After the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) tells Ada (who repeated G. A. Vronsky's salacious joke): 'Vos "vyragences" sont assez lestes' (your expressions are rather free):
Lucette ran up to Van and, almost kneeling, cosily embraced her big cousin around the hips, and clung to him for a moment, ‘Come along,’ said Van, lifting her, ‘don’t forget your jersey, you can’t go naked.’
Ada strolled up. ‘My hero,’ she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other.
Lucette, swinging her mushroom basket, chanted:
‘He screwed off a nipple,
He left him a cripple...’
‘Lucy Veen, stop that!’ shouted Ada at the imp; and Van with a show of great indignation, shook the little wrist he held, while twinkling drolly at Ada on his other side.
Thus, a carefree-looking young trio, they moved toward the waiting victoria. Slapping his thighs in dismay, the coachman stood berating a tousled foot boy who had appeared from under a bush. He had concealed himself there to enjoy in peace a tattered copy of Tattersalia with pictures of tremendous, fabulously elongated race horses, and had been left behind by the charabanc which had carried away the dirty dishes and the drowsy servants.
He climbed onto the box, beside Trofim, who directed a vibrating ‘tpprr’ at the backing bays, while Lucette considered with darkening green eyes the occupation of her habitual perch.
‘You’ll have to take her on your half-brotherly knee,’ said Ada in a neutral aparte.
‘But won’t La maudite rivière object,’ he said absently, trying to catch by its tail the sensation of fate’s rerun.
‘Larivière can go and’ (and Ada’s sweet pale lips repeated Gavronski’s crude crack)... ‘That goes for Lucette too,’ she added.
‘Vos "vyragences" sont assez lestes,’ remarked Van. ‘Are you very mad at me?’
‘Oh Van, I’m not! In fact, I’m delighted you won. But I’m sixteen today. Sixteen! Older than grandmother at the time of her first divorce. It’s my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped. I love you. You love me. Greg loves me. Everybody loves me. I’m glutted with love. Hurry up or she’ll pull that cock off — Lucette, leave him alone at once!’
Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey. (1.39)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): la maudite etc.: the confounded (governess).
vos etc.: Franco-Russ., your expressions are rather free.
Ada's "vyragences" (a play on vyrazheniya, expressions) bring to mind povedentsu moemu (a play on povedeniyu moemu, at my behaviour), a phrase used by Mr. Ratsch (Susanna's father) in Turgenev's novella Neschastnaya ("An Unhappy Girl," 1868):
-- Вы, я вижу, молодой человек, поведенцу моему удивляетесь,-- обратился он опять ко мне.-- Но это происходит от того, что вы еще не знаете моей комплекции. Вы осведомьтесь обо мне у нашего доброго Александра Давыдыча. Что он вам скажет? Он вам скажет, что старик Ратч -- простяк, русак, хоть и не по происхождению, а по духу, ха-ха! При крещении наречен Иоганн-Дитрих, а кличка моя -- Иван Демьянов! Что на уме, то и на языке; сердце, как говорится, на ладошке, церемониев этих разных не знаю и знать не хочу! Ну их! Заходите когда-нибудь ко мне вечерком, сами увидите. Баба у меня -- жена то есть,-- простая тоже; наварит нам, напекет... беда! Александр Давыдыч, правду я говорю?
Фустов только улыбнулся, а я промолчал.
-- Не брезгайте старичком, заходите,-- продолжал г. Ратч.-- А теперь... (Он выхватил толстые серебряные часы из кармана и поднес их к выпученному правому глазу.) Мне, я полагаю, лучше отправиться. Другой птенец меня ожидает... Этого я черт знает чему учу... мифологии, ей-богу! И далеко же живет, ракалья! у Красных ворот! Все равно: пешкурой отмахаю, благо братец ваш скиксовал, ан пятиалтынный на извозчика цел, в мошне остался! Ха-ха! Прощения просим, мосьпане, до зобачения! А вы, молодой человек, заверните... Что ж такое?.. Дуэтец беспременно надо разыграть! -- крикнул г. Ратч из передней, со стуком надевая калоши, и в последний раз раздался его металлический смех.
