The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. The Antiterran counterpart of the British Queen Victoria (1819-1901), King Victor (alias Mr Ritcov) is a frequent guest of Villa Venus (one hundred palatial brothels, or floramors, built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, in memory of his grandson Eric):
Demon’s father (and very soon Demon himself), and Lord Erminin, and a Mr Ritcov, and Count Peter de Prey, and Mire de Mire, Esq., and Baron Azzuroscudo were all members of the first Venus Club Council; but it was bashful, obese, big-nosed Mr Ritcov’s visits that really thrilled the girls and filled the vicinity with detectives who dutifully impersonated hedge-cutters, grooms, horses, tall milkmaids, new statues, old drunks and so forth, while His Majesty dallied, in a special chair built for his weight and whims, with this or that sweet subject of the realm, white, black or brown. (2.3)
In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,
— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (ibid.)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): subsidunt etc.: mountains subside and heights deteriorate.
David van Veen's grandson, Eric Veen is the author of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.' In Chapter Five (XXII: 9) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Tatiana's dream and mentions Seneca:
Но та, сестры не замечая,
В постеле с книгою лежит,
За листом лист перебирая,
И ничего не говорит.
Хоть не являла книга эта
Ни сладких вымыслов поэта,
Ни мудрых истин, ни картин,
Но ни Виргилий, ни Расин,
Ни Скотт, ни Байрон, ни Сенека,
Ни даже Дамских Мод Журнал
Так никого не занимал:
То был, друзья, Мартын Задека,33
Глава халдейских мудрецов,
Гадатель, толкователь снов.
But she, not noticing her sister,
lies with a book in bed,
page after page
keeps turning over, and says nothing.
Although that book displayed
neither the sweet inventions of a poet,
nor sapient truths, nor pictures,
yet neither Virgil, nor Racine, nor Scott, nor Byron,
nor Seneca, nor even
the Magazine of Ladies' Fashions
ever engrossed anybody so much:
it was, friends, Martin Zadeck,33
head of Chaldean sages,
divinistre, interpreter of dreams.
33. Divinatory books in our country come out under the imprint of Martin Zadeck — a worthy person who never wrote divinatory books, as B. M. Fyodorov observes. (Pushkin's note)
In Chapter Ten (IV, V) of EO Pushkin mentions Albion (Great Britain) and says that our tsar (Alexander I) zhirnel (grew fatter):
Но бог помог — стал ропот ниже,
И скоро силою вещей
Мы очутилися в Париже,
А русский царь главой царей.
Моря достались Албиону...
14................... [царь жирнел]
И чем жирнее, тем тяжеле.
О русский глупый наш народ,
Скажи, зачем ты в самом деле
But [God?] helped - lower grew the murmur
and, by the force of circumstances, soon
we found ourselves in Paris,
and the Russian tsar was the head of kings.
The seas to Albion were appointed...
14...................................... [the tsar grew fatter]
-- and the fatter the heavier.
O our Russian stupid nation!
Say, why indeed
[endure the tsars from race to race?]
King Victor (who makes love in a special chair built for his weight and whims) is fat. Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, and Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females:
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical name — ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist, as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his talent.’ (2.2)
A character in Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831), Quasimodo is a hunchback. The characters in Hugo's novel include the gypsy girl Esmeralda. In an apologetic note written after the dinner in 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) and debauch à trois in Van’s Manhattan flat Van calls Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) "our Esmeralda and mermaid" (2.8). Ursus is the traveling artist in Victor Hugo’s novel L’Homme qui rit (“The Laughing Man,” 1869).
Seneca the Younger (Nero's tutor) died in 65 AD, fourteen years before the disastrous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. In Chapter Ten (IX: 2) of EO Pushkin mentions volkan Neapolya (Naples' volcano, i. e. Mount Vesuvius):
Тряслися грозно Пиренеи,
Волкан Неаполя пылал,
Безрукий князь друзьям Мореи
Из Кишинева уж мигал.
The Pyrenees shook ominously;
Naples' volcano was aflame.
The one-armed Prince to the friends of Morea
from Kishinev already winked.
