Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Demon's and Marina's petits soupers:
It was a black hot humid night in mid-July, 1888, at Ardis, in Ladore county, let us not forget, let us never forget, with a family of four seated around an oval dinner table, bright with flowers and crystal — not a scene in a play, as might have seemed — nay, must have seemed — to a spectator (with a camera or a program) placed in the velvet pit of the garden. Sixteen years had elapsed from the end of Marina’s three-year affair with Demon. Intermissions of various length — a break of two months in the spring of 1870, another, of almost four, in the middle of 1871 — had at the time only increased the tenderness and the torture. Her singularly coarsened features, her attire, that sequin-spangled dress, the glittering net over her strawberry-blond dyed hair, her red sunburnt chest and melodramatic make-up, with too much ochre and maroon in it, did not even vaguely remind the man, who had loved her more keenly than any other woman in his philanderings, of the dash, the glamour, the lyricism of Marina Durmanov’s beauty. It aggrieved him — that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers; the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance. Even these hors-d’oeuvres on the zakusochnïy stol of Ardis Manor and its painted dining room did not link up with their petits soupers, although, God knows, the triple staple to start with was always much the same — pickled young boletes in their tight-fitting glossy fawn helmets, the gray beads of fresh caviar, the goose liver paste, pique-aced with Perigord truffles.
Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding.
Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise, experienced no such qualms, lacking as she did that third sight (individual, magically detailed imagination) which many otherwise ordinary and conformant people may also possess, but without which memory (even that of a profound ‘thinker’ or technician of genius) is, let us face it, a stereotype or a tear-sheet. We do not wish to be too hard on Marina; after all, her blood throbs in our wrists and temples, and many of our megrims are hers, not his. Yet we cannot condone the grossness of her soul. The man sitting at the head of the table and joined to her by a pair of cheerful youngsters, the ‘juvenile’ (in movie parlance) on her right, the ‘ingénue’ on her left, differed in no way from the same Demon in much the same black jacket (minus perhaps the carnation he had evidently purloined from a vase Blanche had been told to bring from the gallery) who sat next to her at the Praslin’s last Christmas. The dizzy chasm he felt every time he met her, that awful ‘wonder of life’ with its extravagant jumble of geological faults, could not be bridged by what she accepted as a dotted line of humdrum encounters: ‘poor old’ Demon (all her pillow mates being retired with that title) appeared before her like a harmless ghost, in the foyers of theaters ‘between mirror and fan,’ or in the drawing rooms of common friends, or once in Lincoln Park, indicating an indigo-buttocked ape with his cane and not saluting her, according to the rules of the beau monde, because he was with a courtesan. Somewhere, further back, much further back, safely transformed by her screen-corrupted mind into a stale melodrama was her three-year-long period of hectically spaced love-meetings with Demon, A Torrid Affair (the title of her only cinema hit), passion in palaces, the palms and larches, his Utter Devotion, his impossible temper, separations, reconciliations, Blue Trains, tears, treachery, terror, an insane sister’s threats, helpless, no doubt, but leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams, especially when dampness and dark affect one with fever. And the shadow of retribution on the backwall (with ridiculous legal innuendos). All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come — say, in the trickwork close-up of two left hands belonging to different sexes — doing what? Marina could no longer recall (though only four years had elapsed!) — playing à quatre mains? — no, neither took piano lessons — casting bunny-shadows on a wall? — closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? But what? Climbing a tree? The polished trunk of a tree? But where, when? Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain ‘wipes’ and ‘inserts’ will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; ‘dissolves’ in the sequence discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing ‘footage,’ and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday — before death with its clap-stick closes the scene. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): zakusochnïy etc.: Russ., table with hors-d’oeuvres.
petits soupers: intimate suppers.
Persty: Evidently Pushkin’s vinograd:
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.
(devï molodoy, jeune fille)
ciel-étoilé: starry sky.
In the Foreword to their French translation (1863) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Ivan Tourgueniev (Turgenev, the author of Ottsy i deti, "Fathers and Sons," 1862) and Louis Viardot mention la grande Catherine et les petits soupers de l’Ermitage:
Ce n’est pas à nous qu’il appartient de décider si Pouchkine imitant Byron est supérieur à Pouchkine imitant Shakspeare. Mais nous pouvons constater qu’en Russie le roman-poëme appelé Ievguéni (Eugène) Onéguine passe généralement pour le chef-d’œuvre de son auteur.
Ce roman-poëme fut composé à différentes époques et publié en divers fragments. Ainsi le premier chapitre parut en 1823 et le dernier en 1831. Né au mois de mai 1799, Alexandre Pouchkine avait écrit, en 1820, une Ode à la Liberté. L’empereur Alexandre Ier vit un crime d’État dans cette poésie de collège. Il en condamna le jeune auteur à être enfermé le reste de sa vie, comme un moine prévaricateur, dans le couvent disciplinaire de Solovetsk, situé sur un îlot de la mer Blanche, au delà d’Archangel. L’historien Karamsine, à qui Pouchkine dédia plus tard son drame de Boris Godounoff, prit pitié du jeune poète et le sauva : il obtint que sa réclusion perpétuelle fût commuée en exil. Pouchkine fut d’abord envoyé à Kichenef, en Bessarabie, puis à Odessa, puis à son village de Mikhaïlovskoïé, dans le gouvernement de Pskof, où il resta jusqu’à l’amnistie accordée par l’empereur Nicolas, en 1826, à propos de son couronnement.
