In VN's novel Ada (1969) Ada calls the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) apofeoz (the apotheosis) of "Ardis the First:"
‘Fine,’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.’
‘I remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.’
‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.’
‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’
‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.’
‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?’
‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’
‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): hument: inhale.
tout le reste: all the rest.
zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.
In Chekhov's story Palata № 6 (Ward No. 6, 1892) Ivan Dmitrich Gromov (a patient in Ward Six who suffers from persecution mania) mentions apofeoz (apotheosis):
В это время проснулся Иван Дмитрич. Он сел и подпер щеки кулаками. Сплюнул. Потом он лениво взглянул на доктора и, по-видимому, в первую минуту ничего не понял; но скоро сонное лицо его стало злым и насмешливым.
— Ага, и вас засадили сюда, голубчик! — проговорил он сиплым спросонок голосом, зажмурив один глаз. — Очень рад. То вы пили из людей кровь, а теперь из вас будут пить. Превосходно!
— Это какое-то недоразумение... — проговорил Андрей Ефимыч, пугаясь слов Ивана Дмитрича; он пожал плечами и повторил: — недоразумение какое-то...
Иван Дмитрич опять сплюнул и лег.— Проклятая жизнь! — проворчал он. — И что горько и обидно, ведь эта жизнь кончится не наградой за страдания, не апофеозом, как в опере, а смертью; придут мужики и потащут мертвого за руки и за ноги в подвал. Брр! Ну, ничего... Зато на том свете будет наш праздник... Я с того света буду являться сюда тенью и пугать этих гадин. Я их поседеть заставлю.
Meanwhile Ivan Dmitrich woke up; he sat up and propped his cheeks on his fists. He spat. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor, and apparently for the first minute did not understand; but soon his sleepy face grew malicious and mocking.
“Aha! so they have put you in here, too, old fellow?” he said in a voice husky from sleepiness, screwing up one eye. “Very glad to see you. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours. Excellent!”
“It’s a misunderstanding . . .” Andrey Yefimych brought out, frightened by Ivan Dmitrich’s words; he shrugged his shoulders and repeated: “It’s some misunderstanding.”
Ivan Dmitrich spat again and lay down.
“Cursed life,” he grumbled, “and what’s bitter and insulting, this life will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death; peasants will come and drag one’s dead body by the arms and the legs to the cellar. Ugh! Well, it does not matter. . . . We shall have our good time in the other world. . . . I shall come here as a ghost from the other world and frighten these reptiles. I’ll turn their hair grey.” (Chapter XVII)
On the other hand, Ada's zdravstvuyte: apofeoz brings to mind Ivan Petrovich Turkin's zdravstvuyte pozhaluysta (How do you do, if you please) in Chekhov's story Ionych (1898):
— Здравствуйте пожалуйста, — сказал Иван Петрович, встречая его на крыльце. — Очень, очень рад видеть такого приятного гостя. Пойдемте, я представлю вас своей благоверной. Я говорю ему, Верочка, — продолжал он, представляя доктора жене, — я ему говорю, что он не имеет никакого римского права сидеть у себя в больнице, он должен отдавать свой досуг обществу. Не правда ли, душенька?
— Садитесь здесь, — говорила Вера Иосифовна, сажая гостя возле себя. — Вы можете ухаживать за мной. Мой муж ревнив, это Отелло, но ведь мы постараемся вести себя так, что он ничего не заметит.
"How do you do, if you please?" said Ivan Petrovich, meeting him on the steps. "Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verochka," he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife --"I tell him that he has no human right* to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society. Oughtn't he, darling?"
"Sit here," said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her. "You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous -- he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing." (chapter I)
A stout, handsome, dark man with side-whiskers, Ivan Petrovich Turkin is Kitten's father. After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) with their half-sister Lucette Van and Ada make love in Van’s Manhattan flat and Ada complains that Van hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk:’
He licked his lips, cleared his throat and, deciding to kill two finches with one fircone, walked to the other, southern, extremity of the flat through a boudery and manger hall (we always tend to talk Canady when haut). In the guest bedroom, Lucette stood with her back to him, in the process of slipping on her pale green nightdress over her head. Her narrow haunches were bare, and our wretched rake could not help being moved by the ideal symmetry of the exquisite twin dimples that only very perfect young bodies have above the buttocks in the sacral belt of beauty. Oh, they were even more perfect than Ada’s! Fortunately, she turned around, smoothing her tumbled red curls while her hem dropped to knee level.
‘My dear,’ said Van, ‘do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.’
‘Only she never told you,’ said loyal Lucette, ‘so nothing could escape. Nope. I can’t do that to your sweetheart and mine, because we know you could hit that keyhole with a pistol.’
