Most summers she [Ada] spent at Ardis;
most winters in their Kaluga town home - two upper stories in the former Zemski
chertog (palazzo). (1.24)
He
[Van] was out, he imagined, na progulke
(promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov's
grandson, a neighbor's boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of,
a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with
fur on, probably pathological. (ibid.)
Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called
Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,' was mumbling and numbering in
raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose's purloined
lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember - what a pity,
said Van - when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi
leaving Dan - to his devices and vices, inserted Van - and arriving home at
sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her
crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach'im, to hell's hounds - and
it did remind one of Rose's terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan's leg) the
charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and
blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she
had forgotten her hoop - no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had
not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular
summer, because his father's life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and
he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did
not interest Ada. (ibid.)
Chertog (royal palace) is
mentioned in S. T. Aksakov's fairy tale Alen'kiy tsvetochek ("The
Little Scarlet Flower") appended to "The Childhood Years of Bagrov
Grandson" (1858):
Выходит
он под конец на поляну широкую, и посередь той поляны широкой стоит дом не дом,
чертог не чертог, а дворец королевский или царский, весь в огне, в серебре и
золоте и в каменьях самоцветных, весь горит и светит, а огня не видать; ровно
солнышко красное, индо тяжело на него глазам смотреть.
At last he emerged into a
wide clearing and there in the centre a fantastic sight met his gaze: neither
house nor mansion, but a magnificient royal palace decorated with silver, and
gold, and precious stones. It blazed and glittered, but no fire was to be seen.
It was like staring into the brilliant sun, and the vision hurt his
eyes.
On the other hand, Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra" (recited by the
improvisatore in "The Egyptian Nights," 1835) begins: "Chertog
siyal..." ("The palace shone...")
Chertog has
chert (also spelt chort and chyort), "devil," in
it.
They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the
family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say
'chort' (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do
before. (1.22)
In Lipetskie vody ("The Lipetsk Waters,"
1815), a comedy by "caustic" Shakhovskoy, the poet Zhukovski* is satirized
as Fialkin. Fialka being
Russian for "violet," Ada calls Violet Knox (old Van's secretary, 5.4)
Fialochka (little violet). "The Night Violet" is a poem (1906) by Blok.
Blok's Incognita (1906) ends in the lines:
В
моей душе лежит сокровище,
И
ключ поручен только мне!
Ты
право, пьяное чудовище!
Я
знаю: истина в вине.
A treasure lies
in my soul,
And the key is entrusted to
me alone!
The drunken
monster, you are right!
I know: in wine
is truth.
Klyuch (key) brings
to mind klyuchnitsa (housekeeper)** Pelageya who in The Childhood Years of Bagrov
Grandson tells little hero the fairy tale “Alen’kiy tsvetochek.” As
to p'yanoe chudovishche (drunken monster), it reminds one of
chudishche mokhnatoe (shaggy monster), the owner of
chertog in Aksakov's fairy tale.
...he [Van] indulged in a brutal
outburst triggered by her suggesting - quite sweetly and casually (as she
[Ada] might suggest
walking a little way on the edge of a bog to see if a certain orchid was out) -
that they visit the late Krolik's grave in a churchyard by which they were
passing - and he had suddenly started to shout ('You know I abhor churchyards, I
despise, I denounce death, dead bodies are burlesque, I refuse to stare at a
stone under which a roly-poly old Pole is rotting, let him feed his maggots in
peace, the entomologies of death leave me cold, I detest, I despise...'
(1.41)
In Chapter Three of Blok's
Retribution (1910-21) the hero visits the grave of his father (Demon)
in Warsaw:
Отец лежит в Аллее
Роз.
The Father lies in the Rose Avenue [a street
in Warsaw].
At Marina's cremation Demon (whose life "was
a rose garden all the time") promises not to fool the poor grubs but
five years later breaks his promise perishing in an airplane disaster above
the Pacific (3.7).
chertog
+ barin/brain + malen'kiy + Ada = chert + Bog + Marina
+ alen'kiy + ad/da
luna + Charski = Lunacharski
voda + barin =
vino/voin + da + bar/rab
barin
- master
malen'kiy
- little
Bog - God
ad
- hell
da - yes
luna - moon
Charski - the author-like figure in "The Egyptian
Nights"
Lunacharski - the minister of education in Lenin's
government
voda - water
vino - wine
voin - warrior
rab - slave
Chekhov is the author of
Volodya bol'shoy i Volodya malen'kiy ("The Two Volodyas," 1893). One of the story's characters, Rita, is a
spinster who can drink any amount of wine and liquors without being drunk and
who tells scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless
way. In Chekhov's story Women from the Point of View
of a Drunkard (1885), signed "My brother's brother," girls under
sixteen are compared to distilled water. Poor Aqua's last note is signed "My
sister's sister who teper' iz ada [now is out of hell]"
(1.3) Aqua's twin sister Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) is
a namesake of Marina Mnishek, the Polish beauty in Pushkin's play "Boris
Godunov" (1825).
