The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in
April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George's
Day (according to Mlle Larivière's maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen
- out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend. (1.3)
Svyatoy Georgiy ("Saint George," 1906) is a poem by
Balmont:
Святой Георгий, убив Дракона,
Взглянул печально вокруг
себя.
Не мог он слышать глухого стона,
Не мог быть светлым — лишь свет
любя.
5 Он с лёгким сердцем, во имя
Бога,
Копьё наметил и поднял щит.
Но мыслей встало так много, много,
И
он, сразивши, сражён, молчит.
И конь святого своим копытом
10 Ударил гневно о край пути.
Сюда он
прибыл путём избитым.
Куда отсюда? Куда идти?
Святой Георгий, святой
Георгий,
И ты изведал свой высший час!
15 Пред сильным Змеем ты был в
восторге,
Пред мёртвым Змием ты вдруг погас!
In "Balmont the Lyric Poet" Annenski quotes the closing
stanza of Balmont's poem Koldun'ya vlyublyonnaya ("The Witch in Love,"
1903). The witch in this poem knows chto znayut v adu (what they know
in hell). Vlyublyonnaya koldun'ya (the enamored witch) is also
mentioned by Balmont in his poem Morskaya dusha ("The Sea Soul,"
1903):
У
неё глаза морского цвета,
И живёт она как бы во сне.
От весны до окончанья
лета
Дух её в нездешней стороне.
Ждёт она чего-то молчаливо,
Где
сильней всего шумит прибой,
И в глазах глубоких в миг отлива
Холодеет
сумрак голубой.
А когда высоко встанет буря,
Вся она застынет, внемля
плеск,
И глядит как зверь, глаза прищуря,
И в глазах её — зелёный
блеск.
А когда настанет новолунье,
Вся изнемогая от тоски,
Бледная
влюблённая колдунья
Расширяет чёрные зрачки.
И слова какого-то
обета
Всё твердит, взволнованно дыша.
У неё глаза морского цвета,
У неё
неверная душа.
The name of Aqua's twin sister Marina (Demon's mistress)
means "of the sea." Poor mad Aqua believed that she could understand the
language of her namesake, water:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the
language of tap water - which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does
predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one's ears while one
washes one's hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this
immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite
harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the
thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of
recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads)
all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding
the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and
other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam
sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil') with the banning of an unmentionable
'lammer.' (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): lammer: amber (Fr: l'ambre), allusion to
electricity.
In his poem Ya zakryvayu glaza i v mechtanii... ("I close
my eyes and in day-dreaming...") from the cycle Ogon' ("Fire,"
1905) Balmont mentions Elektrichestvo beloe ("the white
electricity") and says that he sees Earth (cf. Terra, Demonia's twin planet) as
"a sister between planets." Balmont's "Sonnets of Sun, Honey and Moon"
(1921) include Sokhranyonnyi yantar' ("The Preserved
Amber").
In one of his most famous poems (quoted by Annenski in his essay)
Balmont compares himself to the refinement of a slow Russian speech and to a
transparent brook:
Я
- изысканность русской медлительной речи,
Предо мною другие
поэты - предтечи,
Я впервые открыл в этой речи уклоны,
Перепевные, гневные, нежные звоны.
Я - внезапный излом,
Я - играющий гром,
Я - прозрачный
ручей,
Я - для всех и ничей.
Demon's wife goes mad and commits suicide (Aqua's last note is
signed my sister's sister who teper' iz ada ['now
is out of hell']). As a young man Balmont attempted suicide and in his
old age the poet went mad.
Three elements, fire, water, and air,
destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.
(3.1)
Balmont is the author of the three cycles of poems: Ogon'
("Fire"), Voda ("Water," 1905) and Vozdukh ("Air,"
1905). Zemlya ("Earth," 1908) is a poem by Balmont in which,
as in Voda, Atlantida (Atlantis) is mentioned. In Part
Four of Ada Van calls Lucette (who drowns herself in the Atlantic
Ocean) "a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis." In his poem Ogon'
prikhodit s vysoty ("The fire comes from height...) from the cycle
Ogon' ("Fire") Balmont mentions, among other flowers, durman
vonyuchiy (the stinking datura flowers):
Как
бы в броне крылоподобных листьев,
Зубчатых, паутинисто-шерстистых,
—
Дурман вонючий, — мертвенный морозник, —
Цветы отравы, хищности, и тьмы,
—
According to Balmont, durman is a flower of poisoning,
preying and darkness. It is possible that Marina who collected flowers near
Aqua's sanatorim ('Nusshaus') in Switzerland (where Van was born, 1.1) gave
a poison to her sister in order to cloud poor Aqua's
mind.