Le poëme d’Onéguine se ressent de la diversité des lieux, des époques et des situations où furent composées les différentes parties de l’œuvre. Lorsque Pouchkine en écrit le premier chapitre, presque au sortir des bancs de l’école, il est encore imbu des poésies légères françaises du dix-huitième siècle, très à la mode en Russie depuis la grande Catherine et les petits soupers de l’Ermitage ; mais lorsque, plus tard et confiné dans son village, il étudie avec passion les Allemands et les Anglais, Goethe, Schiller, Shakspeare, Walter Scott et Byron, son poème prend un nouveau caractère, acquiert un nouveau souffle, en même temps que Pouchkine, prenant lui-même de la maturité, acquiert de la force et du goût. (Note des traducteurs.)
La grande Catherine (Catherine II, Empress of Russia in 1762-96) brings to mind Catherine I (the second wife and Empress consort of Peter the Great whom she succeded as Empress of Russia, ruling from 1725 until her death in 1727). The founder of VN's home city, Peter the Great reminds one of Pierre Legrand, Van's fencing master:
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Bretteur (“The Duelling Bravo,” 1847) is a short story by Turgenev. Mémoires d’un maître d’armes, ou dix huits mois à Saint-Pétersbourg (“The Fencing Master,” 1840) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas père. Describing his childhood travels with his father, Van pairs Pushkin with Dumas:
In 1880, Van, aged ten, had traveled in silver trains with showerbaths, accompanied by his father, his father’s beautiful secretary, the secretary’s eighteen-year-old white-gloved sister (with a bit part as Van’s English governess and milkmaid), and his chaste, angelic Russian tutor, Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (‘AAA’), to gay resorts in Louisiana and Nevada. AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune, put it back in your face, sir, she said. He also recalled hearing a cummerbunded Dutchman in the hotel hall telling another that Van’s father, who had just passed whistling one of his three tunes, was a famous ‘camler’ (camel driver — shamoes having been imported recently? No, ‘gambler’). (1.24)
At the family dinner Van says that Demon still beats him at fencing:
‘Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing... Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but "court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?’
‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.’
(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)
‘Ah!’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.’
‘I was telling Van a moment ago,’ he continued, raising his voice (he labored under the delusion that Marina had grown rather deaf), ‘about your husband. My dear, he overdoes the juniper vodka stuff, he’s getting, in fact, a mite fuzzy and odd. The other day I chanced to walk through Pat Lane on the Fourth Avenue side, and there he was coming, at quite a spin, in his horrid town car, that primordial petrol two-seater he’s got, with the tiller. Well, he saw me, from quite a distance, and waved, and the whole contraption began to shake down, and finally stopped half a block away, and there he sat trying to budge it with little jerks of his haunches, you know, like a child who can’t get his tricycle unstuck, and as I walked up to him I had the definite impression that it was his mechanism that had stalled, not the Hardpan’s.’ But what Demon, in the goodness of his crooked heart, omitted to tell Marina was that the imbecile, in secret from his art adviser, Mr Aix, had acquired for a few thousand dollars from a gaming friend of Demon’s, and with Demon’s blessings, a couple of fake Correggios — only to resell them by some unforgivable fluke to an equally imbecile collector, for half a million which Demon considered henceforth as a loan his cousin should certainly refund him if sanity counted for something on this gemel planet. And, conversely, Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get ‘something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology’).
‘Vous me comblez,’ said Demon in reference to the burgundy, ‘though’ pravda, my maternal grandfather would have left the table rather than see me drinking red wine instead of champagne with gelinotte. Superb, my dear (blowing a kiss through the vista of flame and silver).’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vous me comblez: you overwhelm me with kindness.
pravda: Russ., it’s true.
gelinotte: hazel-hen.
In A. K. Tolstoy’s humorous poem Istoriya gosudarstva Rossiyskogo ot Gostomysla do Timasheva (“The History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev,” 1868) the phrase “vous me comblez” is used by Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) in reply to Voltaire and Diderot who wrote her that she should give freedom to her subjects (including the serfs):
«Madame, при вас на диво
Порядок расцветёт, —
Писали ей учтиво
Вольтер и Дидерот, —
Лишь надобно народу,
Которому вы мать,
Скорее дать свободу,
Скорей свободу дать».
«Messieurs, — им возразила
Она, — vous me comblez», —
И тотчас прикрепила
Украинцев к земле.
At the beginning of Goncharov's novel Obryv ("The Precipice," 1869) Rayski, in a conversation with his friend Ayanov, mentions an acquaintance's petits soupers:
— Да куда он тратит? В карты почти не играет.
— Как куда? А женщины? А эта беготня, petits soupers, весь этот train? Зимой в пять тысяч сервиз подарил на вечер Armance, а она его-то и забыла пригласить к ужину… (Part One, Chapter 1)
The surname Rayski comes from ray (paradise). The name of Daniel Veen's family estate, Ardis hints at paradise. Goncharov is the author of Mil'yon terzaniy ("A Million Torments," 1872), an essay on Griboedov's comedy Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824). In a conversation with Van in her bedroom Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) tells Van that she played Sofia (Famusov's daughter with whom Chatski is in love) in Stanislavski's stage version of Griboedov's play:
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.
At the family dinner Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) quotes Famusov's words in Griboedov's play:
'By the way, Demon,' interrupted Marina, 'where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years?'
'Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It's next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn't it? Une rivière de diamants?'
'Protestuyu!' cried Marina. 'Yes, I'm speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.'
Besides you'll forget,' said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to 'diamonds.' (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): po razschyotu po moemu: an allusion to Famusov (in Griboedov's Gore ot uma), calculating the pregnancy of a lady's friend.