For almost the past week or so I've been reviewing the opening of Ada, as well as the family tree and certain conspicuous passages, and I think I've crashed into the tip of a Melvillean iceberg. If I'm not dreaming, that is. I hope my errata such as typos will be forgiven.
Firstly, isn't Erasmus Veen's primary namesake the patron saint of sailors St. Erasmus of Formia, aka St. Elmo, as in St. Elmo's Fire, witchfire? Wikipedia says under the heading In History and Culture, "Russian sailors also historically documented instances of St. Elmo's fire, known as "Saint Nicholas" or "Saint Peter's lights",[16] also sometimes called St. Helen's or St. Hermes' fire, perhaps through linguistic confusion.[17] [the first source is completely irrelevant, and the second is old and shoddy--actually it says the Italians called witchfire "The Fire of St. Peter"--but the following demonstrates VN was thinking simultaneously of witchfire and St. Peter]" I'll show that Ada's opening paragraphs allude to Noah's Ark and Flood in several ways, but first Saint Peter. "Prince Peter Zemski" is the "Governor of Bras d'Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country" (3.10-12) "Peter" and "variegated" equals St. Peter at the pearly gates. He "married Mary", and one of the Virgin Mary's titles is Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Two more marriages in this paragraph that combine with the st, which also indicates sainthood, and stella ("tesselated", "settlers") to similarly make Stella Maris. St. Peter also comes from combining "Peter" in this paragraph with "Raduga near the burg of that name" in the next to get St. Petersburg, named after Peter the Great who was named after the Saint. Note to 3.15 provides another connection.
The element of fire can be found in this paragraph too (combining with the vitch of 3.03's "Arkadievitch" to create witchfire). Wikipedia says on cultural depictions of salamanders that in various cultures they're traditionally associated with fire (see the fire salamander especially), and we have a mander in "General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress". Commander is specifically a naval rank, as opposed to General. There are also three whichs on the first page. I'll show with clearer examples that these are not incidental.
Some examples of St. Elmo and witchfires in Ada:
20.03 "independent inferno, which"
21.31 “Two or three centuries earlier she might have just been a consumable witch.”
23.30-32: “the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St. Zeus [or Jove, by the way, as sailors such as Ishmael once invoked] by it through the gradual, gradual shade”
24.02-04 "too much of a Caliban [son of sea-witch Sycorax] to speak distinctly—or perhaps too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor"
34.03 "Ardis Hall [burning], which"
54.01 "'...which is really an elm [yes, this is unnecessary].' Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas [homophone].
or 84.35-85.04: “...her face twitching with nervous resolution, Marina marched toward the vehicle, which presently moved, turning and knocking over an empty half-gallon bottle as its fender leafed [as an elm] through an angry burnberry bush [Burning Bush has been missed, and suddenly there may be a new significance to Lucette's pubic hair].”
If Erasmus Veen-St. Elmo is acceptable--and more examples can be provided--then other nauticalisms and fishinesses and possible allusions to Moby-Dick become much more plausible.
As said, VN alludes to Noah's Ark in Ada's opening pages in "Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, published by Mount Tabor", which is a play on baiter and masturbator, given VN's disdain parody of poor translation. 4.30's "bore-baiter" hints at this rearrangement. Fishing combined with masturbation and Ada's concern with famous novels points clearly to the famous, famously phallus-titled, Moby-Dick. And Captain Ahab is a master fisherman, and the master of a ship and crew, who he exploits in his fetishistic hunt for the whale. It's not hard to see here a ship's mast. Biblically speaking as with this next, we have Mount Ararat. This Ark is two paragraphs above "Raduga near the burg of that name". So a rainbow, as in God's covenant with man, and Ararat in burg-berg.
Moby-Dick is an epic novel broadly inspired by the flood myth. It alludes to the ark explicitly in Ch 3, The Spouter-Inn, but implicitly on the opening page, following Etymology and Extracts:
"[Sailing] is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation [Ada, the vari in "variegated", same four letters as varix, or a varicose vein]... With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship," namelyThe Pequod, which is referred to as an ark several times."