'You're surprised, young man, I see, at my behaviour,' he addressed me again. 'But that's because you don't understand my temperament. You must just ask our good friend here, Alexander Daviditch, to tell you about me. What'll he tell you? He'll tell you old Ratsch is a simple, good-hearted chap, a regular Russian, in heart, if not in origin, ha-ha! At his christening named Johann Dietrich, but always called Ivan Demianitch! What's in my mind pops out on my tongue; I wear my heart, as they say, on my sleeve. Ceremony of all sorts I know naught about and don't want to neither! Can't bear it! You drop in on me one day of an evening, and you'll see for yourself. My good woman—my wife, that is—has no nonsense about her either; she'll cook and bake you... something wonderful! Alexander Daviditch, isn't it the truth I'm telling?'
Fustov only smiled, and I remained silent.
'Don't look down on the old fellow, but come round,' pursued Mr. Ratsch. 'But now...' (he pulled a fat silver watch out of his pocket and put it up to one of his goggle eyes)'I'd better be toddling on, I suppose. I've another chick expecting me.... Devil knows what I'm teaching him,... mythology, by God! And he lives a long way off, the rascal, at the Red Gate! No matter; I'll toddle off on foot. Thanks to your brother's cutting his lesson, I shall be the fifteen kopecks for sledge hire to the good! Ha-ha! A very good day to you, gentlemen, till we meet again!... Eh?... We must have a little duet!' Mr. Ratsch bawled from the passage putting on his goloshes noisily, and for the last time we heard his metallic laugh. (Chapter IV)
The narrator in Turgenev's novella is fond of chess:
Я с ранних лет пристрастился к шахматам; о теории не имел понятия, а играл недурно. Однажды в кофейной мне пришлось быть свидетелем продолжительной шахматной баталии между двумя игроками, из которых один, белокурый молодой человек лет двадцати пяти, мне показался сильным. Партия кончилась в его пользу; я предложил ему сразиться со мной. Он согласился... и в течение часа разбил меня, шутя, три раза сряду.
-- У вас есть способность к игре,-- промолвил он учтивым голосом, вероятно заметив страдание моего самолюбия,-- но вы дебютов не знаете. Вам надо книжку почитать, Аллгайера или Петрова.
-- Вы думаете? Но где могу я такую книжку достать?
-- Приходите ко мне; я вам дам.
Он назвал себя и сказал, где квартирует. На другой день я отправился к нему, а неделю спустя мы уже почти не расставались.
From my earliest years I had been fond of chess; I had no idea of the science of the game, but I didn't play badly. One day in a café, I was the spectator of a prolonged contest at chess, between two players, of whom one, a fair-haired young man of about five-and-twenty, struck me as playing well. The game ended in his favour; I offered to play a match with him. He agreed,... and in the course of an hour, beat me easily, three times running.
'You have a natural gift for the game,' he pronounced in a courteous tone, noticing probably that my vanity was suffering; 'but you don't know the openings. You ought to study a chess-book—Allgaier or Petrov.'
'Do you think so? But where can I get such a book?'
'Come to me; I will give you one.'
He gave me his name, and told me where he was living. Next day I went to see him, and a week later we were almost inseparable. (II)
In Turgenev's novel Dym ("Smoke," 1867) the action begins on August 10, 1862, in Baden-Baden (a German spa):
10 августа 1862 года, в четыре часа пополудни, в Баден-Бадене, перед известною "Соnvеrsаtion" толпилось множество народа. Погода стояла прелестная; все кругом -- зеленые деревья, светлые дома уютного города, волнистые горы, -- все празднично, полною чашей раскинулось под лучами благосклонного солнца; все улыбалось как-то слепо, доверчиво и мило, и та же неопределенная, но хорошая улыбка бродила на человечьих лицах, старых и молодых, безобразных и красивых. Самые даже насурмленные, набеленные фигуры парижских лореток не нарушали общего впечатления ясного довольства и ликования, а пестрые ленты, перья, золотые и стальные искры на шляпках и вуалях невольно напоминали взору оживленный блеск и легкую игру весенних цветов и радужных крыл; одна лишь повсюду рассыпавшаяся сухая, гортанная трескотня французского жаргона не могла ни заменить птичьего щебетанья, ни сравниться с ним.
