Describing the first occasion on which Ada had glimpsed him, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a motor landaulet that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and Ada hired to Radugalet:
Before his boarding-school days started, his father’s pretty house, in Florentine style, between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan), had been Van’s winter home (two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away), unless they journeyed abroad. Summers in Radugalet, the ‘other Ardis,’ were so much colder and duller than those here in this, Ada’s, Ardis. Once he even spent both winter and summer there; it must have been in 1878.
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).
Landaulet and Radugalet bring to mind arbalet (the Russian word for "crossbow, arbalest") and adalet (the Turkish word for "justice, fairness, equity"). Ada's first lover (whose photograph Van sees in Kim Beauharnais's album), Karol, or Karapars (black panther), Krolik was born in Turkey:
Well,’ said Van, when the mind took over again, ‘let’s go back to our defaced childhood. I’m anxious’ — (picking up the album from the bedside rug) — ‘to get rid of this burden. Ah, a new character, the inscription says: Dr Krolik.’
‘Wait a sec. It may be the best Vanishing Van but it’s terribly messy all the same. Okay. Yes, that’s my poor nature teacher.’
Knickerbockered, panama-hatted, lusting for his babochka (Russian for ‘lepidopteron’). A passion, a sickness. What could Diana know about that chase?
‘How curious — in the state Kim mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I imagined. In fact, darling, he’s a big, strong, handsome old March Hare! Explain!’
‘There’s nothing to explain. I asked Kim one day to help me carry some boxes there and back, and here’s the visual proof. Besides, that’s not my Krolik but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik. A doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey.’
‘I love the way your eyes narrow when you tell a lie. The remote mirage in Effrontery Minor.’
‘I’m not lying!’ — (with lovely dignity): ‘He is a doctor of philosophy.’
‘Van ist auch one,’ murmured Van, sounding the last word as ‘wann.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): vanishing etc.: allusion to ‘vanishing cream’.
auch: Germ., also.
In Ilf and Petrov’s novels Dvenadtsat’ stuliev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) and Zolotoy telyonok ("The Golden Calf," 1931) Ostap Bender says that his father was a Turkish subject. One of the three diamond hunters in "The Twelve Chairs," Father Fyodor attempted to breed kroliki (the rabbits). Vorob'yaninov's former mistress whom Bender and Vorob'yaninov visit in Stargorod, Elena Stanislavovna Bour has krolichiy vzglyad (rabbit’s glance):
Когда женщина стареет, с ней могут произойти многие неприятности: могут выпасть зубы, поседеть и поредеть волосы, развиться одышка, может нагрянуть тучность, может одолеть крайняя худоба, но голос у нее не изменится. Он останется таким же, каким был у нее гимназисткой, невестой или любовницей молодого повесы.
Поэтому, когда Полесов постучал в дверь и Елена Станиславовна спросила: «Кто там?» — Воробьянинов дрогнул. Голос его любовницы был тот же, что и в девяносто девятом году, перед открытием парижской выставки. Но, войдя в комнату и сжимая веки от света, Ипполит Матвеевич увидел, что от былой красоты не осталось и следа.
— Как вы изменились! — сказал он невольно.
Старуха бросилась ему на шею.
— Спасибо, — сказала она, — я знаю, чем вы рисковали, придя ко мне. Вы тот же великодушный рыцарь. Я не спрашиваю вас, зачем вы приехали из Парижа. Видите, я не любопытна.
— Но я приехал вовсе не из Парижа, — растерянно сказал Воробьянинов.
— Мы с коллегой прибыли из Берлина, — поправил Остап, нажимая на локоть Ипполита Матвеевича, — об этом не рекомендуется говорить вслух.
— Ах, я так рада вас видеть! — возопила гадалка. — Войдите сюда, в эту комнату… А вы, Виктор Михайлович, простите, но не зайдете ли вы через полчаса?
— О! — заметил Остап. — Первое свидание! Трудные минуты! Разрешите и мне удалиться. Вы позволите с вами, любезнейший Виктор Михайлович?
Слесарь задрожал от радости. Оба ушли в квартиру Полесова, где Остап, сидя на обломке ворот дома № 5 по Перелешинскому переулку, стал развивать перед оторопевшим кустарем-одиночкою с мотором фантасмагорические идеи, клонящиеся к спасению родины.
Через час они вернулись и застали стариков совершенно разомлевшими.
— А вы помните, Елена Станиславовна? — говорил Ипполит Матвеевич.
— А вы помните, Ипполит Матвеевич? — говорила Елена Станиславовна.
«Кажется, наступил психологический момент для ужина», — подумал Остап. И, прервав Ипполита Матвеевича, вспоминавшего выборы в городскую управу, сказал:
— В Берлине есть очень странный обычай — там едят так поздно, что нельзя понять, что это: ранний ужин или поздний обед!
Елена Станиславовна встрепенулась, отвела кроличий взгляд от Воробьянинова и потащилась в кухню.