Actually, in naming in parody Anna Karenina, VN alludes to the titular character's suicide, which doubly parallels Moby-Dick, since Cato's suicide is mentioned in the opening pages, and Captain Ahab practically commits suicide in his relentless hunt for the White Whale.
3.08 "Otrochestvo" closely resembles orchestra, which is associated throughout this novel with testicles and orcas, killer whales. See, only one chapter away, 10.15's "orchestra-seat"; I have in my notes, 73.28-29 “dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra”—why would the first part allude to Joyce and the other nothing at all?; and I highly recommend looking above 183.34, "a clash of cymbals in an orchestra", which alludes to Moby-Dick Ch 95, The Cassock, and Chapter 80, The Nut, "The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world [Van's browmask, a "false head" on Ada's next page]" and Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, "Soon [Ahab's] steady ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still strange foot-prints - the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought."
I already have much much more. Does this seem promising? Probing questions?
Wish & Ships (Melville & Marvell in Ada)
The inventor of the clockwork luggage carts, Erasmus Veen (1760-1852) is linked to Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the author of The Botanic Garden (1791). Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions the poet Max Mispel and his article ‘The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell):
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.’
Upon being cornered, Gwen, a fat little fille de joie (by inclination if not by profession), squealed on one of her new admirers, confessing she had begged him to write that article because she could not bear to see Van’s ‘crooked little smile’ at finding his beautifully bound and boxed book so badly neglected. She also swore that Max not only did not know who Voltemand really was, but had not read Van’s novel. Van toyed with the idea of challenging Mr Medlar (who, he hoped, would choose swords) to a duel at dawn in a secluded corner of the Park whose central green he could see from the penthouse terrace where he fenced with a French coach twice a week, the only exercise, save riding, that he still indulged in; but to his surprise — and relief (for he was a little ashamed to defend his ‘novelette’ and only wished to forget it, just as another, unrelated, Veen might have denounced — if allowed a longer life — his pubescent dream of ideal bordels) Max Mushmula (Russian for ‘medlar’) answered Van’s tentative cartel with the warm-hearted promise of sending him his next article, ‘The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell). (2.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): fille de joie: whore.
'The weed exiles the flower' is a line in Herman Melville's poem The Ravaged Villa:
In shards the sylvan vases lie,
Their links of dance undone,
And brambles wither by thy brim,
Choked Fountain of the Sun!
The spider in the laurel spins,
The weed exiles the flower:
And, flung to kiln, Apollo’s bust
Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.
In the second stanza of his poem After Floods on the Wharfe Andrew Marvell mentions brambles:
Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
And, oh, so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place:
But lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through.
Marvell's and Melville's brambles bring to mind Ada's long botanical rambles (or 'brambles', as she calls them):
On the morning of the day preceding the most miserable one in his life, he found he could bend his leg without wincing, but he made the mistake of joining Ada and Lucette in an impromptu lunch on a long-neglected croquet lawn and walked home with difficulty. A swim in the pool and a soak in the sun helped, however, and the pain had practically gone when in the mellow heat of the long afternoon Ada returned from one of her long ‘brambles’ as she called her botanical rambles, succinctly and somewhat sadly, for the florula had ceased to yield much beyond the familiar favorites. Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs (as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker). (1.40)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): qu’on la coiffe etc.: to have her hair done in the open.
See also my post of almost a year ago "Melville & Marvell in Ada":
https://thenabokovian.org/topic/melville-marvell-ada
clockwork luggage carts & Ronald Oranger in Ada
Van's, Ada's and Lucette's great-grandfather, Erasmus Veen (1760-1852) is the inventor of the clockwork luggage carts:
Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout — as red as a fire engine! — only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en croupe: riding pillion.
The clockwork luggage carts bring to mind Anthony Burgess' black comedy novella A Clockwork Orange (1962). In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Van does not realize that Ada (who has bribed Kim Beauharnais to set the barn on fire) is not a virgin. Van blinds Kim Beauharnais for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada. But 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.
