Describing the death of Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who in 1900 dies of cancer and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time:
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.
For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant, and retired to her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d’Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her), Van’s mother had been suffering from various ‘obscure’ illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated, and which she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower. Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions; and once, in 1899, he saw, as he entered the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina, a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts. Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater, but never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis, none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and ‘self-focusing’ or its opposite device, ‘self-dissolving.’ She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakon’s rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper’s kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism.
Early in 1900, a few days before he saw Marina, for the last time, at the clinic in Nice (where he learned for the first time the name of her illness), Van had a ‘verbal’ nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus. Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating ‘I can’t!’ (meaning ‘can’t die’ — a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming ‘You can, sir!’ She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions. (3.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): dyakon: deacon.
Numbers and rows and series make one think of a lottery ticket — more specifically, of Chekhov's story Vyigryshnyi bilet ("The Lottery Ticket," 1887). It begins as follows:
Иван Дмитрич, человек средний, проживающий с семьей тысячу двести рублей в год и очень довольный своей судьбой, как-то после ужина сел на диван и стал читать газету.
— Забыла я сегодня в газету поглядеть, — сказала его жена, убирая со стола. — Посмотри, нет ли там таблицы тиражей?
— Да, есть, — ответил Иван Дмитрич. — А разве твой билет не пропал в залоге?
— Нет, я во вторник носила проценты.
— Какой номер?
— Серия 9 499, билет 26.
— Так-с… Посмотрим-с… 9 499 и 26.
Иван Дмитрич не верил в лотерейное счастие и в другое время ни за что не стал бы глядеть в таблицу тиражей, но теперь от нечего делать и — благо, газета была перед глазами — он провел пальцем сверху вниз по номерам серий. И тотчас же, точно в насмешку над его неверием, не дальше как во второй строке сверху резко бросилась в глаза цифра 9 499! Не поглядев, какой номер билета, не проверяя себя, он быстро опустил газету на колени и, как будто кто плеснул ему на живот холодной водой, почувствовал под ложечкой приятный холодок: и щекотно, и страшно, и сладко!
— Маша, 9 499 есть! — сказал он глухо.
Жена поглядела на его удивленное, испуганное лицо и поняла, что он не шутит.
— 9 499? — спросила она, бледнея и опуская на стол сложенную скатерть.
— Да, да… Серьезно есть!
— А номер билета?
— Ах, да! Еще номер билета. Впрочем, постой… погоди. Нет, каково? Все-таки номер нашей серии есть! Все-таки, понимаешь…
Ivan Dmitrich, a middle-class man who lived with his family on an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading the newspaper.
"I forgot to look at the newspaper today," his wife said to him as she cleared the table. "Look and see whether the list of drawings is there."
"Yes, it is," said Ivan Dmitrich; "but hasn't your ticket lapsed?"
"No; I took the interest on Tuesday."
"What is the number?"
"Series 9,499, number 26."
"All right . . . we will look . . . 9,499 and 26."
Ivan Dmitritch had no faith in lottery luck, and would not, as a rule, have consented to look at the lists of winning numbers, but now, as he had nothing else to do and as the newspaper was before his eyes, he passed his finger downwards along the column of numbers. And immediately, as though in mockery of his scepticism, no further than the second line from the top, his eye was caught by the figure 9,499! Unable to believe his eyes, he hurriedly dropped the paper on his knees without looking to see the number of the ticket, and, just as though some one had given him a douche of cold water, he felt an agreeable chill in the pit of the stomach; tingling and terrible and sweet!
"Masha, 9,499 is there!" he said in a hollow voice.
His wife looked at his astonished and panicstricken face, and realized that he was not joking.
"9,499?" she asked, turning pale and dropping the folded tablecloth on the table.
"Yes, yes . . . it really is there!"
"And the number of the ticket?"
"Oh yes! There's the number of the ticket too. But stay . . . wait! No, I say! Anyway, the number of our series is there! Anyway, you understand...."
One of the story's two characters, Ivan Dmitrich (Masha's husband), has the same name and patronymic as Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a character in Chekhov's story Palata № 6 ("Ward No. 6," 1892). A madman who suffers from persecution mania, Ivan Dmitrich tells Dr Ragin (who ends up as the sixth patient in Ward No. 6) that he will come here as a ghost from the other world and frighten his tormentors:
В это время проснулся Иван Дмитрич. Он сел и подпер щеки кулаками. Сплюнул. Потом он лениво взглянул на доктора и, по-видимому, в первую минуту ничего не понял; но скоро сонное лицо его стало злым и насмешливым.