‘Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss.’
‘Oh, Van,’ she said over a deep sigh. ‘You promise you won’t tell her I told you?’
‘I promise. No, no, no,’ he went on, assuming a Russian accent, as she, with the abandon of mindless love, was about to press her abdomen to his. ‘Nikak-s net: no lips, no philtrum, no nosetip, no swimming eye. Little vixen’s axilla, just that — unless’ — (drawing back in mock uncertainty) — ‘you shave there?’
‘I stink worse when I do,’ confided simple Lucette and obediently bared one shoulder.
‘Arm up! Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!’ commanded Van, and for a few synchronized heartbeats, fitted his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow.
She sat down with a bump on a chair, pressing one hand to her brow.
‘Turn off the footlights,’ said Van. ‘I want the name of that fellow.’
‘Vinelander,’ she answered.
He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose — no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk.’ He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album. (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Nikak-s net: Russ., certainly not.
In Kim Beauharnais’s album there is a photograph of Dr. Krolik’s brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a Doctor of Philosphy, born in Turkey:
‘Well,’ said Van, when the mind took over again, ‘let’s go back to our defaced childhood. I’m anxious’ — (picking up the album from the bedside rug) — ‘to get rid of this burden. Ah, a new character, the inscription says: Dr Krolik.’
‘Wait a sec. It may be the best Vanishing Van but it’s terribly messy all the same. Okay. Yes, that’s my poor nature teacher.’
Knickerbockered, panama-hatted, lusting for his babochka (Russian for ‘lepidopteron’). A passion, a sickness. What could Diana know about that chase?
‘How curious — in the state Kim mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I imagined. In fact, darling, he’s a big, strong, handsome old March Hare! Explain!’
‘There’s nothing to explain. I asked Kim one day to help me carry some boxes there and back, and here’s the visual proof. Besides, that’s not my Krolik but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik. A doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey.’
‘I love the way your eyes narrow when you tell a lie. The remote mirage in Effrontery Minor.’
‘I’m not lying!’ — (with lovely dignity): ‘He is a doctor of philosophy.’
‘Van ist auch one,’ murmured Van, sounding the last word as ‘wann.’
‘Our fondest dream,’ she continued, ‘Krolik’s and my fondest dream, was to describe and depict the early stages, from ova to pupa, of all the known Fritillaries, Greater and Lesser, beginning with those of the New World. I would have been responsible for building an argynninarium (a pestproof breeding house, with temperature patterns, and other refinements — such as background night smells and night-animal calls to create a natural atmosphere in certain difficult cases) — a caterpillar needs exquisite care! There are hundreds of species and good subspecies in both hemispheres but, I repeat, we’d begin with America. Live egg-laying females and live food plants, such as violets of numerous kinds, airmailed from everywhere, starting, for the heck of it, with arctic habitats — Lyaska, Le Bras d’Or, Victor Island. The magnanery would be also a violarium, full of fascinating flourishing plants, from the endiconensis race of the Northern Marsh Violet to the minute but magnificent Viola kroliki recently described by Professor Hall from Goodson Bay. I would contribute colored figures of all the instars, and line drawings of the perfect insect’s genitalia and other structures. It would be a wonderful work.’
‘A work of love,’ said Van, and turned the page.
‘Unfortunately, my dear collaborator died intestate, and all his collections, including my own little part, were surrendered by a regular warren of collateral Kroliks to agents in Germany and dealers in Tartary. Disgraceful, unjust, and so sad!’
‘We’ll find you another director of science. Now what do we have here?’ (2.7)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): auch: Germ., also.
Van blinds Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada has bribed to set the barn on fire) for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada. But, because love is blind, Van fails to see that, in the Night of the Burning Barn, Ada is not a virgin and that her first lover was Dr. Krolik's brother (whom Ada calls “Tiger Turk”). In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (4.1) the Third Witch mentions nose of Turk and Tartar's lips and a tiger's chaudron (entrails):
Third Witch
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
All
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is an 1865 novella by Nikolay Leskov (1831-1895), one of Chekhov's favorite writers. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) is an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. In Chekhov's story, Ivan Dmitrich tells Andrey Dmitrich (Dr Ragin who ends up as the sixth patient in Ward Six): "what’s bitter and insulting, this life will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death." Describing his meeting with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux in October 1905, Van compares Ada's husband to Prince Gremin (the name of Tatiana's husband in Tchaikovsky's opera):
The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-sœur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. ‘Vasco de Gama, I presume,’ Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for ‘preliminary contact’ those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas — which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): libretto: that of the opera Eugene Onegin, a travesty of Pushkin’s poem.