The author of The Botanic Garden (1791), a Poem in Two Parts, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) is the grandfather of the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82), the author of On the Origin of Species (1859).
The Burning Barn brings to mind Samuil Marshak's play for children Koshkin dom ("Cat's House," 1922): "Tili-bom, tili-bom! Cat's house caught fire!" Marshak is the author of Bagazh ("Luggage," 1926), a humorous poem:
Дама сдавала в багаж
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картину,
Корзину,
Картонку
И маленькую собачонку.
Выдали даме на станции
Четыре зеленых квитанции
О том, что получен багаж:
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картина,
Корзина,
Картонка
И маленькая собачонка.
Вещи везут на перрон.
Кидают в открытый вагон.
Готово. Уложен багаж:
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картина,
Корзина,
Картонка
И маленькая собачонка.
Но только раздался звонок,
Удрал из вагона щенок.
Хватились на станции Дно:
Потеряно место одно.
В испуге считают багаж:
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картина,
Корзина,
Картонка...
- Товарищи! Где собачонка?
Вдруг видят: стоит у колес
Огромный взъерошенный пес.
Поймали его - и в багаж,
Туда, где лежал саквояж,
Картина,
Корзина,
Картонка,
Где прежде была собачонка.
Приехали в город Житомир.
Носильщик пятнадцатый номер
Везет на тележке багаж:
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картину,
Корзину,
Картонку,
А сзади ведут собачонку.
Собака-то как зарычит,
А барыня как закричит:
- Разбойники! Воры! Уроды!
Собака - не той породы!
Швырнула она чемодан,
Ногой отпихнула диван,
Картину,
Корзину,
Картонку...
- Отдайте мою собачонку!
- Позвольте, мамаша! На станции,
Согласно багажной квитанции,
От вас получили багаж:
Диван,
Чемодан,
Саквояж,
Картину,
Корзину,
Картонку
И маленькую собачонку.
Однако
За время пути
Собака
Могла подрасти!
A lady sent in the van:
A bag,
A box,
A divan,
A hamper,
A sampler,
Some books,
And a wee little doggy named Snooks.
At the station in Red Banner Street
She was handed a yellow receipt
That listed the things for the van:
A bag,
A box,
A divan,
A hamper,
A sampler,
Some books,
And a wee little doggy named Snooks.
When the luggage was brought to the train,
It was counted all over again,
And packed away in the van:
The bag,
The box,
The divan,
The hamper,
The sampler,
The books,
And the wee little doggy named Snooks.
But off the wee doggy ran
As soon as the journey began.
And only on reaching the Don
Was it found that the doggy was gone.
All the luggage was safe in the van:
The bag,
The box,
The divan,
The hamper,
The sampler,
The books,
But—where was the doggy named Snooks?
Just then an enormous hound
Came over the rails at a bound.
It was caught and put in the van
Along with the bag and the box,
The hamper,
The sampler,
The books,
Instead of the doggy named Snooks.
The lady got out of the train
At a station in southern Ukraine.
She called to a porter, who ran
To bring her the things in the van:
The bag,
The box,
The divan,
The hamper,
The sampler,
The books,
And the dog—that was not named Snooks.
The hound gave a terrible growl,
The lady emitted a howl.
“You robbers, you rascals!” cried she,
“This isn’t my dog, can’t you see?”
She tore at the handles and locks,
She kicked at the bag and the box,
The hamper,
The sampler,
The books:
“I will have my doggy named Snooks!”
“Just a minute, dear madam, don’t shout,
And don’t throw your luggage about.
It seems that you sent in the van:
A bag,
A box,
A divan,
A hamper,
A sampler,
Some books,
And a wee little doggy named Snooks.
“But the smallest of dogs, as you know,
In the course of a journey may grow.”
(tr. M. Wettlin)
Samuil Marshak translated into Russian all 154 Sonnets of William Shakespeare. In several sonnets Shakespeare urges a young man to settle down with a wife and to have children. Asking Van to stop his affair with Ada, Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) mentions a normal marriage and children:
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)
In March 1905 Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize 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.
