At the end of "Ardis the First" Van and Ada (the two main characters in VN's novel Ada, 1969) visit a Russian traktir in Gamlet (a half-Russian village near Ardis Hall):
‘We must now find our bicycles,’ said Van, ‘we are lost "in another part of the forest."’
‘Oh, let’s not return yet,’ she cried, ‘oh, wait.’
‘But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and whenabouts,’ said Van. ‘It is a philosophical need.’
The day was darkening; a beaming vestige of sunlight lingered in a western strip of the overcast sky: we have all seen the person who after gaily greeting a friend crosses the street with that smile still fresh on his face — to be eclipsed by the stare of the stranger who might have missed the cause and mistaken the effect for the bright leer of madness. Having worked out that metaphor, Van and Ada decided it was really time to go home. As they rode through Gamlet, the sight of a Russian traktir gave such a prod to their hunger that they dismounted and entered the dim little tavern. A coachman drinking tea from the saucer, holding it up to his loud lips in his large claw, came straight from a pretzel-string of old novels. There was nobody else in the steamy hole save a kerchiefed woman pleading with (ugovarivayushchaya) a leg-dangling lad in a red shirt to get on with his fish soup. She proved to be the traktir-keeper and rose, ‘wiping her hands on her apron,’ to bring Ada (whom she recognized at once) and Van (whom she supposed, not incorrectly, to be the little chatelaine’s ‘young man’) some small Russian-type ‘hamburgers’ called bitochki. Each devoured half a dozen of them — then they retrieved their bikes from under the jasmins to pedal on. They had to light their carbide lamps. They made a last pause before reaching the darkness of Ardis Park. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): traktir: Russ., pub.
In Chapter Seven of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Tatiana's journey "to Moscow, to the mart of brides," and several times (XXXIII: 14, XXXIV: 5) mentions traktir (a tavern):
Когда благому просвещенью
Отдвинем более границ,
Современем (по расчисленью
Философических таблиц,
Лет чрез пятьсот) дороги, верно,
У нас изменятся безмерно:
Шоссе Россию здесь и тут,
Соединив, пересекут.
Мосты чугунные чрез воды
Шагнут широкою дугой,
Раздвинем горы, под водой
Пророем дерзостные своды,
И заведет крещеный мир
На каждой станции трактир.
Теперь у нас дороги плохи,42
Мосты забытые гниют,
На станциях клопы да блохи
Заснуть минуты не дают;
Трактиров нет. В избе холодной
Высокопарный, но голодный
Для виду прейскурант висит
И тщетный дразнит аппетит,
Меж тем как сельские циклопы
Перед медлительным огнем
Российским лечат молотком
Изделье легкое Европы,
Благословляя колеи
И рвы отеческой земли.
When we the boundaries of beneficial
enlightenment move farther out,
in due time (by the computation
of philosophic tabulae,
in some five hundred years) roads, surely,
at home will change immeasurably.
Paved highways at this point and that
uniting Russia will traverse her;
cast-iron bridges o'er the waters
in ample arcs will stride;
we shall part mountains; under water
dig daring tunnels;
and Christendom will institute
at every stage a tavern.
The roads at home are bad at present;42
forgotten bridges rot;
at stages the bedbugs and fleas
do not give one a minute's sleep.
No taverns. In a cold log hut
there hangs for show a highfalutin
but meager bill of fare, and teases
one's futile appetite,
while the rural Cyclopes
in front of a slow fire
treat with a Russian hammer
Europe's light article,
blessing the ruts
and ditches of the fatherland.
42. Дороги наши — сад для глаз:
Деревья, с дерном вал, канавы;
Работы много, много славы,
Да жаль, проезда нет подчас.
С деревьев, на часах стоящих,
Проезжим мало барыша;
Дорога, скажешь, хороша —
И вспомнишь стих: для проходящих!
Свободна русская езда
В двух только случаях: когда
Наш Мак-Адам или Мак-Ева
Зима свершит, треща от гнева,
Опустошительный набег,
Путь окует чугуном льдистым,
И запорошит ранний снег
Следы ее песком пушистым.