In Chapter Ten of EO Pushkin says: "The seas to Albion were appointed." In his poem K moryu ("To the Sea," 1824) Pushkin pairs Napoleon (who died on St. Helena, in May 1821) with Byron (who died in Greece, in April 1824). In his Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814) Byron calls Napoleon (the Emperor of France who did not exist on Demonia) "the Desolator desolate, the Victor overthrown." In De Profundis (1897), a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) compares himslef to Byron (who once swam across the Hellespont, or Dardanelles, in order to lose weight):
Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
and mentions Napoleon:
I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines—written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:—
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,—
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.
In a letter of Dec. 16, 1883, to Lillie Langtry (a stage actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, later Edward VII, the second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria) Oscar Wilde calls Lillie Langtry "Venus Victrix of our age:"
And so I write to tell you how glad I am at your triumphs – you, Venus Victrix of our age – and the other half to tell you that I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair wich make her flower-like head droop like a blossom, and wonderful ivory hands wich draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her. We are to be married in April. I hope so much that you will be over then. I am so anxious for you to know and to like her.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his father’s visit to England in February 1916, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, one of whom, Korney Chukovski (the enfant terrible of the group), insisted on asking the king (George V) if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde:
My father had visited London before—the last time in February 1916, when, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, he had been invited by the British Government to take a look at England’s war effort (which, it was hinted, did not meet with sufficient appreciation on the part of Russia’s public opinion). On the way there, being challenged by my father and Korney Chukovski to rhyme on Afrika, the poet and novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (no relation to Count Lyov Nikolaevich) had supplied, though seasick, the charming couplet
Vizhu pal’mu i Kafrika.
Eto—Afrika.
(I see a palm and a little Kaffir. That’s Afrika.)
In England the visitors had been shown the Fleet. Dinners and speeches had followed in noble succession. The timely capture of Erzerum by the Russians and the pending introduction of conscription in England (“Will you march too or wait till March 2?” as the punning posters put it) had provided the speakers with easy topics. There had been an official banquet presided over by Sir Edward Grey, and a funny interview with George V whom Chukovski, the enfant terrible of the group, insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde—“dze ooarks of OOald.” The king, who was baffled by his interrogator’s accent and who, anyway, had never been a voracious reader, neatly countered by inquiring how his guests liked the London fog (later Chukovski used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals). (Chapter Thirteen, 1)
"The enfant terrible of the group" brings to mind Les Enfants Maudits, a novel by Mlle Larivière's (Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse). Describing Eric Veen's Villa Venus, Van mentions an offer from Hollywood that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected:
Eccentricity is the greatest grief’s greatest remedy. The boy’s grandfather set at once to render in brick and stone, concrete and marble, flesh and fun, Eric’s fantasy. He resolved to be the first sampler of the first houri he would hire for his last house, and to live until then in laborious abstinence.
It must have been a moving and magnificent sight — that of the old but still vigorous Dutchman with his rugged reptilian face and white hair, designing with the assistance of Leftist decorators the thousand and one memorial floramors he resolved to erect allover the world — perhaps even in brutal Tartary, which he thought was ruled by ‘Americanized Jews,’ but then ‘Art redeemed Politics’ — profoundly original concepts that we must condone in a lovable old crank. He began with rural England and coastal America, and was engaged in a Robert Adam-like composition (cruelly referred to by local wags as the Madam-I’m-Adam House), not far from Newport, Rodos Island, in a somewhat senile style, with marble columns dredged from classical seas and still encrusted with Etruscan oyster shells — when he died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon. It was only his hundredth house!
His nephew and heir, an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen (somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told), with a large family and a small trade, was not cheated out of the millions of guldens, about the apparent squandering of which he had been consulting mental specialists during the last ten years or so. All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘ryuen’,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown). By the beginning of the new century the Venus revenues were pouring in (their final gush, it is true). A tattling tabloid reported, around 1890, that out of gratitude and curiosity ‘Velvet’ Veen traveled once — and only once — to the nearest floramor with his entire family — and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. Mere rumours, no doubt. (2.3)