One wonders though if there is not more blood than water in that river (see
also in Topos my Russian article "All's Well that Ends Well. The Optimism
of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Pasternak and Nabokov").
Alexey Sklyarenko