At the beginning of VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called ‘Russian’ Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with ‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).
Van’s maternal grandmother Daria (‘Dolly’) Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824, Mary O’Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in Bras, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called ‘Russian’ Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with ‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.
granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.
Estoty seems to hint at estote, second-person plural future active imperative of sum ("am" in Latin). In Orthodoxy (1908) G. K. Chesterton quotes Descartes's words "Cogito, ergo sum:"
Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think." (Chapter III. "The Suicide of Thought")
The Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii) bring to mind Severn side mentioned by G. K. Chesterton in his Dedication to The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), a poem about the idealised exploits of the Saxon King Alfred the Great (848-899):
Gored on the Norman gonfalon
The Golden Dragon died:
We shall not wake with ballad strings
The good time of the smaller things,
We shall not see the holy kings
Ride down by Severn side.
August 1, 1903. Two Great Tories is an article that G. K. Chesterton contributed to the Daily News:
Two very great men have only recently passed from us, to all appearance very different – the one a butterfly with a sting, the other a buffalo with a touch of attractive weakness. But Henley and Whistler were, I believe, up to the last friends; and it is good that they should have been friends, for of all men on earth the most pathetic are those who, like them, have a noble talent for finding friends and a noble talent for losing them. Moreover, they stood together on yet greater things. They were both representatives of that great intellectual and artistic reaction which followed the exhaustion of the Liberalism of the French Revolution: they were both what an able writer in ‘The Outlook’ some days ago called ‘strong Illiberals’. They were both Tories; that is, pessimists. Nothing strikes one so much about the attitude of both as the fact that a superb melancholy made it necessary for both to take refuge in something, in something outside current life. Henley took refuge among criminals and Whistler (less happy) among artists: but they were both brave and sad men. Henley as a poet was great only when he uttered the very rhapsody of stoicism. Whistler's whole life was a nocturne: it was like one of his own pictures in which the darkness is lit only with one red or lemon gleam, the Chinese lantern of art.
According to G. K. Chesterton, Henley and Whistler were both pessimists. Van's Professor at Kingston, old Rattner (the author of a book on Terra) is a pessimist of genius:
Van spent the fall term of 1892 at Kingston University, Mayne, where there was a first-rate madhouse, as well as a famous Department of Terrapy, and where he now went back to one of his old projects, which turned on the Idea of Dimension & Dementia (‘You will "sturb," Van, with an alliteration on your lips,’ jested old Rattner, resident pessimist of genius, for whom life was only a ‘disturbance’ in the rattnerterological order of things — from ‘nertoros,’ not ‘terra’).
Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada] liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit dealing with the divorce between time and the contents of time (such as action on matter, in space, and the nature of space itself) and was contemplating moving to Manhattan (that kind of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication rather than a concession to some farcical ‘influence of environment’ endorsed by Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays), when he received an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment affected violently his entire pulmonary and systemic circulation.
Nobody, not even his father, knew that Van had recently bought Cordula’s penthouse apartment between Manhattan’s Library and Park. Besides its being the perfect place to work in, with that terrace of scholarly seclusion suspended in a celestial void, and that noisy but convenient city lapping below at the base of his mind’s invulnerable rock, it was, in fashionable parlance, a ‘bachelor’s folly’ where he could secretly entertain any girl or girls he pleased. (One of them dubbed it ‘your wing à terre’). But he was still in his rather dingy Chose-like rooms at Kingston when he consented to Lucette’s visiting him on that bright November afternoon. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): sturb: pun on Germ. sterben, to die.
"Ich sterbe (‘I’m dying’)" were Chekhov's words on his deathbed in Badenweiler (a German spa), in July 1904. Chekhov (who knew very little German) pronounced the first two letters of sterbe as they are pronounced in 'storm' and 'disturbance.' In Chekhov’s story Dom s mezoninom (“The House with the Mezzanine,” 1896) Belokurov talks of the disease of the century—pessimism:
Белокуров длинно, растягивая «э-э-э-э...», заговорил о болезни века — пессимизме. Говорил он уверенно и таким тоном, как будто я спорил с ним. Сотни верст пустынной, однообразной, выгоревшей степи не могут нагнать такого уныния, как один человек, когда он сидит, говорит и неизвестно, когда он уйдёт.
— Дело не в пессимизме и не в оптимизме, — сказал я раздраженно, — а в том, что у девяноста девяти из ста нет ума.
Belokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
'Pessimism or optimism have nothing to do with it,' I said, irritably. 'The point is, ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no brains.' (chapter II)
Chekhov's story is subtitled Rasskaz khudozhnika ("An Artist's Story"). An American artist, Abraham Rattner (1895-1978) is the author of The Kings (1945) and Study for "Still Life: Old Shoes and Chair" (1949). In 1905, soon after Demon Veen's death in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific, Van is elected to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston:
Van pursued his studies in private until his election (at thirty-five!) to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston. The Council’s choice had been a consequence of disaster and desperation; the two other candidates, solid scholars much older and altogether better than he, esteemed even in Tartary where they often traveled, starry-eyed, hand-in-hand, had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the ‘eleventh hour,’ for the Chair was to be dismantled if it remained vacant for a legally limited length of time, so as to give another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat the chance to be brought in from the back parlor. Van neither needed nor appreciated the thing, but accepted it in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude, or simply in memory of his father who had been somehow involved in the whole affair. He did not take his task too seriously, reducing to a strict minimum, ten or so per year, the lectures he delivered in a nasal drone mainly produced by a new and hard to get ‘voice recorder’ concealed in his waistcoat pocket, among anti-infection Venus pills, while he moved his lips silently and thought of the lamplit page of his sprawling script left unfinished in his study. He spent in Kingston a score of dull years (variegated by trips abroad), an obscure figure around which no legends collected in the university or the city. Unbeloved by his austere colleagues, unknown in local pubs, unregretted by male students, he retired in 1922, after which he resided in Europe. (3.7)
In Orthodoxy G. K. Chesterton mentions chairs:
Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs." (Chapter III. "The Suicide of Thought")
The Rattner Chair of Philosophy brings to mind H.G. Wells's The Plattner Story (1896). In the story, a man recounts his experiences in a parallel world, which he speculates is some form of Afterlife.