Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) calls the new kerosene distillery stïd i sram (shame) of our county:
‘I say,’ exclaimed Demon, ‘what’s happened — your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious’ (muttering:) ‘Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long...’ (switching to a gipsy chant:) ‘You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man’ (reverting to his ordinary voice:) ‘What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!’
‘Mascodagama,’ whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.
‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me — you like Ardis Hall?’
‘I adore it,’ said Van. ‘It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.’
‘Hopeless? I wonder. I know Dan wants to leave it to Lucile, but Dan is greedy, and my affairs are such that I can satisfy great greed. When I was your age I thought that the sweetest word in the language rhymes with "billiard," and now I know I was right. If you’re really keen, son, on having this property, I might try to buy it. I can exert a certain pressure upon my Marina. She sighs like a hassock when you sit upon her, so to speak. Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries. Pull that cord again. Yes, maybe Dan could be made to sell.’
‘That’s very black of you, Dad,’ said pleased Van, using a slang phrase he had learned from his tender young nurse, Ruby, who was born in the Mississippi region where most magistrates, public benefactors, high priests of various so-called’ denominations,’ and other honorable and generous men, had the dark or darkish skin of their West-African ancestors, who had been the first navigators to reach the Gulf of Mexico.
‘I wonder,’ Demon mused. ‘It would cost hardly more than a couple of millions minus what Cousin Dan owes me, minus also the Ladore pastures, which are utterly mucked up and should be got rid of gradually, if the local squires don’t blow up that new kerosene distillery, the stïd i sram (shame) of our county. I am not particularly fond of Ardis, but I have nothing against it, though I detest its environs. Ladore Town has become very honky-tonky, and the gaming is not what it used to be. You have all sorts of rather odd neighbors. Poor Lord Erminin is practically insane. At the races, the other day, I was talking to a woman I preyed upon years ago, oh long before Moses de Vere cuckolded her husband in my absence and shot him dead in my presence — an epigram you’ve heard before, no doubt from these very lips —’
The next thing will be ‘paternal repetitiousness.’)
‘— but a good son should put up with a little paternal repetitiousness — Well, she tells me her boy and Ada see a lot of each other, et cetera. Is that true?’
‘Not really,’ said Van. ‘They meet now and then — at the usual parties. Both like horses, and races, but that’s all. There is no et cetera, that’s out of the question.’
‘Good! Ah, the portentous footfall is approaching, I hear. Prascovie de Prey has the worst fault of a snob: overstatement. Bonsoir, Bouteillan. You look as ruddy as your native vine — but we are not getting any younger, as the amerlocks say, and that pretty messenger of mine must have been waylaid by some younger and more fortunate suitor.’
‘Proshu, papochka (please, Dad),’ murmured Van, who always feared that his father’s recondite jests might offend a menial — while sinning himself by being sometimes too curt. (1.38)
According to Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), his father used to call Aksakov's descriptions of nature styd i sram:
"Погодите, вернемся к дедам. Гоголь? Я думаю, что мы весь состав его пропустим. Тургенев? Достоевский?"
"Обратное превращение Бедлама в Вифлеем, -- вот вам Достоевский. "Оговорюсь", как выражается Мортус. В Карамазовых есть круглый след от мокрой рюмки на садовом столе, это сохранить стоит, -- если принять ваш подход".
"Так неужели-ж у Тургенева всё благополучно? Вспомните эти дурацкие тэтатэты в акатниках? Рычание и трепет Базарова? Его совершенно неубедительная возня с лягушками? И вообще -- не знаю, переносите ли вы особую интонацию тургеневского многоточия и жеманное окончание глав? Или всё простим ему за серый отлив черных шелков, за русачью полежку иной его фразы?"
"Мой отец находил вопиющие ошибки в его и толстовских описаниях природы, и уж про Аксакова нечего говорить, добавлял он, -- это стыд и срам".
«Быть может, если мёртвые тела убраны, мы примемся за поэтов? Как вы думаете? Кстати, о мёртвых телах. Вам никогда не приходило в голову, что лермонтовский „знакомый труп“ – это безумно смешно, ибо он, собственно, хотел сказать „труп знакомого“, – иначе ведь непонятно: знакомство посмертное контекстом не оправдано».
“Wait, let’s go back to the forebears. Gogol? I think we can accept his ‘entire organism.’ Turgenev? Dostoevski?”