— Ага, и вас засадили сюда, голубчик! — проговорил он сиплым спросонок голосом, зажмурив один глаз. — Очень рад. То вы пили из людей кровь, а теперь из вас будут пить. Превосходно!
— Это какое-то недоразумение... — проговорил Андрей Ефимыч, пугаясь слов Ивана Дмитрича; он пожал плечами и повторил: — недоразумение какое-то...
Иван Дмитрич опять сплюнул и лег.— Проклятая жизнь! — проворчал он. — И что горько и обидно, ведь эта жизнь кончится не наградой за страдания, не апофеозом, как в опере, а смертью; придут мужики и потащут мертвого за руки и за ноги в подвал. Брр! Ну, ничего... Зато на том свете будет наш праздник... Я с того света буду являться сюда тенью и пугать этих гадин. Я их поседеть заставлю.
Meanwhile Ivan Dmitrich woke up; he sat up and propped his cheeks on his fists. He spat. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor, and apparently for the first minute did not understand; but soon his sleepy face grew malicious and mocking.
“Aha! so they have put you in here, too, old fellow?” he said in a voice husky from sleepiness, screwing up one eye. “Very glad to see you. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours. Excellent!”
“It’s a misunderstanding . . .” Andrey Yefimych brought out, frightened by Ivan Dmitrich’s words; he shrugged his shoulders and repeated: “It’s some misunderstanding.”
Ivan Dmitrich spat again and lay down.
“Cursed life,” he grumbled, “and what’s bitter and insulting, this life will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death; peasants will come and drag one’s dead body by the arms and the legs to the cellar. Ugh! Well, it does not matter. . . . We shall have our good time in the other world. . . . I shall come here as a ghost from the other world and frighten these reptiles. I’ll turn their hair grey.” (Chapter XVII)
The twin sister of poor mad Aqua (Demon Veen's wife), Marina dies of cancer. The Russian word for 'cancer' is rak. The music teacher of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette, Philip Rack was poisoned by his jealous wife Eslie and dies in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital:
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go ‘brambling’ in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? ‘Ward Five,’ answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local ‘lab’ could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept ‘mum’; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets — how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.
That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): palata: Russ., ward.
Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal 'arethusoides' but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian') and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack's martyrdom. (ibid.)
In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov calls Chekhov pevets beznadezhnosti (a poet of hopelessness), speaks of Chekhov’s story Duel' ("The Duel," 1891) and uses the phrase pervyi vstrechnyi poshlyak (the first vulgar person [she encountered]):
Неизвестно зачем, без любви, даже без влечения она отдаётся первому встречному пошляку. Потом ей кажется, что её с ног до головы облили грязью, и эта грязь так пристала к ней, что не смоешь даже целым океаном воды.
For no reason at all, without love, without even attraction she [Laevski’s mistress] gives herself to the first vulgar person [poshlyak] she met. Then she feels that mud was flung at her and this mud got stuck to her whole body so that even an ocean of water would not wash it off. (VI)
Water is the element that destroys Lucette (Van's and Ada's haf-sister who in June 1901 jumps from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic). Describing Lucette's suicide, Van says that she did not see her whole life flash before her:
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. (3.5)
In his essay on Chekhov Shestov points out that the doctor in Ward No. 6 dies very beautifully, in his last moments he sees a herd of deer:
И, кажется, “Палату № 6” в своё время очень сочувственно приняли. Кстати прибавим, что доктор умирает очень красиво: в последние минуты видит стадо оленей и т. п.
Chekhov had openly repented and renounced the theory of non-resistance; and, I believe, Ward No. 6 met with a sympathetic reception at the time. In passing I would say that the doctor dies very beautifully: in his last moments he sees a herd of deer... (VI)
At the end of Ada Van (whom Dr Lagosse made the last merciful injection of morphine and who hastens to complete the book before it is too late) mentions a doe at gaze in the ancestral park:
Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr Van Veen, son of Baron ‘Demon’ Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.
In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.
The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): gamine: lassie.