Или когда поля проймет
Такая знойная засуха,
Что через лужу может вброд
Пройти, глаза зажмуря, муха.
("Станция". Князь Вяземский)
Our roads are for the eyes a garden:
trees, ditches, and a turfy bank;
much toil, much glory,
but, sad to say, no passage now and then.
The trees that stand like sentries
bring little profit to the travelers;
the road, you'll say, is fine,
but you'll recall the verse: “for passers-by!”
Driving in Russia is unhampered
on two occasions only:
when our McAdam — or McEve — winter —
accomplishes, crackling with wrath,
its devastating raid
and with ice's cast-iron armors roads
while powder snow betimes
as if with fluffy sand covers the tracks;
or when the fields are permeated
with such a torrid drought
that with eyes closed a fly
can ford a puddle.
(The Station, by Prince Vyazemski) (Pushkin's note)
Van, Ada are their half-sister Lucette are the great-grandchildren of Prince Peter Zemski (1772-1832), Governor of Bras d’Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country:
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'): Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.
granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.
As VN points out in his EO Commentary (vol. III, pp. 109-110), the verse "for passers-by!" (dlya prokhodyashchikh) quoted by Vyazemski in his poem Stantsiya (The Station) is the last line of Dmitriev's fable Prokhozhiy ("The Passer-by"):
Прохожий, в монастырь зашедши на пути,
Просил у братий позволенья
На колокольню их взойти.
Взошел и стал хвалить различные явленья,
Которые ему открыла высота.
«Какие, — он вскричал, — волшебные места!
Вдруг вижу горы, лес, озера и долины!
Великолепные картины!
Не правда ли?» — вопрос он сделал одному
Из братий, с ним стоящих.
«Да! — труженик, вздохнув, ответствовал ему: —
Для проходящих».
In his draft of the beginning of Chapter Eight of EO Pushkin says that Dmitriev (who called Pushkin "the beautiful flower of poetry that will not pale for a long time") was not his detractor (khulitel'). Dmitriev's Fables include Repeynik i Fialka (“The Burdock and the Violet,” 1824). In his essay Dmitriev (1937), written for the centenary of the poet’s death (almost forty years his senior, Dmitriev outlived Pushkin by eight months), Hodasevich quotes this fable as a good sample of Dmitriev's poetry:
Между репейником и розовым кустом
Фиялочка себя от зависти скрывала;
Безвестною была, но горести не знала:
Тот счастлив, кто своим доволен уголком.
Between a burdock and a rose bush
the little violet hid herself from envy;
she was obscure, but knew no grief:
happy is he who is pleased with his corner.
Dmitriev's Fiyalochka (little violet) brings to mind Fialochka ('little Violet'), as Ada calls Violet Knox, old Van’s typist who marries Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary and the editor of Ada) after Van’s and Ada’s death:
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is – ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir – the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother's children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her 'Fialochka' and allowed herself the luxury of admiring 'little Violet' 's cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
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 and Violet Knox are Ada's grandchildren.
According to Ada, she saw the verse "Far enough, fair enough" in small violet letters before Van put it into orange ones:
Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned allover the world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class families (in the British and Brazilian sense) to which the Veens and Durmanovs happened to belong, and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important ‘utilities’ — telephones, motors — what else? — well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker with lolling tongues, breathing faster than gundogs (for it’s quite a long sentence), such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires (Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls) were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved ‘minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make. Had our erudite lovers been allowed by common propriety and common law to knock into working order the mysterious box they had once discovered in their magic attic, they might have recorded (so as to replay, eight decades later) Giorgio Vanvitelli’s arias as well as Van Veen’s conversations with his sweetheart. Here, for example, is what they might have heard today — with amusement, embarrassment, sorrow, wonder.
