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) says that Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution:
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).
In his Introduction to Gorki's novella Byvshie lyudi (“Creatures that Once Were Men,” 1897) G. K. Chesterton says that "to be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist:"
Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are not), but because most Russians—indeed, nearly all Russians—are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible and which makes religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold) there never will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which they call progress.
"The sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State" brings to mind "the marshes of this our sufficient world." In the old Russian alphabet the letter L was called lyudi. 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 (the author of Bednye lyudi, "Poor Folk," 1846) and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3, 1850, was Thursday. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) is a novel by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton is the author of The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), a poem about the idealised exploits of the Saxon King Alfred the Great. Describing the beginning of Demon's affair with Marina, Van mentions Belokonsk (the Russian twin of Whitehorse):
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. (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).
Starukha Belokonskaya (old dame Belokonski) is a character in Dostoevski's novel The Idiot (1869). At the dinner in Bellevue Hotel in Mont Roux Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) mentions dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski, a delightful old spinster (“a vulgar old skunk,” according to Ada), who lives in a villa above Valvey:
It went on and on like that for more than an hour and Van’s clenched jaws began to ache. Finally, Ada got up, and Dorothy followed suit but continued to speak standing:
‘Tomorrow dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski is coming to dinner, a delightful old spinster, who lives in a villa above Valvey. Terriblement grande dame et tout ça. Elle aime taquiner Andryusha en disant qu’un simple cultivateur comme lui n’aurait pas dû épouser la fille d’une actrice et d’un marchand de tableaux. Would you care to join us — Jean?’
Jean replied: ‘Alas, no, dear Daria Andrevna: Je dois "surveiller les kilos." Besides, I have a business dinner tomorrow.’
‘At least’ — (smiling) — ‘you could call me Dasha.’
‘I do it for Andrey,’ explained Ada, ‘actually the grand’ dame in question is a vulgar old skunk.’
‘Ada!’ uttered Dasha with a look of gentle reproof. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): terriblement etc.: terribly grand and all that, she likes to tease him by saying that a simple farmer like him should not have married the daughter of an actress and an art dealer.
je dois etc.: I must watch my weight.
Skuns is Russian for “skunk.” In his lecture on Dostoevski (in Lectures on Russian Literature) VN says that a curious prototype of Prince Myshkin (the hero of The Idiot), Ivanushka durachok (Johnny the Simpleton, the favorite hero of the old Russian folklore), is really as cunning as a skunk:
Another interesting line of inquiry lies in the examination of his characters in their historical development. Thus the favorite hero of the old Russian folklore, John the Simpleton, who is considered a weak-minded muddler by his brothers but is really as cunning as a skunk and perfectly immoral in his activities, an unpoetical and unpleasant figure, the personification of secret slyness triumphing over the big and the strong, Johnny the Simpleton, that product of a nation which has had more than one nation's share of misery, is a curious prototype of Dostoevski's Prince Myshkin, hero of his novel The Idiot, the positively good man, the pure innocent fool, the cream of humility, renunciation, and spiritual peace. And Prince Myshkin, in turn, had for his grandson the character recently created by the contemporary Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, the type of cheerful imbecile, muddling through a police-state totalitarian world, imbecility being the last refuge in that kind of world.
In his lecture VN mentions Skotoprigonyevsk, the town in which the action of Dostoevski’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) takes place:
In this taunting and teasing way the cunning author quite deliberately entices his reader. However, this is not the only way in which he does it. He is constantly preoccupied with various means for keeping and whetting the reader's attention throughout the book. Take for instance the manner in which he finally discloses the name of the town where the action has been taking place from the very start of the novel. This revelation of the town's name does not occur until close to the end: "Skotoprigonyevsk [place towards which cattle herds are driven, clearing place for cattle, something like oxtown], Skotoprigonyevsk," he says, "such alas is the name of our town, I have been long trying to conceal it."
Skotoprigonyevsk brings to mind the great Scott (Scotty), Marina’s impresario who brought the Russian dancers all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk.