Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets and the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka:
Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she 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. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drowning the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might have been just another consumable witch. (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Yukonets: inhabitant of Yukon (Russ.).
Aqua’s and Marina’s father, General Ivan Durmanov was a Commander of Yukon Fortress (1.1). On Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) Pushkin lived in Yukon:
The ‘pest’ appeared as suddenly as it would vanish. It settled on pretty bare arms and legs without the hint of a hum, in a kind of recueilli silence, that — by contrast — caused the sudden insertion of its absolutely hellish proboscis to resemble the brass crash of a military band. Five minutes after the attack in the crepuscule, between porch step and cricket-crazed garden, a fiery irritation would set in, which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). ‘Sladko! (Sweet!)’ Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon. During the week following her birthday, Ada’s unfortunate fingernails used to stay garnet-stained and after a particularly ecstatic, lost-to-the-world session of scratching, blood literally streamed down her shins — a pity to see, mused her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully fascinating — for we are visitors and investigators in a strange universe, indeed, indeed. (1.17)
According to Ivan ("Jean") Lapin (a tradesman from Opochka whose name brings to mind Dr Lapiner, Aqua's and Marina's Swiss physician), in May 1825 in Mikhaylovskoe (Pushkin's country place in the Province of Pskov) Pushkin wore "a peasant shirt of red calico, with a sky-blue ribbon for sash. He carried an iron club." In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 458) VN explains: Pushkin carried an iron club to strengthen and steady his pistol hand in view of a duel he intended to have with Fyodor Tolstoy at the first opportunity (see n. to Four: XIX: 5). Count Fyodor Tolstoy who took part in the first lap of Admiral Krusenstern's famous voyage around the world and who was dumped for insubordination on Rat Island, in the Aleutians, was nicknamed Amerikanets, "the American." In a poem addressed to Chaadaev Pushkin calls Tolstoy "that philosopher who in past days / amazed four continents with his lewd ways" (EO Commentary, vol. II, p. 429, note). In Chapter Eight (XXXVIII: 5-8) of Eugene Onegin sila magnetizma (the power of magnetism; cf. 'the unmentionable magnetic power,' as Van calls electricity banned on Demonia after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century) almost makes Onegin, who is in love with Princess N., grasp the mechanism of Russian verses:
Он так привык теряться в этом,
Что чуть с ума не своротил
Или не сделался поэтом.
Признаться: то-то б одолжил!
А точно: силой магнетизма
Стихов российских механизма
Едва в то время не постиг
Мой бестолковый ученик.
Как походил он на поэта,
Когда в углу сидел один,
И перед ним пылал камин,
И он мурлыкал: Веnеdеttа
Иль Idol mio и ронял
В огонь то туфлю, то журнал.
He grew so used to lose himself in this
that he almost went off his head
or else became a poet. (Frankly,
that would have been a boon, indeed!)
And true: by dint of magnetism,
the mechanism of Russian verses
my addleheaded pupil
at that time nearly grasped.
How much a poet he resembled
when in a corner he would sit alone,
and the hearth blazed in front of him,
and he hummed “Benedetta”
or “Idol mio,” and into the fire
dropped now a slipper, now his magazine!
Lyaskanka means "a female inhabitant of Lyaska (the Antiterran name of Alaska)." There is Lyaska in plyaska (dance, folk dancing), a word used by Lermontov in the penultimate line of his poem Rodina ("Motherland," 1841):
Люблю отчизну я, но странною любовью!
Не победит её рассудок мой.
Ни слава, купленная кровью,
Ни полный гордого доверия покой,
Ни тёмной старины заветные преданья
Не шевелят во мне отрадного мечтанья.
Но я люблю — за что, не знаю сам —
Её степей холодное молчанье,
Её лесов безбрежных колыханье,
Разливы рек её, подобные морям;
Просёлочным путём люблю скакать в телеге
И, взором медленным пронзая ночи тень,
Встречать по сторонам, вздыхая о ночлеге,
Дрожащие огни печальных деревень;
Люблю дымок спалённой жнивы,
В степи ночующий обоз
И на холме средь жёлтой нивы
Чету белеющих берёз.
С отрадой, многим незнакомой,
Я вижу полное гумно,
Избу, покрытую соломой,
С резными ставнями окно;
И в праздник, вечером росистым,
Смотреть до полночи готов
На пляску с топаньем и свистом
Под говор пьяных мужичков.
I love my homeland, but in the strangest way;
My intellect could never conquer it.
The fame, earned with my blood and pain,
The peace, full of the proud fit,
The dark old age and its devoted tales
Won't stir in me the blithe inspiring gales.
But I do love, what for I do not know,
Its cold terrains' perpetuating quiet,
Its endless woodlands’ oscillation tired
The sea-like rivers' wild overflows.
Along the rural paths I favor taking rides,
And with a slow glance impaling morbid darks,
The trembling village lights discover on the side,
While thinking where this time for board I will park.
I like the smoke from garnered fields,
The sledges sleeping in the steppe,
The birches growing on the hill
That occupies the grassland gap.
With joy, that people fathom not,
I feel the rush of threshing scenes,
The covered with foliage huts,
The ornamented window screens.
And on the evening of the fete
I like to watch till the midnight
The dance with tapping and a chat
Of drunken fellows on the side.
(tr. B. Leyvi)
Describing the beginning of Demon's affair with Marina, Van mentions the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ and the imbecile but colorful transfigurants from Lyaska — or Iveria:
Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen 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) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat.
His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss, as she ran, flushed and flustered, in a pink dress into the orchard, earning a claque third of the sitting ovation that greeted the instant dispersal of the imbecile but colorful transfigurants from Lyaska — or Iveria. Her meeting with Baron O., who strolled out of a side alley, all spurs and green tails, somehow eluded Demon’s consciousness, so struck was he by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life. Without waiting for the end of the scene, he hurried out of the theater into the crisp crystal night, the snowflakes star-spangling his top hat as he returned to his house in the next block to arrange a magnificent supper. By the time he went to fetch his new mistress in his jingling sleigh, the last-act ballet of Caucasian generals and metamorphosed Cinderellas had come to a sudden close, and Baron d’O., now in black tails and white gloves, was kneeling in the middle of an empty stage, holding the glass slipper that his fickle lady had left him when eluding his belated advances. The claqueurs were getting tired and looking at their watches when Marina in a black cloak slipped into Demon’s arms and swan-sleigh. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Iveria is the Georgian name of Georgia (Stalin's native country). Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van mentions kerchiefed Marina with Dack (the dackel at Ardis) in her clutch deriding the watchdogs:
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.
Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over.
That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it one had to drive round a large reservoir which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft — typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist’s eye the motorcar’s lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en croupe: riding pillion.
Rob Roy (1817) is a historical novel by Walter Scott, one of the Waverley novels. Rob Roy (a Jacobite Scottish outlaw, Robert Roy MacGregor, 1671-1734) rhymes with Zveroboy, the Russian title of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Deerslayer (1841). In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 202) VN points out that Annette Olenin (whom in May 1828 Pushkin courted in Priyutino, the Olenins' country seat near St. Petersburg where Pushkin, bitten by mosquitoes, used to exclaim "Sladko!") dubbed Pushkin "Red Rover" after the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Red Rover (written in the summer of 1827 in a village near Paris).