On the 10th of August 1862, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a great number of people were thronging before the well-known Conversation in Baden-Baden. The weather was lovely; everything around—the green trees, the bright houses of the gay city, and the undulating outline of the mountains—everything was in holiday mood, basking in the rays of the kindly sunshine; everything seemed smiling with a sort of blind, confiding delight; and the same glad, vague smile strayed over the human faces too, old and young, ugly and beautiful alike. Even the blackened and whitened visages of the Parisian demi-monde could not destroy the general impression of bright content and elation, while their many-coloured ribbons and feathers and the sparks of gold and steel on their hats and veils involuntarily recalled the intensified brilliance and light fluttering of birds in spring, with their rainbow-tinted wings. But the dry, guttural snapping of the French jargon, heard on all sides could not equal the song of birds, nor be compared with it. (Chapter I)
In VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930) Luzhin makes the acquaintance of his future wife on July 24, 1928, in Baden-Baden:
Он сидел, опираясь на трость, и думал о том, что этой липой, стоящей на озаренном скате, можно, ходом коня, взять вон тот телеграфный столб, и одновременно старался вспомнить, о чем именно он сейчас говорил. Лакей с дюжиной пустых пивных кружек, висящих на скрюченных пальцах, пробежал вдоль крыла дома, и Лужин с облегчением вспомнил, что говорил о турнире, некогда происходившем как раз в этом крыле. Он взволновался, ему стало жарко, и круг шляпы давил виски, и это волнение было еще не совсем понятно. “Пойдемте,– сказал он. – Я вам покажу. Там теперь должно быть пусто. И прохладно”. Тяжело ступая и таща за собой трость, которая шуршала по гравию и подпрыгнула на пороге, он вошел в дверь первым. “Какой неотесанный”, – подумала она и поймала себя на том, что качает головой, и что это чуть-чуть фальшиво,– дело совсем не в его неотесанности, “Вот, кажется, сюда”,– сказал Лужин и толкнул боковую дверь. Горел огонь, толстый человек в белом кричал что-то, и бежала башня тарелок на человеческих ногах. “Нет, дальше”,– сказал Лужин и пошел по коридору. Он открыл другую дверь и чуть не упал: шли вниз ступеньки, а там — кусты и куча сору, и опасливо, дрыгающей походкой, отходящая курица. “Я ошибся,– сказал Лужин, – вероятно, вот сюда, направо”. Он снял шляпу, почувствовал, как на лбу горячим бисером собирается пот. Ах, как ясен был образ просторной, пустой, прохладной залы,– и как трудно было ее найти! “Вот эту дверь попробуем”,– сказал он. Дверь оказалась запертой. Он несколько раз нажал ручку. “Кто там?”– вдруг сказал хриплый голос, и скрипнула постель. “Ошибка, ошибка”, – забормотал Лужин и пошел дальше, потом оглянулся и остановился; он был один. “Где же она?” — сказал он вслух, топчась и озираясь. Коридор, окно в сад, на стене аппарат с квадратными оконцами для номеров. Где-то пролетел звонок. В одном из оконец криво выскочил номер. Ему стало беспокойно и смутно, точно он заблудился в дурном сне, – и он быстро пошел назад, повторяя вполголоса: “Странные шутки, странные шутки”. Вышел он неожиданно в сад, и там двое сидели на скамейке и с любопытством смотрели на него. Вдруг он услышал сверху смех, поднял лицо. Она стояла на балкончике своей комнаты и смеялась, положив локти на перила, ладони прижав к щекам и укоризненно-лукаво кивая. Она видела его большое лицо, шляпу набекрень и ждала, что он будет теперь делать. “Я не могла за вами поспеть”, – крикнула она, выпрямившись и открыв руки в каком-то объяснительном жесте. Лужин опустил голову и вошел в дом. Она полагала, что он сейчас постучится к ней, и думала о том, что не впустит его, скажет, что в комнате беспорядок. Но он не постучался. Когда она спустилась ужинать, его в столовой не было. “Обиделся”,– решила она и пошла спать раньше обыкновенного. Утром она вышла гулять и смотрела, не ждет ли он в саду, на скамейке, с газетой, как всегда. Его не было ни в саду, ни в галерее, и она пошла гулять без него. Когда он и к обеду не явился, и за его столиком оказалась престарелая чета, давно на этот столик метившая, она спросила в конторе, не болен ли господин Лужин. “Господин Лужин сегодня утром уехал в Берлин”,– ответила барышня.