When a woman grows old, many unpleasant things may happen to her: her teeth may fall out, her hair may thin out and turn grey, she may become short-winded, she may unexpectedly develop fat or grow extremely thin, but her voice never changes. It remains just as it was when she was a schoolgirl, a bride, or some young rake's mistress. That was why Vorobyaninov trembled when Polesov knocked at the door and Elena Stanislavovna answered: "Who's that?" His mistress's voice was the same as it had been in 1899 just before the opening of the Paris Exhibition. But as soon as he entered the room, squinting from the glare of the light, he saw that there was not a trace of her former beauty left.
"How you've changed," he said involuntarily.
The old woman threw herself on to his neck. "Thank you," she said. "I know what you risk by coming here to see me. You're the same chivalrous knight. I'm not going – to ask you why you're here from Paris. I'm not curious, you see."
"But I haven't come from Paris at all," said Ippolit Matveyevich in confusion.
"My colleague and I have come from Berlin," Ostap corrected her, nudging Ippolit Matveyevich, "but it's not advisable to talk about it too loudly."
"Oh, how pleased I am to see you," shrilled the fortune-teller. "Come in here, into this room. And I'm sorry, Victor Mikhaylovich, but couldn't you come back in half an hour?"
"Oh!" Ostap remarked. "The first meeting. Difficult moments! Allow me to withdraw as well. May I come with you, dear Victor Mikhaylovich?"
The mechanic trembled with joy. They both went off to Polesov's apartment, where Ostap, sitting on a piece of one of the gates of No. 5 Pereleshinsky Street, outlined his phantasmagoric ideas for the salvation of the motherland to the dumbstruck artisan. An hour later they returned to find the old couple lost in reminiscence.
"And do you remember, Elena Stanislavovna?" Ippolit Matveyevich was saying.
"And do you remember, Ippolit Matveyevich?" Elena Stanislavovna was saying.
"The psychological moment for supper seems to have arrived," thought Ostap, and, interrupting Ippolit Matveyevich, who was recalling the elections to the Tsarist town council, said: "They have a very strange custom in Berlin. They eat so late that you can't tell whether it's an early supper or a late lunch."
Elena Stanislavovna gave a start, took her rabbit's eyes off Vorobyaninov, and dragged herself into the kitchen. (Chapter XIV “The Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare”)
At the end of "The Twelve Chairs" Vorob'yaninov murders Bender (who is fast asleep) by cutting his victim's throat with a razor. But in "The Golden Calf" Bender resurrects and says that surgeons managed to save his life. At Kingston (Van's American University) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) tells Van that surfers and surgeons saved John Starling (Ada's lover and fellow actor who played Skvortsov, a second in Baron Tuzenbakh's pistol duel with Solyony, in Chekhov's Three Sisters):
Driblets? Driblets? Now who pronounced it that way? Who? Who? A dripping ewes-dropper in a dream? Did the orphans live?’ But we must listen to Lucette.
‘After a year or so she found out that an old pederast kept him and she dismissed him, and he shot himself on a beach at high tide but surfers and surgeons saved him, and now his brain is damaged; he will never be able to
speak.’
‘One can always fall back on mutes,’ said Van gloomily. ‘He could act the speechless eunuch in "Stambul, my bulbul" or the stable boy disguised as a kennel girl who brings a letter.’
‘Van, I’m boring you?’
‘Oh, nonsense, it’s a gripping and palpitating little case history.’
Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years ― besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot ― Adiana! Wonder whom she’ll bag next. (2.5)
As in landaulet and Radugalet, in "driblets" (as Doc Ecksreher, the Kalugano physician, pronounced the word 'triplets') there is the diminutive suffix "let." Another word that ends in "let" is pistolet (pistol in Russian). In Kalugano Van fights a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge. Violet also ends in "let." 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. Orange and violet are colors of the rainbow. Raduga is Russian for "rainbow."
In Chapter Ten (VI: 1) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin calls the Russian word avos' (mayhap) shibolet narodnyi (the national shibboleth). According to Byron, the national shibboleth of the English is "God damn!" (the only English phrase that Byron's Don Juan knows). On the eve of Lucette's suicide Van and Lucette watch Don Juan's Last Fling, Yuzlik's film in which Ada played the gitanilla, in the Tobakoff cinema hall. The element that destroys Lucette (who jumps from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) is water. In VN's novel Pnin (1957) Joan Clements (Pnin's landlady) tells Pnin that they were in Istanbul at the same time and that she remembers the Turkish word for 'water,' and Pnin (a linguist by necessity) says that water in Turkish is su. Uchan-Su (the name translates from Crimean Tatar to "flying water") is a waterfall near Yalta in Crimea, the highest waterfall on the Crimean Peninsula. In his poem Uchan-Su (1900) Bunin compares Uchan-Su to venchal'naya fata (a bride's wedding veil):
Свежее, слаще воздух горный.
Невнятный шум идет в лесу:
Поет веселый и проворный,
Со скал летящий Учан-Су!