The Erasmus Quote
I was looking at the quote in Ada about Erasmus and the clockwork luggage carts that you've referenced, as well as others, and find it a prime example of what I meant with the witchfire:
The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle. (19.115-116--is this how?)
"[F]ire", or "Ada", and the function word "which" makes witchfire; "windless" is a play on windlass, a nautical instrument; there's a sea in "teleseats", and the "roadboats" explain themselves; taking the lug of "luggage", lugworms are widely used as bait, and there are two nautical senses of the term gauge. I don't have access to the actual OED site but this is from it, station, n.: "Originally: a port, harbour, or roadstead for ships. Now chiefly: a place at which ships of a nation's navy are regularly stationed, or may dock for repair...", but station also has several meanings in Christianity, which with the st play brings to mind sainthood. And a ship has a master, and mast, as well. Again: Erasmus invented a boat, a roadboat. Lastly, "harkle", with ark, is formed from hackle, as in used fishing lures, and hark, which makes me think of Quaker archaisms generally--and arc may refer to arcs of electricity.
Erasmus Veen vs. Erasmus of Rotterdam
I guess, I see what you mean. Veen means in Dutch what Neva (the river that flows in St. Petersburg) means in Finnish: peat bog. The most famous Erasmus (the name means "beloved") is Erasmus of Rotterdam, a Dutch humanist (c. 1466-1536). The Port of Rotterdam is the largest seaport in Europe, and the world's largest seaport outside of Asia. "If you are sick of Queen[ston], why not fly to Italy or Holland?" (from Ada's PS to Van's apologetic note to Lucette). In one of her letters to Van Ada calls Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis) and her two sisters "witches all," but she is a witch herself ("Mlle Hypnokush whose eyes never dwell on you and yet pierce you"). Two or three centuries earlier Aqua (Marina's poor mad twin sister) might have been just another consumable witch. Joan of Arc (the patron saint of France) was burnt at the stake. Fire is the element that destroys Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions). Armina (the name of the villa where Van was conceived) is an anagram of the sea. Viedma (a seaport in Argentina mentioned by Van when he recounts his travels by train before falling asleep) hints at ved'ma (Russian for "witch"). Ved'ma is a humorous story by Chekhov. Hope, this helps.
Setting the Stage for Melville
Good, good, that helps very much. This is all in trying to set the stage for Melville allusions which I feel I have seen, as well as puns on fish and nauticalisms generally, which my eye has been opened to these past few days, so I don't have to provide to myself and others an ad hoc explanation (at least, an elaborate one) for why, say, the following soundplays on gar, a freshwater fish:
In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesman were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed—the word "samovars" may have got garbled in the agent's aerocable)... (2.11)
For an example of what I mean by Melville, compare this "archangel" line in Moby-Dick, Chapter 42, The Whiteness of The Whale, and this in Ada:
...[Aqua] saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. (3.21; see something similar at 1.6)
There's an ocean in both books? Um, The Whiteness of The Whale is an extremely important chapter in Moby-Dick? This is selfmocking, but I'd sound rather loutish either way (although much of the "evidence" in my initial post was a rushjob)
Advice on the front of laying the groundwork, if necessary, would be healthy. Otherwise, I should send suggestions to Naiman?
Thanks.
P.S. VN might've known that Melville, or Malleville, comes from the Latin for bad country house. Perhaps part of the reason Villa Venus (Veen) is called such?