(Narrator: on that summer day soon after they had entered the kissing phase of their much too premature and in many ways fatal romance, Van and Ada were on their way to the Gun Pavilion alias Shooting Gallery, where they had located, on its upper stage, a tiny, Oriental-style room with bleary glass cases that had once lodged pistols and daggers — judging by the shape of dark imprints on the faded velvet — a pretty and melancholy recess, rather musty, with a cushioned window seat and a stuffed Parluggian Owl on a side shelf, next to an empty beer bottle left by some dead old gardener, the year of the obsolete brand being 1842.)
‘Don’t jingle them,’ she said, ‘we are watched by Lucette, whom I’ll strangle some day.’
They walked through a grove and past a grotto.
Ada said: ‘Officially we are maternal cousins, and cousins can marry by special decree, if they promise to sterilize their first five children. But, moreover, the father-in-law of my mother was the brother of your grandfather. Right?’
‘That’s what I’m told,’ said Van serenely.
‘Not sufficiently distant,’ she mused, ‘or is it?’
‘Far enough, fair enough.’
‘Funny — I saw that verse in small violet letters before you put it into orange ones — just one second before you spoke. Spoke, smoke. Like the puff preceding a distant cannon shot.’
‘Physically,’ she continued, ‘we are more like twins than cousins, and twins or even siblings can’t marry, of course, or will be jailed and "altered," if they persevere.’
‘Unless,’ said Van, ‘they are specially decreed cousins.’ (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet.
After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set). Elektricheskiy svet v alleye ("The Electric Light in a Park Avenue," 1904) is a poem by Anneski:
О, не зови меня, не мучь!
Скользя бесцельно, утомлённо,
Зачем у ночи вырвал луч,
Засыпав блеском, ветку клена?
Её пьянит зелёный чад,
И дум ей жаль разоблачённых,
И слёзы осени дрожат
В её листах раззолочённых, —
А свод так сладостно дремуч,
Так миротворно слиты звенья
И сна, и мрака, и забвенья…
О, не зови меня, не мучь!
Annenski is the author of Traktir zhizni ("The Tavern of Life," 1904):
Вкруг белеющей Психеи
Те же фикусы торчат,
Те же грустные лакеи,
Тот же гам и тот же чад…
Муть вина, нагие кости,
Пепел стынущих сигар,
На губах — отрава злости,
В сердце — скуки перегар…
Ночь давно снега одела,
Но уйти ты не спешишь;
Как в кошмаре, то и дело:
«Алкоголь или гашиш?»
А в сенях, поди, не жарко:
Там, поднявши воротник,
У плывущего огарка
Счёты сводит гробовщик.
Annenski's Traktir zhizni brings to mind Pushkin's poem Telega zhizni (“The Cart of Life,” 1823):
Хоть тяжело подчас в ней бремя,
Телега на ходу легка;
Ямщик лихой, седое время,
Везет, не слезет с облучка.
С утра садимся мы в телегу;
Мы рады голову сломать
И, презирая лень и негу,
Кричим: пошел! . . . .
Но в полдень нет уж той отваги;
Порастрясло нас; нам страшней
И косогоры и овраги;
Кричим: полегче, дуралей!
Катит по-прежнему телега;
Под вечер мы привыкли к ней
И, дремля, едем до ночлега —
А время гонит лошадей.
Though hard is a burden in it sometime,
The cart is light at fair speed;
The driver is dashing, grey-haired Time,
Drives on, not getting off the seat.
At dawn we spring up on the cart;
We gladly risk our own neck
And, having scorned sloth and delight,
Call: off you go! For God's sake.
At noon there are no former nerves;
Having been jolted, more we dread
All those slopes and steeps, and curves;
We shout: not so fast, blockhead!
Same as before the cart is on its way;
We do get used to it when evening closes,
And dozing off we come to the night’s stay,
While Time drives on the sturdy horses.
(tr. Emil Sharafutdinov)
Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van (who does not suspect that Ada has bribed Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, to set the barn on fire) mentions telegas (pl. of telega, a cart) among the vehicles used by the inhabitants of Ardis Hall to reach the site of the fire:
With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.
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. (1.19)
The coachman in Pushkin's Telega zhizni is grey-haired Time. Part Four of Ada is Van's treatise The Texture of Time.