ADA AS A MYSTICAL NOVEL



ADA AS A MYSTICAL NOVEL

Near the poet Koltsov

I am ringed like a falcon.

Mandelshtam

Blessed is he who visits this world

at its fateful moments

Tyutchev

My collection of insects

is open to my acquaintances.

Pushkin

Chacun a sa manière de tuer ses puces.

Nabokov envisioned his own life as a colored spiral within a glass ball (Speak, Memory, Chapter Fourteen, 1). The spiral is, in his word, “a spiritualized circle.” The life of the poet Derzhavin (1743-1816) seems to present itself as a broken circle. It is believed that the first word he pronounced was “God.” But the poet’s last thought (for which, as Khodasevich writes in his book about him, Derzhavin could not find words) was also about God. On July 6, 1816, two days before his death, Derzhavin began to write, with chalk on a slate, the poem that would have become his best ode, if he had had the chance to finish it:

The river of time in its rush

Carries away all human cares

And drowns in the abyss of oblivion

Peoples, kingdoms and kings.

And if something remains

Through the sounds of lyre and trumpet,

Then it will be devoured by eternity’s maw

And will not escape the common fate.

Na tlennost’ (“On Decay”) serves as its own refutation. The letters on the slate can not be read anymore, but the river of time turned out to be helpless to wipe away these very lines. Kapnist was right when he said that “this sound will flow from century to century,” and Derzhavin himself, in his Pamyatnik (“Exegi munumentum,” 1795), wrote that “I will not die whole, but a greater part of me, having escaped decay, will live after death.” As did Pushkin, Derzhavin “did not die whole,” and managed to escape the common fate. And, although Catherine’s bard renounces historical immortality in his last verses, he, it seems, believes in a certain personal immortality which is found in God (in Khodasevich’s opinion, there must have been talk of this in the unwritten lines). As Yuli Aikhenvald noted in his essay on another poet, Lev Mey, “poets are resurrected.” It seems to me, that Nabokov believed in this deep in his heart. In this article I will attempt to show that Ada is Nabokov’s polemical response to Derzhavin’s last poem, and, at the same time, an attempt to finish it.

After several unsuccessful attempts of Maikov and Bryusov, Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), the Russian poet of genius, more or less successfully completed several of Pushkin’s fragments (“Nado mnoi v lazuri iasnoi…,” “Noch' svetla; v nebesnom pole…”). In Dar (The Gift, 1937) Nabokov himself could not resist the temptation to “resurrect” Pushkin and thought up another ending for Pushkin’s eight-line poem “Oh no, my life has not grown tedious.” Later, Nabokov wrote an ending to Pushkin’s Rusalka (“The Mermaid”), which must have been entered into the continuation of Dar. But none of the new poets, who were masters of stylization, would come near the well-known fragment by Derzhavin (if we don’t count Vl. Solovyov’s parody “Unosit vsyo reka vremyan…”). And only Osip Mandelshtam, whom Nabokov considered the most talented of those poets who did not emigrate and tried to survive in Soviet Russia, in his poem “The Slate Ode” (1924), dared, if not finish, then at least, to “continue” Derzhavin (by joining him with motifs from one of Lermontov’s last poems, “Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu…”). Mandelshtam’s tragic fate—death in Stalin’s camps—deeply moved Nabokov. In Ada he did everything possible to save at least Mandelshtam’s fragile verses from an ignorant translator, who would horribly distort their meaning. I think that Mandelshtam’s poetry plays a much greater role in Ada than it seems, and that Nabokov conducts a hidden dialogue with the author (who, like Nabokov, was a graduate of St. Petersburg’s Tenishev School) of “The Wolfhound Century,” “The Eight-Line Poems” and “Verses on Russian Poetry.”

Mandelshtam spent the last several years of his life, before his second arrest in 1938, in exile in Voronezh, the birthplace of the poet Koltsov. Here, amidst the young Voronezh hills, he yearned for the “all-human” Tuscan hills, and composed a number of heart-rending poems, contained in the posthumous collection “The Voronezh Notebooks:”

Pusti menya, otday menya, Voronezh, –

Uronish’ ty menya il’ provoronish’,

Ty vyronish’ menya ili vernyosh’ –

Voronezh – blazh’, Voronezh – voron, nozh!

Let me go, Voronezh, give me away.

You’ll let me fall or slip,

You’ll drop me or return.

Voronezh is a whim, a raven, or a knife!

Another poem from this collection, which is also constructed on assonance and alliteration, begins thus:

Ya okolo Kol’tsova

Kak sokol zakol’tsovan…

Near [the poet] Koltsov

I am ringed like a falcon…

The raven and falcon are two birds which play an important role in Ada, being contrasted with each other. The main character, Van Veen, is associated with a raven, and his antagonist, Ada’s husband Andrey Vinelander is associated with a falcon. The bright falcon, the bird of Russian tales (see my “Ada as a Russian Fairy Tale Spun by the Phoenix and Sung by the Sirin” in The Nabokovian, #55), is often met in the pseudo-folksongs of Alexey Koltsov (1809-1842). The maiden usually refers to her beloved thusly in his poems, including his best known piece “Separation,” 1840:

At the hazy dawn of youth,

I loved my dear with all my soul,

There was a heavenly light in her eyes,

Her face shown with the flame of love.

