The somewhat Italianate style of the
apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its
white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes,
veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe
as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white 'Nuremberg
Virgin'-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving
by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of
Marseilles Harbor - in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts
added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada
welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life,
otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods.
(3.8)
Aleksey and Anna seem to hint at Aleksey Vronski and Anna
Karenin, but they also can be Aleksey Suvorin and his second wife Anna
Ivanovna. Suvorin was Chekhov's travelling companion in his journey in Italy. In
a letter of April 1, 1891, Chekhov from Rome wrote to Madame
Kiselyov:
To-morrow I am going to Naples. Pray that
I may meet there a beautiful Russian lady, if possible a widow or a divorced
wife.
In the guide-books it says that a love affair is
an essential condition for a tour in Italy. Well, hang them all! I am ready for
anything. If there must be a love affair, so be it.
Roman (the word Chekhov used in his
letter) means both "love affair" and "novel." According to
Serebrov (A. N. Tikhonov), Chekhov once told him:
Чтобы строить роман, необходимо хорошо знать
закон симметрии и равновесия масс. Роман – это целый дворец, и надо, чтобы
читатель чувствовал себя в нём свободно, не удивлялся бы и не скучал, как в
музее.
To build a novel one must
know well the law of symmetry and the balance of forms. The novel is
a whole palace and the reader should be at ease in it, he should
not be surprised or bored, as in a museum. (On Chekhov,
III)
According to Suvorin, Несколько раз он развивал передо мною широкую
тему романа с полуфантастическим героем, который живёт целый век и участвует во
всех событиях XIX века.
Several times he [Chekhov] developed before me the broad
theme of a novel with the half-fantastic main character who
lives a hundred years and participates in all events of the 19th
century.
The narrator and main character of Ada, Van
Veen, lives almost a whole century dying at ninety
seven.
In his postscript to the above-quoted letter to
Madame Kiselyov Chekhov sends his greetings gospodam
skvortsam:
My respects to Messr.
starlings.
One of Ada's lovers is John Starling who played Skvortsov in
the Yakima stage version of Four Sisters (as Chekhov's play
The Three Sisters is known on Antiterra):
Van glanced through the list of
players and D.P.'s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an
artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking
camera)', had been assigned to a 'Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff' and
somebody called 'John Starling' had been cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant
in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from
skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada,
she blushed as was her Old World wont.
'Yes,' she said, 'he was quite
a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were
too much for him - he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet
master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see ("the blush now
replaced by a matovaya pallor") I'm not hiding one stain of what rhymes
with Perm.' (2.9)
A stain of what rhymes with Perm brings to mind
Aleksey and Anna who may have asterisked in their Italian hotel.
Yakim and Yakima hint at Yakimanka, a street in
Moscow where Chekhov's family lived in the 1880s. The name of the fourth sister
in the Antiterran version of Chekhov's play, Varvara ("the garrulous original"
who is played by Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina in the film
version of Four Sisters), hints at Varvarka, another street in
Moscow.
...But let us shift to
the didactic metaphorism of Chekhov's friend, Count Tolstoy [the author of Anna Karenin].
We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in
the Old World subalpine zone. At first one opens them with the utmost care, very
slowly, in the vain hope of hushing the excruciating creak, the growing groan
that the door emits midway. Before long one discovers, however, that if it is
opened or closed with celerity, in one resolute sweep, the hellish hinge is
taken by surprise, and triumphant silence achieved. Van and Ada, for all the
exquisite and powerful bliss that engulfed and repleted them (and we do not mean
here the rose sore of Eros alone), knew that certain memories had to be left
closed, lest they wrench every nerve of the soul with their monstrous moan. But
if the operation is performed swiftly, if indelible evils are mentioned between
two quick quips, there is a chance that the anesthetic of life itself may allay
unforgettable agony in the process of swinging its door. (ibid.)
In Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard (Act One) Gaev
improvises a speech addressing a bookcase
(knizhnyi shkaf; shkaf also
means "wardrobe" and "cupboard"):
GAEV. And do you know, Luba, how old this case
is? A week ago I took out the bottom drawer; I looked and saw figures burnt out
in it. That case was made exactly a hundred years ago. What do you think of
that? What? We could celebrate its jubilee. It
hasn't a soul of its own, but still, say what you will, it's a fine
bookcase.
PISHCHIK. [Astonished] A hundred years. .
. Think of that!
GAEV. Yes . . . it's a real thing. [Handling
it] My dear and honoured case! I congratulate you on your existence, which
has already for more than a hundred years been directed towards the bright
ideals of good and justice; your silent call to productive labour has not grown
less in the hundred years [Weeping] during which you have upheld virtue
and faith in a better future to the generations of our race, educating us up to
ideals of goodness and to the knowledge of a common consciousness.
[Pause.]
According to Van, Marina is an adequate Mme Ranevski (the
main character in The Cherry Orchard):
They've all gone and left me behind, as
old Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard (Marina was an
adequate Mme Ranevski). (1.19)
Van and Ada make love for the first time in the Night of the
Burning Barn, when everybody left to see the fire. They "asterisk" in the
library of Ardis Hall:
When he grew too loud, she shushed,
shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around
him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams - but impatient
young passion (brimming like Van's overflowing bath while he is reworking this,
a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the
first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird
uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged
dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the
carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned
well pleased with the night treat, the cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a
pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)
- and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the
couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent
bedrooms. (ibid.)
Btw., Aleksey is also the name of Anna Karenin's deceived
husband and Suvorin's first wife (who was killed by a lover who shot himself
dead beside her) was also Anna Ivanovna. Could they meet on
"Desdemonia" (as Van calls Antiterra, aka Demonia)?
Aleksey Sklyarenko