Describing a game of Flavita (the Russian Scrabble) that he played with Ada and Lucette soon after the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Benten lamp that Ada would prefer but that is out of kerosene:
A particular nuisance was the angry or disdainful looking up of dubious words in a number of lexicons, sitting, standing and sprawling around the girls, on the floor, under Lucette’s chair upon which she knelt, on the divan, on the big round table with the board and the blocks and on an adjacent chest of drawers. The rivalry between moronic Ozhegov (a big, blue, badly bound volume, containing 52,872 words) and a small but chippy Edmundson in Dr Gerschizhevsky’s reverent version, the taciturnity of abridged brutes and the unconventional magnanimity of a four-volume Dahl (‘My darling dahlia,’ moaned Ada as she obtained an obsolete cant word from the gentle long-bearded ethnographer) — all this would have been insupportably boring to Van had he not been stung as a scientist by the curious affinity between certain aspects of Scrabble and those of the planchette. He became aware of it one August evening in 1884 on the nursery balcony, under a sunset sky the last fire of which snaked across the corner of the reservoir, stimulated the last swifts, and intensified the hue of Lucette’s copper curls. The morocco board had been unfolded on a much inkstained, monogrammed and notched deal table. Pretty Blanche, also touched, on earlobe and thumbnail, with the evening’s pink — and redolent with the perfume called Miniver Musk by handmaids — had brought a still unneeded lamp. Lots had been cast, Ada had won the right to begin, and was in the act of collecting one by one, mechanically and unthinkingly, her seven ‘luckies’ from the open case where the blocks lay face down, showing nothing but their anonymous black backs, each in its own cell of flavid velvet. She was speaking at the same time, saying casually: ‘I would much prefer the Benten lamp here but it is out of kerosin. Pet (addressing Lucette), be a good scout, call her — Good Heavens!’
The seven letters she had taken, S,R,E,N,O,K,I, and was sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him) now formed in quick and, as it were, self-impulsed rearrangement the key word of the chance sentence that had attended their random assemblage. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Gerschizhevsky: a Slavist’s name gets mixed here with that of Chizhevki, another Slavist.
The Benten lamp seems to combine Benten (the goddess of the sea mentioned in the Japanese chapter of Jules Verne' novel Around the World in Eighty Days) with little little Bunsen lamps (named after Robert Bunsen, a German chemist, 1811-99) mentioned in Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) by Watson when he describes his first meeting with Holmes. But it also may hint at Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who is mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter One (XLII: 6) of Eugene Onegin:
Причудницы большого света!
Всех прежде вас оставил он;
И правда то, что в наши лета
Довольно скучен высший тон;
Хоть, может быть, иная дама
Толкует Сея и Бентама,
Но вообще их разговор
Несносный, хоть невинный вздор;
К тому ж они так непорочны,
Так величавы, так умны,
Так благочестия полны,
Так осмотрительны, так точны,
Так неприступны для мужчин,
Что вид их уж рождает сплин.7
Capricious belles of the grand monde!
Before all others you he left;
and it is true that in our years
the upper ton is rather tedious.
Although, perhaps, this or that dame
interprets Say and Bentham,
in general their conversation
is insupportable, though harmless tosh.
On top of that they are so pure,
so stately, so intelligent,
so full of piety,
so circumspect, so scrupulous,
so inaccessible to men,
that the mere sight of them begets the spleen.7
7. The whole of this ironical stanza is nothing but a subtle compliment to our fair compatriots. Thus Boileau, under the guise of disapprobation, eulogizes Louis XIV. Our ladies combine enlightenment with amiability, and strict purity of morals with the Oriental charm that so captivated Mme de Staël. (Pushkin's note)
In 1786 and 1787, Bentham travelled to Krichev in White Russia (modern Belarus) to visit his brother, Samuel, who was engaged in managing various industrial and other projects for Prince Potyomkin. It was Samuel (as Jeremy later repeatedly acknowledged) who conceived the basic idea of a circular building at the hub of a larger compound as a means of allowing a small number of managers to oversee the activities of a large and unskilled workforce.
A favorite (and secret husband) of the Empress Catherine II, Prince Potyomkin founderd Sevastopol (the second largest city in the Crimea). Describing his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama, Van mentions the psychiatrist P. O. Tyomkin who was saved by one of the special detectives at Chose (Van’s English University) from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id.:
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
The dagger of Prince Potyomkin brings to mind a fork with which Alexey Orlov (whose brother Grigoriy was a lover of Catherine II) is said to have stabbed the Emperor Peter III (Catherine's husband, father of Paul I, the Emperor who four decades later was assassinated in the newly built Mikhaylovski Castle). A pyromaniac, Peter III liked to watch the flames consume buildings and, whenever there was a fire in St. Petersburg, would rush to the place along with his courtiers. A son of Catherine and Grigoriy Orlov, Alexey Bobrinski (the surname comes from bobrovaya shuba, the beaver fur coat, in which the infant was muffled up) was born during a house fire set up by Catherine's devoted valet to hide the fact of the child's birth. The Benten lamp is out of kerosene, because on the eve, in the Night of the Brning Barn, it was used by Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada (who wanted to spend the night with Van and hoped that everybody will leave the house to admire the fire) has bribed to set the barn on fire. Eight years later Van blinds Kim (who attempted to blackmail Ada) with an alpenstock and burns down Kim's files (and most of the Kalugano forest). Because love is blind, Van fails to see that in the Night of the Burning Barn Ada is not a virgin. Nor does he realize that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the Editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, 'little Violet,' and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren. After his father's assassination the Emperor Alexander I (Catherine's beloved grandson) famously said Pri mne vsyo budet kak pri babushke ("In my rule everything will be as in the rule of my grandmother"). When Van describes the Night of Burning Barn, Ada takes over and mentions Grandma who gets the Xmas card:
Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —
Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).
Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter. (1.19)