Describing his dinner in ‘Ursus’ with Ada and Lucette, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin:
Knowing how fond his sisters were of Russian fare and Russian floor shows, Van took them Saturday night to ‘Ursus,’ the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major. Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass ‘miraged’ that season — in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green. Their mouths ‘echoed’ in tone (but not tint) each other’s lipstick; their eyes were made up in a ‘surprised bird-of-paradise’ style that was as fashionable in Los as in Lute. Mixed metaphors and double-talk became all three Veens, the children of Venus.
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.
At the beginning of his novella Byvshie lyudi (“Creatures that Once Were Men,” 1897) Maxim Gorky mentions zhalkaya flora gorodskikh okrain (the miserable flora of city outskirts):
Въезжая улица — это два ряда одноэтажных лачужек, тесно прижавшихся друг к другу, ветхих, с кривыми стенами и перекошенными окнами; дырявые крыши изувеченных временем человеческих жилищ испещрены заплатами из лубков, поросли мхом; над ними кое-где торчат высокие шесты со скворешницами, их осеняет пыльная зелень бузины и корявых вётел — жалкая флора городских окраин, населённых беднотою.
In front of you is the main street, with two rows of miserable looking huts with shuttered windows and old walls pressing on each other and leaning forward. The roofs of these time-worn habitations are full of holes, and have been patched here and there with laths; from underneath them project mildewed beams, which are shaded by the dusty-leaved elder-trees and crooked white willows—pitiable flora of those suburbs inhabited by the poor. (Part I)
The Introduction to Creatures that Once Were Men was written by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton is the author of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908). Van takes his sisters to 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) Saturday night. Gorky's essay on New York (known on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra, as Manhattan or simply Man) is entitled Gorod zhyoltogo d'yavola ("The City of the Yellow Devil," 1906). By the yellow devil Gorky means gold. The second part of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy is entitled V lyudyakh ("My Apprenticeship," 1916). Byvshie lyudi and V lyudyakh bring to mind Bednye lyudi ("Poor Folk," 1846), Dostoevski's first novel (written in epistolary form). In the old Russian alphabet the letter L (Lucette's initial) was called lyudi. In a draft of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Tatiana Larin signs her letter to Onegin with her initials:
Podumala chto skazhut lyudi?
I podpisala T. L.
she wondered what people would say,
and signed T. L. (Chapter Three)
The Roman numeral L corresponds to the Arabic number 50. The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3, 1850, was Thursday. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski says that he failed to pass his algebra examination:
До сих пор я не знал, что значит оскорблённое самолюбие. Я бы краснел, ежели бы это чувство овладело мною... но знаешь? Хотелось бы раздавить весь мир за один раз... Я потерял, убил столько дней до экзамена, заболел, похудел, выдержал экзамен отлично в полной силе и объёме этого слова и остался... Так хотел один преподающий (алгебры), которому я нагрубил в продолженье года и который нынче имел подлость напомнить мне это, объясняя причину, отчего остался я...
In Ada's epilogue Van quotes the epoch-making confession of Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu:
More fiercely than ever he execrated all sham art, from the crude banalities of junk sculpture to the italicized passages meant by a pretentious novelist to convey his fellow hero’s cloudbursts of thought. He had even less patience than before with the ‘Sig’ (Signy-M.D.-M.D.) school of psychiatry. Its founder’s epoch-making confession (‘In my student days I became a deflowerer because I failed to pass my botany examination’) he prefixed, as an epigraph, to one of his last papers (1959) entitled The Farce of Group Therapy in Sexual Maladjustment, the most damaging and satisfying blast of its kind (the Union of Marital Counselors and Catharticians at first wanted to sue but then preferred to detumefy). (5.4)
Flora's uncertain (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) origin brings to mind "the Romany patteran" in Kipling's poem The Gipsy Trail and Frank Ramsey (a British philosopher and mathematician, 1903-30, who developed jaundice and died aged twenty-six). The Russian name of jaundice, zheltukha comes from zhyoltyi (yellow). The Ramsey number makes one think of numbers and rows and series mentioned by Van:
He traveled, he studied, he taught.
He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van — who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers.
He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth, and ennui, and discarded ‘merrycans’ with ‘Billy’ labels, and the jungle jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden, were but places on the map of his own madness.
He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sun decks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)
Eberthella Brown brings to mind Father Brown, a fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur detective in G. K. Chesterton's stories.