In March 1905 Demon Veen (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father, Van mentions The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin (an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith) by Kithar K. L. Sween (a friend of Milton Eliot, the real estate magnate):
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict.
The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
In his poem Whispers of Immortality (1919) T. S. Eliot (the author of The Waste Land, 1922, and Sweeney Agonistes, 1932) metnions Grishkin:
Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
On the other hand, Cardinal Grishkin seems to be a cross between onyi khitryi kardinal ("a certain sly Cardinal," Cardinal Montalto, Pope Sixtus V, 1521-90) to whom in Canto Three of his poem Poltava (1828) Pushkin compares Mazepa:
И день настал. Встает с одра
Мазепа, сей страдалец хилый,
Сей труп живой, еще вчера
Стонавший слабо над могилой.
Теперь он мощный враг Петра.
Теперь он, бодрый, пред полками
Сверкает гордыми очами
И саблей машет — и к Десне
Проворно мчится на коне.
Согбенный тяжко жизнью старой,
Так оный хитрый кардинал,
Венчавшись римскою тиарой,
И прям, и здрав, и молод стал.
and Grigoriy (Grishka) Otrepiev (the Pretender), a character in Pushkin's tragedy Boris Godunov (1825):
Первый пристав. А вот что: из Москвы бежал некоторый злой еретик, Гришка Отрепьев, слыхал ли ты это?
Григорий (читает): ...А по справкам оказалось, отбежал он, окаянный Гришка, к границе литовской...
1ST OFFICER.This is why; from Moscow there has fled a certain wicked heretic—Grishka Otrepiev. Have you heard this?
GRIGORIY (Reads.) ...And, according to information, it has been shown that he, the accursed Grishka, has fled to the Lithuanian frontier. (Tavern on the Lithuanian Frontier)
A character in Boris Godunov, Pushkin (the poet's ancestor) mentions latinskie popy (the Catholic priests) who see eye to eye with Grishka:
Пушкин
Да слышно, он умён, приветлив, ловок,
По нраву всем. Московских беглецов
Обворожил. Латинские попы
С ним заодно. Король его ласкает
И, говорят, помогу обещал.
PUSHKIN.
'Tis said that he is wise,
Affable, cunning, popular with all men.
He has bewitched the fugitives from Moscow,
The Catholic priests see eye to eye with him.
The King caresses him, and, it is said,
Has promised help.
(Moscow. Shuyski's House)
On Van's eighth birthday (January 1, 1878) his father made himself up as Boris Godunov in an amateur parody:
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester... the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama.... In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion. (2.11)
In a conversation with Van Demon says that he he is not concerned with semantics - or semination:
The most protracted of the several pauses having run its dark course, Demon’s voice emerged to say, with a vigor that it had lacked before:
‘Van, you receive the news I impart with incomprehensible calmness. I do not recall any instance, in factual or fictional life, of a father’s having to tell his son that particular kind of thing in these particular circumstances. But you play with a pencil and seem as unruffled as if we were discussing your gaming debts or the demands of a wench knocked up in a ditch.’
Tell him about the herbarium in the attic? About the indiscretions of (anonymous) servants? About a forged wedding date? About everything that two bright children had so gaily gleaned? I will. He did.
‘She was twelve,’ Van added, ‘and I was a male primatal of fourteen and a half, and we just did not care. And it’s too late to care now.’
‘Too late?’ shouted his father, sitting up on his couch.
‘Please, Dad, do not lose your temper,’ said Van. ‘Nature, as I informed you once, has been kind to me. We can afford to be careless in every sense of the word.’
‘I’m not concerned with semantics — or semination. One thing, and only one, matters. It is not too late to stop that ignoble affair —’
‘No shouting and no philistine epithets,’ interrupted Van.
‘All right,’ said Demon. ‘I take back the adjective, and I ask you instead: Is it too late to prevent your affair with your sister from wrecking her life?’
Van knew this was coming. He knew, he said, this was coming. ‘Ignoble’ had been taken care of; would his accuser define ‘wrecking’?
The conversation now took a neutral turn that was far more terrible than its introductory admission of faults for which our young lovers had long pardoned their parents. How did Van imagine his sister’s pursuing a scenic career? Would he admit it would be wrecked if they persisted in their relationship? Did he envisage a life of concealment in luxurious exile? Was he ready to deprive her of normal interests and a normal marriage? Children? Normal amusements?
‘Don’t forget "normal adultery,"’ remarked Van.