Marina =
Armina = Ariman
Armina - Villa Armina, Demon's Mediterranean Villa that he
gave to Marina
Ariman - Russian spelling of Ahriman (in Zoroastrianism,
the impersonification of evil); in Garshin's story Krasnyi tsvetok
("The Red Flower," 1883) the flowers of poppy are compared
to Ahriman:
Это было таинственное, страшное существо,
противоположность Богу, Ариман, принявший скромный и невинный
вид.
It was a
mysterious, terrible creature, God’s opposite, Ahriman, that adopted a humble
and innocent disguise.
He
headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his
black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent
revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much
more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone,
always alone, like Blok's Incognita. (3.3)
The girl whom Van does not
recognize at first turns out to be Lucette.
In his memoir essay on
Chekhov, Iz vospominaniy ob Antone Chekhove ("From the Reminiscences of
Anton Chekhov," 1906), Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov speaks of
op'yanenie Chekhovym (intoxication with Chekhov):
Даже
выражение "знакомство с Чеховым" как-то сюда не укладывается - вернее было бы
назвать тогдашнее настроение - "опьянение Чеховым"... опьянение его талантом,
умом, юмором, всей его личностью, чуждой фразы и мелочной условности.
(chapter I "The First Acquaintance")
Shcheglov's essay begins as
follows:
Одно из самых
дорогих украшений моего рабочего стола - портрет Антона Чехова с дружеской
надписью: "...на добрую нежную память о старине глубокой, когда мы
познакомились..."
One of
the dearest things that grace my writing-table is the picture of Anton
Chekhov with his friendly inscription: "...as a fond and tender
memento of deep ancientry when we got acquainted..."
O starine glubokoy
("of deep ancientry") is a reference to the opening lines of Canto One of
Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820):
Дела давно
минувших дней,
Преданья
старины глубокой.
The ways and deeds of days
gone by,
the legends of deep ancientry.
Her florimania endured, alas; but after
Dr Krolik died (in 1886) of a heart attack in his garden, she had placed
all her live pupae in his open coffin where he lay, she said, as plump
and pink as in
vivo. (1.35)
in vivo
+ starine = in vino veritas
As he speaks of the circumstances of his first meeting with Chekhov,
Shcheglov mentions the poet Nadson (1862-87):
Знакомство произошло в большой зале ресторана гостиницы
"Москва"; помню даже такую мелочь - именно за последним столом у окна, что
против входа в залу, - тем более помню, что за этим самым столом, по странной
случайности, не раз приходилось скромно пировать со свежеиспечённым офицериком
Каспийского полка Семёном Надсоном...
In a letter to Suvorin in which he says that the works of contemporary
writers lack the alcohol that would intoxicate the reader Chekhov
mentions Nadson:
Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of
to-day, lemonade?
Shcheglov was a playwright. In his letters to Shcheglov Chekhov tried
to persuade his friend to stop writing for the stage and return to plain prose.
(Similarly, Tolstoy said to Chekhov that he disliked Chekhov's plays and that
they were even worse than Shakespeare's.)
According to Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, "Lermontov was the first
Nadson of Russian literature" (The Gift, Chapter Four). Lermontov
is the author of Demon (1829-39). Demon is the society nickname of
Van's and Ada's father.
With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey
Andreevich [Aksakov], he [Van] lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink
cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers - and puzzling out the
exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father's
volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov's diamond-faceted
tetrameters. (1.28)
*Zhukovski was a son of Afanasiy Bunin, a Tula landowner, and Salha, a
Turkish girl from Bendery (Bessarabia)
**Note also the housekeeper
of Onegin’s late uncle who forty years had
squabbled with her (EO, Two, III, 2-3) and Van'ka
klyuchnik, the hero of a popular folk song
p.s. Carolyn: your "lights" dimmed in my memory. Do you mean that Krolik
was poisoned, like Hamlet's father? Or that he was asleep, not
dead?
Alexey
Sklyarenko