leaving the Melville stage
Yes, Eric Naiman's advice (if that's what you need) can be of more help to you (I confess, I did not read Moby-Dick in its entirety and my knowledge of American literature is, on the whole, rather superficial). Btw., sig (cf. Sig Leymanski, anagram of Kingsley Amis) is Russian for white-fish. Chekhov (a great fisherman) in jest called the editors of Russian Thought (a liberal literary magazine) kopchyonye sigi (smoked white-fish) who have as much taste for literature as a pig has for oranges. VN would certainly know Sabaneyev's popular book on fishing. Leonid Sabaneyev was a schoolmate and close personal friend of Alexander III (reigned in 1881-94), the tsar whose hobby was fishing ("Europe can wait while the Russian tsar is fishing"). Sabaneyev's son (a friend of Aldanov and Adamovich), also Leonid, left Russia in the 1920s, lived in France and died very old in the 1960s. VN would know his fascinating memoirs. As to Villa Venus, The Ravaged Villa is a poem by Melville ("The weed exiles the flower" is a line in it). In certain respect, it is very close to Tyutchev's poem Ital'yanskaya villa ("The Italian Villa," 1837). Nochi na ville ("The Nights at the Villa," 1838) is a fragment by Gogol. Melville's novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) makes one think of Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), M'sieur Pierre, the executioner in VN's Priglashenie na kazn' (Invitation to a Beheading, 1935), and Pierre Legrand (Van's fencing master whose name hints at the tsar Peter the Great). In Invitation to a Beheading Cincinnatus C. is sentenced to death because others (all of whom are transparent to each other) cannot see through him. According to a Russian saying, chuzhaya dusha - potyomki (you cannot read in another man's soul). In a letter to a friend Chekhov said: Ya ne Potyomkin, ya - Tsintsinnat ("I'm not a Potyomkin, I'm a Cincinnatus"). Prince Potyomkin was a fovorite of the Empress Catherine II (reigned in 1762-96). In the Mascodagama chapter of Ada Van mentions the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. D'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm (whom Ada met at Marina's funeral), brings to mind one-legged vindictive Captain Ahab.
The Little Lower Layer
As I said, I've been scouring Ada for fish and nautical terms, and I've been rewarded with not just those but some evocative echoes. I'll draw your attention first to 1.3:
Van's maternal grandmother Daria ("Dolly") Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, governor of Bras d'Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated nation, who had married, in 1824, Mary O'Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in Bras, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman with lands in the Severn Tories (Severniya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called "Russian" Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with "Russian" Canady, otherwise "French" Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes
I've mentioned before how St. Peter, a fisherman, is evoked in Prince Peter; "married" has at least one nautical definition, to splice ropes together so as not to increase their girth--and I've spoken on Maris already; "Irish woman of fashion" easily becomes woman of fishing, or fisherwoman, or fish (a term for a woman), as if Peter has fished her up. And halcyon in the nominal sense can refer to a kingfisher, which Captain Ahab's namesake was a king, and the Captain Ahab. I said in my first post, I think, that "Mount Tabor" is a play on masturbator, which you may have doubted, but "transfigured into English" easily becomes another fish, R. G. Stonelower's initials play on restless genital syndrome (this name occurs under Classification). Stones (Wiktionary, but perfect quotations, KJV and Shakespeare) are an obsolete term for the testes, so a play on their descension. Masturbator is no longer far off. (Stone is also an obsolete term for mirror, relevant bc of the doubling)
But where does this all lead? Both the beginning of Ada and the Moby-Dick, Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck , uses the phrase "country gentleman." I agree, this seems pedestrian. But if this isn't solid enough, VN echoes the beginning of Captain Ahab's famous monologue from the same chapter at Ada 1.7:
The two kids' best find, however, came from another carton in the lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet... [same paragraph] the park of the hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium near it... [again] a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. (1.7)
"Lower layer" is an obvious match, "glued flowers" correspond with Ahab's "pasteboard masks". A mountain near Brig? A berg, as in "iceberg." A brig is a type of ship, but also an informal term for a prison, especially on a warship. And "sojourn" is typically Biblical or Melvillean diction. "Park" has "ark," of course, and from my last post we know to watch for "gar." Like ark, I believe that "mel" (or "elm") is one of VN's signals to watch for boats or fish, but I would need perhaps a longer post to show that.
P.S.
