Describing the library of Ardis Hall, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the mating habits of the fly Serromyia amorata Poupart and says that he prefers to burn than to be slurped up alive by the Cheramie:
Another hearty laugh shook Van when he unearthed for entomologically-minded Ada the following passage in a reliable History of Mating Habits. ‘Some of the perils and ridicule which attend the missionary position adopted for mating purposes by our puritanical intelligentsia and so justly derided by the "primitive" but healthy-minded natives of the Begouri Islands are pointed out by a prominent French orientalist [thick footnote, skipped here] who describes the mating habits of the fly Serromyia amorata Poupart. Copulation takes place with both ventral surfaces pressed together and the mouths touching. When the last throb (frisson) of intercourse is terminated the female sucks out the male’s body content through the mouth of her impassioned partner. One supposes (see Pesson et al.) [another copious footnote] that the titbits, such as the juicy leg of a bug enveloped in a webby substance, or even a mere token (the frivolous dead end or subtle beginning of an evolutionary process — qui le sait!) such as a petal carefully wrapped up and tied up with a frond of red fern, which certain male flies (but apparently not the femorata and amorata morons) bring to the female before mating, represent a prudent guarantee against the misplaced voracity of the young lady.’
Still more amusing was the ‘message’ of a Canadian social worker, Mme de Réan-Fichini, who published her treatise, On Contraceptive Devices, in Kapuskan patois (to spare the blushes of Estotians and United Statians; while instructing hardier fellow-workers in her special field). ‘Sole sura metoda,’ she wrote, ‘por decevor natura, est por un strong-guy de contino-contino-contino jusque le plesir brimz; et lors, a lultima instanta, svitchera a l’altra gropa [groove]; ma perquoi una femme ardora andor ponderosa ne se retorna kvik enof, la transita e facilitata per positio torovago’; and that term an appended glossary explained in blunt English as ‘the posture generally adopted in rural communities by all classes, beginning by the country gentry and ending with the lowliest farm animals throughout the United Americas from Patagony to Gasp.’ Ergo, concluded Van, our missionary goes up in smoke.
‘Your vulgarity knows no bounds,’ said Ada.
‘Well, I prefer to burn than to be slurped up alive by the Cheramie — or whatever you call her — and have my widow lay a lot of tiny green eggs on top of it!’ (1.21)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): qui le sait: who knows.
The Cheramie mentioned by Van seems to hint at Leskov’s story Sheramur (“Cheramour,” 1879). Leskov's Cheramour is geroy bryukha (a hero of potbelly) whose motto is zhrat' (to devour) and whose ideal is kormit' drugikh (to feed others):
Итак, Шерамур — герой брюха; его девиз — жрать, его идеал — кормить других; в этом настроении он имел похождения, достойные некоторого внимания. Я опишу кое-что из них в коротких отрывках: это единственная форма, в которой можно передать что-нибудь о лице, не имевшем никакой последовательности и не укладывающемся ни в какую форму. (Chapter One)
The Russian word bryukhata (big with child) comes from bryukho (potbelly). In February 1905, when she writes a letter to Van telling him that they can meet in October, Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) seems to be pregnant. Van (who is sterile and cannot hope to have an offspring) never finds out that Andrey 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 whom Ronald Oranger marries after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.
On the other hand, in Leskov's anti-nihilist novel Na nozhakh ("At Daggers Drawn," 1870) Glafira calls Ropshin mon cher ami:
И Глафира закинула голову, причем по прекрасному лицу ее лег красноватый оттенок заходящего солнца.
- Я не знаю, насколько это вас беспокоит, - отвечал Ропшин, - но... зачем вы меня так мучаете?
- Я! Вас? Чем?
Глафира покраснела и независимо от солнца, но тотчас взяла другой тон и, возвысив голос, сказала:
- О-о! mon cher ami, c'est une chose insupportable, вы мне все твердите я да я, как будто все дело только в одних вас! (Chapter 31)
C'est une chose insupportable (this is intolerable) brings to mind Chose, Van's English University. Describing a game of poker that he played at Chose with Dick C. (a cardsharp) and the French twins, Van mentions rosy aurora shivering in green Serenity Court:
Van felt pretty sure of his skill — and of milord’s stupidity — but doubted he could keep it up for any length of time. He was sorry for Dick, who, apart from being an amateur rogue, was an amiable indolent fellow, with a pasty face and a flabby body — you could knock him down with a feather, and he frankly admitted that if his people kept refusing to pay his huge (and trite) debt. he would have to move to Australia to make new ones there and forge a few checks on the way.
He now constatait avec plaisir, as he told his victims, that only a few hundred pounds separated him from the shoreline of the minimal sum he needed to appease his most ruthless creditor. whereupon he went on fleecing poor Jean and Jacques with reckless haste, and then found himself with three honest aces (dealt to him lovingly by Van) against Van’s nimbly mustered four nines. This was followed by a good bluff against a better one; and with Van’s generously slipping the desperately flashing and twinkling young lord good but not good enough hands, the latter’s martyrdom came to a sudden end (London tailors wringing their hands in the fog, and a moneylender, the famous St Priest of Chose, asking for an appointment with Dick’s father). After the heaviest betting Van had yet seen, Jacques showed a forlorn couleur (as he called it in a dying man’s whisper) and Dick surrendered with a straight flush to his tormentor’s royal one. Van, who up to then had had no trouble whatever in concealing his delicate maneuvers from Dick’s silly lens, now had the pleasure of seeing him glimpse the second joker palmed in his, Van’s, hand as he swept up and clasped to his bosom the ‘rainbow ivory’ — Plunkett was full of poetry. The twins put on their ties and coats and said they had to quit.