He sat leaning on his cane and thinking that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there, and simultaneously he tried to remember what exactly he had just been talking about. A waiter with a dozen empty beer mugs hanging from his crook'd fingers ran along the wing of the building, and Luzhin remembered with relief that he had been speaking about the tournament that once took place in that very wing. He grew agitated and hot, and the band of his hat constricted his temples, and this agitation was not quite comprehensible yet. '‘Let’s go,” he said. "I’ll show you. It must be empty there now. And cool.” Step ping heavily and trailing hu cane which grated along the gravel and bounced against the doorstep, he entered the door first. How ill-bred he is, she reflected and caught herself shaking her head, and then accused herself of introducing a slightly false note— his manners had nothing at all to do with ill-breeding. "Here, I think it’s this way,” said Luzhin and pushed a side door. A fire was burning, a fat man in white was shouting something and a tower of plates ran past on human legs. "No, farther,” said Luzhin and walked along the corridor. He opened another door and almost fell: steps going down, and some shrubs at the bottom, and a pile of rubbish, and an apprehensive hen, jerkily walking away. "I made a mistake,” said Luzhin, "it’s probably here to the right.” He removed his hat, feeling burning beads of sweat gather on his brow. Oh, how clear was the image of that cool, empty, spacious hall and how difficult it was to find iti "Let’s try this door here,” he said. The door proved to be locked. He pressed the handle down several times. "Who’s there?” a hoarse voice said abruptly, and a bed creaked. "Mistake, mistake,” muttered Luzhin and went farther; then he looked back and stopped: he was alone. "Where is she?” he said aloud, shuffling his feet as he turned this way and that. Corridor. Window giving on garden. Gadget on wall, with numbered pigeonholes. A bell whirred. In one of the pigeonholes a number popped up awry. He was bemused and troubled, as if he had lost his way in a bad dream — and he quickly walked back, repeating under his breath: “Queer jokes, queer jokes.” He came out unexpectedly into the garden, and there two characters were sitting on a bench and looking at him curiously. Suddenly he heard laughter overhead and raised his face. She was standing on the little balcony of her room and laughing, her elbows propped on the railings, her palms pressed against her cheeks, and shaking her head with sly reproachfulness. She looked at his ample face, the hat on the back of his head, and waited to see what he would do now. “I couldn’t keep up with you,” she cried, straightening up and opening her arms in some kind of explanatory gesture. Luzhin lowered his head and entered the huifting. She sup- posed that in a moment he would knock on her door and she decided not to let him in and say the room was untidy. But he did not knock. When she went down to supper he was not in the diningroom. He’s taken offense, she decided and went to bed eailier than usual. In the morning she went out for a walk and looked to see if he was waiting in the garden, reading his newspaper on a bench as usual. He was not in the garden, he was not in the gallery, and she went for a walk without him. When he did not appear for dinner and his table was taken by an ancient couple who had long had their eye on it. she asked in the office if Mr. Luzhin was sick. “Mr. Luzhin left this moining for Berlin,’ replied the girl. (Chapter Six)
Luzhin muses that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there. At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" G. A. Vronsky (the movie man who makes a film of Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits) mentions a telegraph pole (a joke that Ada repeats after the picnic on her sixteenth birthday):
And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).
‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.
‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.
‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.
‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’
‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’
‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’
‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’
‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fleshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’
‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’
‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.
‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.
‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’
‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’
The indecent ‘telegraph’ caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï): ‘But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife — I mean the second guy’s wife — accepts the situation (polozhenie).’
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
‘Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.’
‘I see, but some won’t,’ said Marina. (1.32)