You posted recently about Paar of Chose, who appears first on 3.18 in "Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark". I think the lightningfather Jove, or Jupiter, as sailors such as Ishmael once invoked, is a straightforward derivation, along with the Christian God. "Chose" is apparently a French legal term. Paar resembles parr the fish (so also maybe parr of choice, or choice parr, as in food). Fish, Moby-Dick and property law combined all bring to mind Moby-Dick, Ch 89, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
Dick C. in Ada
It just occurred to me that Dick C. (a cardsharp with whom Van plays poker at Chose) might be a cross between Richard the Lionheart and Moby-Dick. Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions Richard Leonard Churchill’s novel about a certain Crimean Khan, “A Great Good Man:”
Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
At the end of his poem O pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1944) VN says that, if his late namesake (V. V. Mayakovski) were still alive, he would be now finding taut rhymes such as monumentalen and pereperchil:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake,
who used to write verse, in rank
and in file, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as “praline”
or “air chill,”
and others of the same kind.
VN’s footnote: Lines 58–59/“praline” … “air chill.” In the original, monumentalen, meaning “[he is] monumental” rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning “[he] put in too much pepper,” offers an ingenuous correspondence with the name of the British politician in a slovenly Russian pronunciation (“chair-chill”).
Pereperchil brings to mind Chekhov’s story Peresolil (“Overdoing it,” 1885; literally peresolil means “[he] put in too much salt”). In a letter of April 13, 1904, to Boris Lazarevski (a writer who lived in Vladivostok) Chekhov (who stayed in Yalta and who died three months later in Badenweiler, a German spa) says that, when he was in Vladivostok in October 1890 (on his way back from the Sakhalin), a whale was seen in the bay:
Когда я был во Владивостоке, то погода была чудесная, теплая, несмотря на октябрь, по бухте ходил настоящий кит и плескал хвостищем, впечатление, одним словом, осталось роскошное - быть может оттого, что я возвращался на родину.
[The distance] from Vladivostok to Washington is 5000 miles:
On the chalk-clouded blackboard, which he wittily called the greyboard, he now wrote a date. In the crook of his arm he still felt the bulk of Zol. Fond Lit. The date he wrote had nothing to do with the day this was in Waindell:
December, 26, 1829
He carefully drilled in a big white full stop, and added underneath:
3.03 p.m. St Petersburg
Dutifully this was taken down by Frank Backman, Rose Balsamo, Frank Carroll, Irving D. Herz, beautiful, intelligent Marilyn Hohn, John Mead, Jr, Peter Volkov, and Allan Bradbury Walsh.
Pnin, rippling with mute mirth, sat down again at his desk: he had a tale to tell. That line in the absurd Russian grammar, 'Brozhu li ya vdol' ulits shumnïh (Whether I wander along noisy streets),' was really the opening of a famous poem. Although Pnin was supposed in this Elementary Russian class to stick to language exercises ('Mama, telefon! Brozhu li ya vdol' ulits shumnïh. Ot Vladivostoka do Vashingtona 5000 mil'.'), he took every opportunity to guide his students on literary and historical tours.
In a set of eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he always had - wherever he was, whatever he was doing - of dwelling on thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain 'future anniversary': the day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his tombstone.
'"And where will fate send me", imperfective future, "death",' declaimed inspired Pnin, throwing his head back and translating with brave literality, '"in fight, in travel, or in waves? Or will the neighbouring dale" - dolina, same word, "valley" we would now say - "accept my refrigerated ashes", poussière, "cold dust" perhaps more correct. And though it is indifferent to the insensible body..."'
Pnin went on to the end and then, dramatically pointing with the piece of chalk he still held, remarked how carefully Pushkin had noted the day and even the minute of writing down that poem.
'But,' exclaimed Pnin in triumph, 'he died on a quite, quite different day! He died -' The chair back against which Pnin was vigorously leaning emitted an ominous crack, and the class resolved a pardonable tension in loud young laughter. (Pnin, Chapter Three, 3)
As Van points out, the Russian word for "cardsharp" is the same as the German for "schoolboy" minus the umlaut:
‘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.
(There should be a sign denoting applause. Ada’s note.) (1.28)
shuler (Russ., cardsharp) → Schüler (Germ., schoolboy) → Schiller. In VN's Lolita Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) marries Dick Schiller (Richard F. Schiller).