“Bedlam turned back into Bethlehem—that’s Dostoevski for you. ‘With one reservation,’ as our friend Mortus says. In the ‘Karamazovs’ there is somewhere a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table. That’s worth saving if one uses your approach.”
“But don’t tell me all is well with Turgenev? Remember those inept tête-à-têtes in acacia arbors? The growling and quivering of Bazarov? His highly unconvincing fussing with those frogs? And in general, I don’t know if you can stand the particular intonation of the Turgenevian row of dots at the close of a ‘fading phrase’ and the maudlin endings of his chapters. Or should we forgive all his sins because of the gray sheen of Mme. Odintsev’s black silks and the outstretched hind legs of some of his graceful sentences, those rabbitlike postures assumed by his resting hounds?”
“My father used to find all kinds of howlers in Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s hunting scenes and descriptions of nature, and as for the wretched Aksakov, let’s not even discuss his disgraceful blunders in that field.”
“Now that the dead bodies have been removed we might, perhaps, proceed to the poets? All right. By the way, speaking of dead bodies, has it ever occurred to you that in Lermontov’s most famous short poem the ‘familiar corpse’ at the end is extremely funny? What he really wanted to say was ‘corpse of the man she once knew.’ The posthumous acquaintance is unjustified and meaningless.” (Chapter One)
In his poem Son ("The Dream," 1841) Lermontov mentions znakomyi trup (familiar corpse). Like Lermontov's poem, VN's Ada seems to be a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream).
At ten Van puzzles out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov's diamond-faceted tetrameters:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): The Headless Horseman: Mayne Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
Van's Russian tutor, Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (AAA) has the same name and patronymic as Andrey Andreevich Vinelander (Ada's husband). Ada’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Vinelander marries a mister Brod or Bred:
So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question. (3.8)
The name of Dasha’s husband brings to mind Berlaga's bred velichiya (megalomania) in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931). In the madhouse Berlaga (who simulates madness by claiming that he is the Viceroy of India) meets a patient who claims that he is Gaius Julius Caesar:
Кай Юлий Старохамский пошел в сумасшедший дом по высоким идейным соображениям.
-- В Советской России, -- говорил он, драпируясь в одеяло, -- сумасшедший дом -- это единственное место, где может жить нормальный человек.
Все остальное -- это сверхбедлам.
Gaius Julius Starokhamsky had entered the madhouse for lofty, ideological reasons.
“In Soviet Russia, the only place where a normal person can live is an insane asylum,” he said, draping himself in a blanket.
“Everything else is super-bedlam.” (Chapter XVI: “Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytik”)
Sverkhbedlam (super-bedlam) brings to mind “Bedlam turned back into Bethlehem” (as in The Gift Fyodor defines Dostoevski). On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) the territory of Soviet Russia is occupied by Tartary, an independent inferno:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.)
There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (OS), in our world. In the old Russian alphabet the letter L was called Lyudi. In the draft of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Tatiana’s letter to Onegin is signed T. L. (Tvyordo, Lyudi). Bednye lyudi (“Poor Folk,” 1846) is the title of Dostoevski’s first novel (written in epistolary form).
It seems that on Demonia the Russians were defeated by the Tartars in the battle of Kulikovo (1380) and migrated to America, crossing the Bering Strait (the ha-ha of a doubled ocean). In the madhouse Berlaga meets a geography teacher who went mad because one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and couldn't find the Bering Strait:
Но тут больной, сидевший на кровати в глубине покоя, поднялся на тоненькие и желтые, как церковные свечи, ноги и страдальчески закричал:
-- На волю! На волю! В пампасы!
Как бухгалтер узнал впоследствии, в пампасы просился старый учитель географии, по учебнику которого юный Берлага знакомился в своё время с вулканами, мысами и перешейками. Географ сошёл с ума совершенно неожиданно: однажды он взглянул на карту обоих полушарий и не нашёл на ней Берингова пролива. Весь день старый учитель шарил по карте. Все было на месте: и Нью-Фаундленд, и Суэцкий канал, и Мадагаскар, и Сандвичевы острова с главным городом Гонолулу, и даже вулкан Попокатепетль, а Берингов пролив отсутствовал. И тут же, у карты, старик тронулся. Это, был добрый сумасшедший, не причинявший никому зла, но Берлага отчаянно струсил. Крик надрывал его душу.
-- На волю! - продолжал кричать географ. - В пампасы!