‘Same here, Dick,’ said Van. ‘Pity you had to rely on your crystal balls. I have often wondered why the Russian for it — I think we have a Russian ancestor in common — is the same as the German for "schoolboy," minus the umlaut’ — and while prattling thus, Van refunded with a rapidly written check the ecstatically astonished Frenchmen. Then he collected a handful of cards and chips and hurled them into Dick’s face. The missiles were still in flight when he regretted that cruel and commonplace bewgest, for the wretched fellow could not respond in any conceivable fashion, and just sat there covering one eye and examining his damaged spectacles with the other — it was also bleeding a little — while the French twins were pressing upon him two handkerchiefs which he kept good-naturedly pushing away. Rosy aurora was shivering in green Serenity Court. Laborious old Chose. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): constatait etc.: noted with pleasure.
Shivering aurora, laborious old Chose: a touch of Baudelaire.
At the end of his poem Le Crépuscle du Matin (“Morning Twilight”) Baudelaire mentions L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte (the dawn, shivering in her green and rose garment) and calls Paris (the city also known as Lute on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) "vieillard laborieux (laborious old man):"
L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte
S'avançait lentement sur la Seine déserte,
Et le sombre Paris, en se frottant les yeux
Empoignait ses outils, vieillard laborieux.
Aurora, in a shift of rose and green,
Came shivering down the Seine's deserted scene
And Paris, as he rubbed his eyes, began
To sort his tools, laborious old man.
(transl. Roy Campbell)
After reading Le Cygne ("The Swan") from Les Fleurs du mal, Victor Hugo announced that Baudelaire had created un nouveau frisson (a new thrill). When the last throb (frisson) of intercourse is terminated the female of the Serromyia fly sucks out the male’s body content through the mouth of her impassioned partner. The characters in Victor Hugo's novel L'Homme qui rit ("The Laughing Man," 1869) include the traveling artist Ursus. After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) with their half-sister Lucette Van and Ada make love in Van's Manhattan flat and Ada tells Van that from now on it is going to be Chère-amie-fait-morata:
‘My dear,’ said Van, ‘do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.’
‘Only she never told you,’ said loyal Lucette, ‘so nothing could escape. Nope. I can’t do that to your sweetheart and mine, because we know you could hit that keyhole with a pistol.’
‘Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss.’
‘Oh, Van,’ she said over a deep sigh. ‘You promise you won’t tell her I told you?’
‘I promise. No, no, no,’ he went on, assuming a Russian accent, as she, with the abandon of mindless love, was about to press her abdomen to his. ‘Nikak-s net: no lips, no philtrum, no nosetip, no swimming eye. Little vixen’s axilla, just that — unless’ — (drawing back in mock uncertainty) — ‘you shave there?’
‘I stink worse when I do,’ confided simple Lucette and obediently bared one shoulder.
‘Arm up! Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!’ commanded Van, and for a few synchronized heartbeats, fitted his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow.
She sat down with a bump on a chair, pressing one hand to her brow.
‘Turn off the footlights,’ said Van. ‘I want the name of that fellow.’
‘Vinelander,’ she answered.
He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose — no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk.’ He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album.
‘I’ll be back in a rubby,’ she said (tribadic schoolgirl slang), ‘so keep awake. From now on by the way, it’s going to be Chère-amie-fait-morata’ — (play on the generic and specific names of the famous fly) — ‘until further notice.’
‘But no sapphic vorschmacks,’ mumbled Van into his pillow.
‘Oh, Van,’ she said, turning to shake her head, one hand on the opal doorknob at the end of an endless room. ‘We’ve been through that so many times! You admit yourself that I am only a pale wild girl with gipsy hair in a deathless ballad, in a nulliverse, in Rattner’s "menald world" where the only principle is random variation. You cannot demand,’ she continued — somewhere between the cheeks of his pillow (for Ada had long vanished with her blood-brown book) — ‘you cannot demand pudicity on the part of a delphinet! You know that I really love only males and, alas, only one man.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Nikak-s net: Russ., certainly not.
famous fly: see p.109, Serromyia.
Vorschmacks: Germ., hors-d’oeuvres.
Van kisses Lucette's armpit. In Igor Severyanin (1911), a pastiche by Arlekin (Harlequin, Ivan Ignatiev’s penname), the poet says: “I want to caress your armpit!.. Yes, only your armpit:”
Лентятся ленты
— Медикаменты —
Мои желанья...
— Не вижу зги!
Вьются змеем,
Мне водолеем,
Густым елеем
Вертя мозги.
Твой взгляд вспаляет
И раскаляет.
Хочу подмышку твою ласкать!..
Да, лишь подмышку.
На шерамыжку, —
Как пса Амишку,
В кровь исхлестать!
In his sonnet Leskov (1927) Igor Severyanin mentions nizy (lower classes), verkhi (upper classes) and Obzhora Sheramur (the Glutton Cheramour):
Её низы — изморина и затерть.
Российский бебеизм — её верхи.
Повсюду ничевошные грехи.
Осмеркло всё: дворец и церкви паперть.
Лжёт, как историк, даже снега скатерть:
Истает он, и обнажатся мхи,
И заструят цветы свои духи,
Придет весна, светла как Божья Матерь,
И повелит держать пасхальный звон,
И выйдет, как священник на амвон,
Писатель, в справедливости суровый,
И скажет он: «Обжора Шерамур,
В больной отчизне дураков и дур
Ты самый честный, нежный и здоровый».
V bol'noy otchizne durakov i dur (In the sick fatherland of fools of both sexes), the sonnet's penultimate line, brings to mind Durak Walter (Daniel Veen, Van's and Ada's Uncle Dan) and dura Cordula (Cordula de Prey, Ada's schoolmate and chaperone at Brownhill).