Mr Plunkett had been, in the summer of his adventurous years, one of the greatest shuler’s, politely called ‘gaming conjurers,’ both in England and America. At forty, in the middle of a draw-poker session he had been betrayed by a fainting fit of cardiac origin (which allowed, alas, a bad loser’s dirty hands to go through his pockets), and spent several years in prison, had become reconverted to the Roman faith of his forefathers and, upon completing his term, had dabbled in missionary work, written a handbook on conjuring, conducted bridge columns in various papers and done some sleuthing for the police (he had two stalwart sons in the force). The outrageous ravages of time and some surgical tampering with his rugged features had made his gray face not more attractive but at least unrecognizable to all but a few old cronies, who now shunned his chilling company, anyway. To Van he was even more fascinating than King Wing. Gruff but kindly Mr Plunkett could not resist exploiting that fascination (we all like to be liked) by introducing Van to the tricks of an art now become pure and abstract, and therefore genuine. Mr Plunkett considered the use of all mechanical media, mirrors and vulgar ‘sleeve rakes’ as leading inevitably to exposure, just as jellies, muslin, rubber hands, and so on sully and shorten a professional medium’s career. He taught Van what to look for when suspecting the cheater with bright objects around him (‘Xmas tree’ or ‘twinkler,’ as those amateurs, some of them respectable clubmen, are called by professionals). Mr Plunkett believed only in sleight-of-hand; secret pockets were useful (but could be turned inside out and against you). Most essential was the ‘feel’ of a card, the delicacy of its palming, and digitation, the false shuffle, deck-sweeping, pack-roofing, prefabrication of deals, and above all a finger agility that practice could metamorphose into veritable vanishing acts or, conversely, into the materialization of a joker or the transformation of two pairs into four kings. One absolute requisite, if using privately an additional deck, was memorizing discards when hands were not pre-arranged. For a couple of months Van practiced card tricks, then turned to other recreations. He was an apprentice who learned fast, and kept his labeled phials in a cool place. (1.28)
According to a German saying, Übung macht den Meister (practice makes perfect). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ("Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," 1795) is a novel by Goethe.
milord Dick in Ada
Describing a game of poker that he plays at Chose, Van twice calls Dick C. (a cardsharp) "milord:"
Sometime during the winter of 1886-7, at dismally cold Chose, in the course of a poker game with two Frenchmen and a fellow student whom we shall call Dick, in the latter’s smartly furnished rooms in Serenity Court, he noticed that the French twins were losing not only because they were happily and hopelessly tight, but also because milord was that ‘crystal cretin’ of Plunkett’s vocabulary, a man of many mirrors — small reflecting surfaces variously angled and shaped, glinting discreetly on watch or signet ring, dissimulated like female fireflies in the undergrowth, on table legs, inside cuff or lapel, and on the edges of ashtrays, whose position on adjacent supports Dick kept shifting with a negligent air — all of which, as any card sharper might tell you, was as dumb as it was redundant. (1.28)
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. (ibid.)
In his famous epigram on Count Vorontsov (the General Governor of New Russia, the poet's boss in Odessa) Pushkin calls Vorontsov polu-milord, polu-kupets ("half-milord, half-merchant, etc."). In Tatiana's dream in Chapter Five (XVI: 14) of Eugene Onegin there is polu-zhuravl' i polu-kot (a half-crane and half-cat). A namesake of Moby-Dick (the whale in Hermann Melville's novel), Dick C. is polu-kit (a half-whale). Note that Baron d'Onsky (Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel, 1.2) seems to be a cross between Dmitri Donskoy (the Moscow Prince who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo, 1380) and Onegins' donskoy zherebets (Don stallion). Note also that Count Vorontsov is a character in Tolstoy's Haji-Murat, a story mentioned by Van in the same chapter of Ada:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper.
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
A huge whale (or large fish) swallowed Ionah (the prophet). Ionych (1898) is a story by Chekhov. Dr Startsev (Dmitri Ionovich) is in love with Kitten (Ekaterina Turkin, nicknamed Kotik). In 'kitten' there is kit (whale in Russian).