Van remembered that his
tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then
a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954),
used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal
joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’
in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin.
(1.38)
I suspect it was something about A. P. Chekhov's (not
Vengerov's) death that made Nabokov give Vengerov that almost
improbably long life.
In a letter of January 20, 1899, to his brother Ivan
Pavlovich Chekhov speaks of his negotiations with the publisher
Adolf Marx and mentions a telegram he sent Marx promising him to live
not more than eighty years:
В дополнение к письму о переговорах с Марксом
сообщаю, что я продолжал упорно торговаться до сегодня и только сегодня
телеграфировал, что я согласен. За будущие произведения я буду получать (по
предварительном напечатании в журналах обычным порядком) 250 р. за лист,
потом через 5 лет 450 р., ещё через 5 лет 650 р. за лист и т. д.
с надбавками по 200 р. через каждые 5 лет. Обещал в телеграмме, что буду
жить не долее 80 лет.
According to Sergeenko, Marx took Chekhov's words in his telegram
at face value and the deal nearly collapsed:
Твоя фраза в телеграмме о том, что ты даешь
слово не жить более 80-ти лет, была принята Марксом чистоганом и едва не
расстроила сделку. Он вскочил из-за стола и, в волнении шагая по комнате,
бормотал: fünf und zwanzig Jahre — Tausend fünf hundert... Dreißig Jahre — ein
Tausend... etc. (Sergeenko's letter of February 15, 1899, to
Chekhov)
The year of VN's birth, 1899 is also Pushkin's hundredth
anniversary. If Chekhov (who died in 1904, at forty four)
had lived till 1940 dying at eighty, he would have seen not
only the World War I, the Revolution and the terror of Lenin and Stalin but
also the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's death in 1937 (widely
celebrated in the USSR, as well as in the emigration). He could have
read all novels of Sirin (except Chapter Four of The Gift,
"The Life of Chernyshevski") and the dilogy of Ilf and Petrov
(the writers who were born in Odessa, the city where Pushkin's gourmets
tear oysters of their 'cloisters'). One of the characters of Ilf and Petrov's
"The 12 Chairs" is Ellochka the cannibal, a friend of Fima Sobak (whose name
brings to mind Cordula Tobak, born de Prey, Van's mistress). The characters of
Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" include Ivan Osipovich, a cook who gave
dinner to Anton Pavlovich, the Prince of Würtemberg (Chapter XXIX,
Gremyashchiy Klyuch). No German Prince of that name existed.
Anton Pavlovich is Chekhov's name and patronymic. Chekhov died in
Badenweiler, a spa in Baden-Würtemberg. One night he woke up in his hotel
room and said in German: ich sterbe (I'm dying). Chekhov's wife
sent for the doctor who brought champagne for his colleague (for
medicine could not help anymore). The writer's last words were "it's been a long
time since I drank champagne." Like Chekhov, Il'ya Ilf died of
tuberculosis (in spring, 1937). A few days before his death
Ilf was dining in a Moscow restaurant and said of the wine he was drinking:
"champagne named ich sterbe" (Sbornik vospominaniy ob I. Ilfe
i E. Petrove, Moscow, 1963).
Like Chekhov and Ilf, Ada's husband Andrey Vinelander dies of
tuberculosis. (3.8)
According to old Rattner (Van's colleague at Kingston University,
a pessimist of genius), Van will "sturb" with an alliteration on his lips.
(2.5)
According to Van, a gap of up to a hundred years exists
between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth's twin planet on which
Ada is set):
Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’)
sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of
Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle
to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as
if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the
opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland
to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the
Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water
and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and
‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in
regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did
not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but
because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the
two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the
crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world
corresponding to the not-yets of the other...
There were those who
maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two
worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive
events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and
there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live
organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would
rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess
games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an
infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains,
at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development.
(1.3)
In Chapter Four of Eugene Onegin
Lenski plays chess with Olga Larin: "and Lenski with a pawn / takes in
abstraction his own rook" (XXVI: 13-14). Chekhov's Play without a Title
(whose characters include Abram Vengerovich and his son Isak) begins with a
game of chess. One of the chapters of The Twelve Chairs is entitled
"The Interplanetary Chess Tournament." One of the chapters of The Golden
Calf is entitled "Homer, Milton and Panikovski." A character in The
Golden Calf, poor geography teacher, went mad because he failed to find on
a globe the Bering Strait ("the ha-ha of a doubled ocean").
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m.,
Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan's lawyer, Demon noted - just as he
was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs
Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the
street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to
raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very
exotic and potent pill to face the day's ordeal on top of a sleepless journey),
contented himself - quite properly - with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled
with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and
smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out
of the way of Mrs R4. (2.10)
Vivian Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): R4: 'rook
four,' a chess indication of position (pun on the woman's name).
On the other hand, Dama s sobachkoy (The Lady with the
Dog, 1899) is a story by Chekhov.
Alexey
Sklyarenko