Он лучше всех на свете знал, что такое воля. Он был географ, и ему были известны такие просторы, о которых обыкновенные, занятые скучными делами люди даже и не подозревают. Ему хотелось на волю, хотелось скакать на потном мустанге сквозь заросли.
But then a patient who was sitting on a bed deep inside the large ward stood up on his legs, which were thin and yellow like church candles, and yelled out with pain:
“Freedom! Freedom! To the pampas!”
Later, the accountant learned that the man who longed for the pampas was an old geography teacher, the author of the textbook from which the young Berlaga had learned about volcanoes, capes, and isthmuses many years ago. The geographer went mad quite unexpectedly: one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and couldn't find the Bering Strait. The old teacher spent the whole day studying the map. Everything was where it was supposed to be: Newfoundland; the Suez Canal; Madagascar; the Sandwich Islands with their capital city, Honolulu; even the Popocatépetl volcano. But the Bering Strait was missing. The old man lost his mind right then and there, in front of the map.
He was a harmless madman who never hurt anybody, but he scared Berlaga to death.
The shouting broke his heart.
"Freedom!" the geographer yelled out again. “To the pampas!”
He knew more about freedom than anyone else in the world.
He was a geographer: he knew of the wide open spaces that regular people, busy doing their mundane things, can't even imagine. He wanted to be free, he wanted to ride a sweating mustang through the brush… (Chapter XVI: “Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytik”)
At the end of his poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin (1947) VN mentions pampasy molodosti vol'noy (the pampas of my free youth):
Мне хочется домой. Довольно.
Качурин, можно мне домой?
В пампасы молодости вольной,
в техасы, найденные мной.
Я спрашиваю, не пора ли
вернуться в теме тетивы,
к чарующему чапаралю
из "Всадника без головы",
чтоб в Матагордовом Ущелье
заснуть на огненных камнях
с лицом, сухим от акварели,
с пером вороньим в волосах?
I want to go home. Enough, in truth.
Kachurin, may I now go home?
To the pampas of my free youth,
the Texas I found once on a roam.
I ask you, isn't it time withal
to return unto the theme of the bow,
to what's charmingly hight "chaparral"
in The Headless Horseman, you well know,
to sleep in Matagordo Gorge
on the fiery boulders you find there,
with a face that watercolors forge,
and a feather in one's hair? (4)
At the beginning of his poem VN mentions the vales of Daghestan (an allusion to the first line of Lermontov's poem "The Dream"):
Качурин, твой совет я принял
и вот уж третий день живу
в музейной обстановке, в синей
гостиной с видом на Неву.
Священником американским
твой бедный друг переодет,
и всем долинам дагестанским
я шлю завистливый привет.
Kachurin, I've taken your advice
and here I three long days persever
in museologic digs, a nice
blue room that looks out on the Neva.
As an American clergyman
disguised is your poor little friend,
and to the vales of Daghestan
I envious salutations send. (1)
Describing Villa Venus (Eric Veen's floramors), Van mentions Princess Kachurin, a maidservant:
He was thirsty, but the champagne he had bought, with the softly rustling roses, remained sealed and he had not the heart to remove the silky dear head from his breast so as to begin working on the explosive bottle. He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained — she, and the other girl, and a third one (a maidservant, Princess Kachurin), who seemed to have been born in the faded bathing suit she never changed and would die in, no doubt, before reaching majority or the first really cold winter on the beach mattress which she was moaning on now in her drugged daze. And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she? — not Rumanian, not Dalmatian, not Sicilian, not Irish, though an echo of brogue could be discerned in her broken but not too foreign English. Was she eleven or fourteen, almost fifteen perhaps? Was it really her birthday — this twenty-first of July, nineteen-four or eight or even several years later, on a rocky Mediterranean peninsula?
A very distant church clock, never audible except at night, clanged twice and added a quarter.
‘Smorchiama la secandela,’ mumbled the bawd on the bed in the local dialect that Van understood better than Italian. The child in his arms stirred and he pulled his opera cloak over her. In the grease-reeking darkness a faint pattern of moonlight established itself on the stone floor, near his forever discarded half-mask lying there and his pump-shod foot. It was not Ardis, it was not the library, it was not even a human room, but merely the squalid recess where the bouncer had slept before going back to his Rugby-coaching job at a public school somewhere in England. The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s’ organized dream,’ but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada. (2.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): smorchiama: let us snuff out the candle.