‘How much better that would be!’ said grim Demon, sitting on the edge of the couch with both elbows propped on his knees, and nursing his head in his hands: ‘The awfulness of the situation is an abyss that grows deeper the more I think of it. You force me to bring up the tritest terms such as "family," "honor," "set," "law."...All right, I have bribed many officials in my wild life but neither you nor I can bribe a whole culture, a whole country. And the emotional impact of learning that for almost ten years you and that charming child have been deceiving their parents —’
Here Van expected his father to take the ‘it-would-kill-your-mother’ line, but Demon was wise enough to keep clear of it. Nothing could ‘kill’ Marina. If any rumors of incest did come her way, concern with her ‘inner peace’ would help her to ignore them — or at least romanticize them out of reality’s reach. Both men knew all that. Her image appeared for a moment and accomplished a facile fade-out. (2.11)
Semination brings to mind Kithar Sween's 'seminal' novel (Cardinal Grishkin). The element that destroyed Demon Veen is air (Van does not suspect that his father died because Ada, who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up, managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair):
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)
At the end of her Poema vozdukha ("The Poem of Air," 1927) written v dni Lindberga (in the days of Lindbergh)* Marina Tsvetaev (1892-1941) mentions kogorty chisl (the cohorts of numbers):
В час, когда готический
Храм нагонит шпиль
Собственный — и вычислив
Всё, — когорты числ!
В час, когда готический
Шпиль нагонит смысл
Собственный…
In The Poem of Air Marina Tsvetaev calls death kurs vozdukhoplavan'ya (a course of aeronautics) where everything begins s azov (from scratch), zanovo (anew):
Курс воздухоплаванья
Смерть, где всё с азов,
За́ново…
In a conversation with Van in her bedroom Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) mentions Azov, a Russian humorist:
Naked-faced, dull-haired, wrapped up in her oldest kimono (her Pedro had suddenly left for Rio), Marina reclined on her mahogany bed under a golden-yellow quilt, drinking tea with mare’s milk, one of her fads.
‘Sit down, have a spot of chayku,’ she said. ‘The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.’ And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): ‘Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage — I mean "adage," I always fluff that word — and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?’
Van’s mind flashed in advance of his speech. It was, Marina, a fantastic exaggeration. The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe. I’m the well-known beggar in the saddest of all stories.
‘Erunda (nonsense),’ said Van. ‘She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook and misconstrued our stumbling huddle (spotïkayushcheesya sliyanie).’
‘I do not mean Ada, silly,’ said Marina with a slight snort, as she fussed over the teapot. ‘Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. Ada is a big girl, and big girls, alas, have their own worries. Mlle Larivière meant Lucette, of course. Van, those soft games must stop. Lucette is twelve, and naive, and I know it’s all clean fun, yet (odnako) one can never behave too delikatno in regard to a budding little woman. A propos de coins: in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma, "How stupid to be so clever," a play in verse, written, I think, in Pushkin’s time, the hero reminds Sophie of their childhood games, and says:
How oft we sat together in a corner
And what harm might there be in that?
but in Russian it is a little ambiguous, have another spot, Van?’ (he shook his head, simultaneously lifting his hand, like his father), ‘because, you see, — no, there is none left anyway — the second line, i kazhetsya chto v etom, can be also construed as "And in that one, meseems," pointing with his finger at a corner of the room. Imagine — when I was rehearsing that scene with Kachalov at the Seagull Theater, in Yukonsk, Stanislavski, Konstantin Sergeevich, actually wanted him to make that cosy little gesture (uyutnen’kiy zhest).’
‘How very amusing,’ said Van.
The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.
‘I could never stand that breed,’ remarked Van. ‘Dackelophobia.’
‘But girls — do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but — Why do you laugh?’
‘Nothing,’ said Van. ‘I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?’
‘How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way-don’t ask me how’ (double hand gesture of horrified ignorance ‘— when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though — I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little "stylized" (stilizovanï), as your father used to say, an irrisistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games — who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember — not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!’ (1.37)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): chayku: Russ., tea (diminutive).
Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow’s.
cousinage: cousinhood is dangerous neighborhood.
on s’embrassait: kissing went on in every corner.
erunda: Russ., nonsense.
hier und da: Germ., here and there.
raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.
According to Marina, Azov (a Russian humorist) derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. In his suicide note (written after Demon told him to stop his affair with Ada) Van uses the phrase "here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are:"
He judged it would take him as much time to find a taxi at this hour of the day as to walk, with his ordinary swift swing, the ten blocks to Alex Avenue. He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks. Upon letting himself in for the last time into his idiotically cheerful apartment, he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note:
Do what he tells you. His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic] a vague kind of ‘Victorian’ era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?], but in a paroxysm of [illegible] I suddenly realized he was right. Yes, right, here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are. You see, girl, how it is and must be. In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye, girl. (2.11)
Azov is Gen. pl. of az (as the letter A was called in the old Russian alphabet). Mne otmshchenie, i az vozdam (Vengeance is mine, I will repay) is the epigraph to Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77). At the beginning of Ada the opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel is turned inside out:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
According to Marina Tsvetaev, her Polish mother named her after Marina Mnishek, the wife Grigoriy Otrepiev (False Dmitri I) and several other impostors. Marina Mnishek is a character in Pushkin's Boris Godunov.
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada have at least two children and 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.
*On May 20–21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh (an American aviator and military officer, 1902-74) made the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), flying alone for 33.5 hours.