Глядишь — и, точно застывая,
Но в то же время ропот свой,
Свой легкий бег не прерывая, —
Прозрачной пылью снеговой
Несется вниз струя живая,
Как тонкий флер, сквозит огнем,
Скользит со скал фатой венчальной
И вдруг, и пеной, и дождем
Свергаясь в черный водоем,
Бушует влагою хрустальной…
А горы в синей вышине!
А южный бор и сосен шепот!
Под этот шум и влажный ропот
Стоишь, как в светлом полусне.
The name Yuzlik (of the director of the Don Juan's Last Fling movie) means in Uzbek "veil." Describing Marina's wedding photograph, Van mentions the commonplace sweep of a bride’s ectoplasmic veil:
According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed), and that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place on St Adelaida’s Day, 1871. Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, one dark-haired and tanned, the other dark-haired and milk-white, bending in a shaft of hot sunlight that slanted through the dormer window under which the dusty cartons stood, happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina’s hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband’s kneehole library table) identical in every detail — including the commonplace sweep of a bride’s ectoplasmic veil, partly blown by a parvis breeze athwart the groom’s trousers — to the newspaper reproduction. A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida. Another daughter, this time Dan’s very own, followed on January 3, 1876. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.
Telling Van about Ada's wedding, Lucette says that Ada's thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds:
Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the Gavailles (‘incorrigible dreamer,’ drawled Van). He had ‘wept like a fountain’ in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding — in the Greek-faith style, if you please — looked like a badly faked episode in an ‘old movie, the priest was gaga and the dyakon drunk, and — perhaps, fortunately — Ada’s thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds. Van said he would not listen to that.
‘Oh, you must,’ she rejoined, ‘hotya bï potomu (if only because) one of her shafer’s (bachelors who take turns holding the wedding crown over the bride’s head) looked momentarily, in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head), exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you from wherever you were.’
At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom’s sinister sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream, growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of his holding that crown over her.
‘Your father,’ added Lucette, ‘paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures — but of course, real fame begins only when one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now?’
‘I don’t,’ he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. ‘Alas, I don’t! I love you with a brother’s love and maybe still more tenderly. Would you like me to order drinks?’
‘I’d like you to go on and on,’ she muttered, her nose buried in the rubber pillow. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): I love you with a brother’s love etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Four: XVI: 3-4.
There is su in sud (Russ., law-court, court, justice, judgment, trial) and sud'ya (Russ., judge). Describing the library of Ardis Hall, Van mentions Judge Bald and his followers:
In those times, in this country’ incestuous’ meant not only ‘unchaste’ — the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics — but also implied (in the phrase ‘incestuous cohabitation,’ and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had long replaced appeals to ‘divine law’ by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, ‘incest’ could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate, stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples, weaklings, ‘muted mutates’ and, finally, to hopeless sterility. Now that smacked of ‘crime,’ and since nobody could be supposed to control judiciously orgies of indiscriminate inbreeding (somewhere in Tartary fifty generations of ever woolier and woolier sheep had recently ended abruptly in one hairless, five-legged, impotent little lamb — and the beheading of a number of farmers failed to resurrect the fat strain), it was perhaps better to ban ‘incestuous cohabitation’ altogether. Judge Bald and his followers disagreed, perceiving in ‘the deliberate suppression of a possible benefit for the sake of avoiding a probable evil’ the infringement of one of humanity’s main rights — that of enjoying the liberty of its evolution, a liberty no other creature had ever known. Unfortunately after the rumored misadventure of the Volga herds and herdsmen a much better documented fait divers happened in the U.S.A. at the height of the controversy. An American, a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk, described as an ‘habitually intoxicated laborer’ (‘a good definition,’ said Ada lightly, ‘of the true artist’), managed somehow to impregnate — in his sleep, it was claimed by him and his huge family — his five-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria Ivanov, and, then, five years later, also got Maria’s daughter, Daria, with child, in another fit of somnolence. Photographs of Maria, a ten-year old granny with little Daria and baby Varia crawling around her, appeared in all the newspapers, and all kinds of amusing puzzles were provided by the genealogical farce that the relationships between the numerous living — and not always clean-living — members of the Ivanov clan had become in angry Yukonsk. Before the sixty-year-old somnambulist could go on procreating, he was clapped into a monastery for fifteen years as required by an ancient Russian law. Upon his release he proposed to make honorable amends by marrying Daria, now a buxom lass with problems of her own. Journalists made a lot of the wedding, and the shower of gifts from well-wishers (old ladies in New England, a progressive poet in residence at Tennesee Waltz College, an entire Mexican high school, et cetera), and on the same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and demanded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course, only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long shadow upon the little matter of ‘favourable inbreeding.’ By mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols — ‘Peeping Pats,’ as the anti-Irish tabloids called them. (1.21)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): fait divers: fait divers: news item.
blin: Russ., pancake.
Ada's first lover, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, makes one think of Lewis Carroll (whose Palace in Wonderland Ada never read) and of VN's novel Korol', dama, valet ("King, Queen, Knave," 1928).