What is, compared to her, you, May morn,

You, the green leafy grove.

The grass-steppe—silken brocade.

Or Eve’s twilight, night-enchantress?

You are good—when she is not here,

When one can share one’s sorrow with you.

But one doesn’t even notice you, when she’s around.

She turns winter into spring, night into a bright day!

I can not forget how I told her

At the moment before the last separation: “Good-bye, dear!

It must be Heaven that wants us to part

But may be we shall see each other again…”

Instantly her entire face flushed,

Becoming snow-white the next moment.

Sobbing like mad,

She couldn’t be torn away from my breast.

“Don’t go away! Stay but a moment! Give me the time

To stifle my grief, to sob out my sorrow,

At you, my bright falcon…”

She lost her spirit, gulping down the last word.

The first line of this poem, Na zare tumannoy yunosti (“At the hazy dawn of youth,” or “At the dawn of a hazy youth”), appears as the title of a short autobiographical story (1892) by poet-philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900). In it the author describes an event which occurred during a trip from Moscow to Kharkov to visit one of his cousins, with whom he felt a tender and heightened feeling of love. On the trip he met a young woman, Julie (as she asked to be called), with whom he had a passing romance and to whom he experienced a moment of deep infatuation—that led to a break in his entire outlook on life. In Kharkov an explanation occurs between the young philosopher and his cousin: he suggests to Olga that she unite her fate with his, but she answers in refusal, having pleaded that she was too worldly for him. Solovyov’s story ends with the following words: “Four years later I met Julie in Italy on the Riviera, but it was that kind of meeting, which one can tell friends on Christmas Eve.”

Solovyov’s biographer S. M. Lukyanov, as well as K. V. Mochulsky, author of the book Vladimir Solovyov: Life and Teaching (Paris, 1936), believe that the Julie in the story is Nadezhda Auer, with whom fate joined Solovyov two more times: in Sorrento in 1876, four years after their first meeting, and at Lake Saima in Finland in 1895 (during the latter meeting, Auer’s 19-year old daughter, Zoya, reminded Solovyov of Katya Romanov, who had served as the prototype for the cousin in the autobiographical story). Thus Solovyov had three meetings with Julie, which correspond to the three rendez-vous which he had with the “Eternal Beloved,” that certain ideal image of the Eternal Feminine. Solovyov considered these the most important thing that happened to him in his life and described them in the autobiographical poem “Tri svidaniya” (“Three Rendez-vous,” 1898):

Triumphing over death from the start

Stilling time’s unyielding wheel with love’s art,

Eternal Beloved, your name is held hid in my heart,

But please hear my timorous song.

The Eternal Beloved first appeared to Solovyov, when he was nine, during a church service in Moscow:

Flooded with golden azure,

And Your hand holding a strange flower from a strange land,

You were there, smiling a radiant smile.

You inclined Your head, then faded into mist.

The second time Solovyov saw the face of the Eternal Beloved in the library of the British Museum in 1875; and the third rendez-vous occurred in 1876 in the Egyptian desert, where Solovyov went with the special purpose to see not just the face but the whole of the Eternal Beloved (as she had promised him during the second rendez-vous). At the moment she appeared to him, Solovyov experienced the feeling that he could embrace and sense the whole universe:

Agown in heavenly purple glow you stood,

Eyes full of azure fire,

Your gaze was the first blaze

Of world-filling, life-giving day.

What is, what was, what shall forever be –

All, all was held here in one steady gaze...

The seas and rivers blue beneath me,

Distant woods, snow-capped peaks.

I saw all, and all was one –

A single image of womanly beauty

Pregnant with vastnesses!

Before me, in me – only You.

Radiant One! You can't fool me:

I saw all of you there in the desert.

In my soul those roses won’t wither,

Whichever way the day may whirl.

Yet but an instant! And the vision veiled.

The sun climbed the sky’s dome.

Silence, desert silence. And so my soul prayed;

While within: an endless celebration of bells!

---

Still the slave of the vain world's mind,

But beneath rough matter’s rind,

I've clearly seen eternal violet, rich royal purple,

And felt the warm touch of divine light!

As Solovyov himself wrote in the notes, the line “Ochami, polnymi lazurnogo ognya” (“Eyes, full of azure fire”) was borrowed from Lermontov (Lermontov’s line reads “Glazami, polnymi lazurnogo ognya”), from the poem “Kak chasto pyostroyu tolpoyu okruzhyon…” (“How often surrounded by a motley crowd…”). As a poet, Solovyov continues the Lermontov line in Russian poetry. In many respects, Aleksandr Blok, on whom Solovyov’s philosophy, especially his idea of the “Eternal Feminine” turned out to have a huge influence, also became a representative of this line. The image of the “Woman robed with the Sun” which plays such a large role in the poetry of the early Blok and the symbolists, is borrowed from Solovyov, from the ending of his “Short Tale on the Antichrist” (the full title of this work is Tri razgovora o voyne, progresse, i kontse vsemirnoy istorii, so vklyucheniem kratkoy povesti ob Antikhriste; “Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of World History, with the Inclusion of a Short Tale on the Antichrist,” 1899).

Solovyov was not only a poet and religious philosopher-mystic, but also a prophet (whose character and way of life reminded the contemporaries of Lermontov’s Prophet). In “A Short Tale on the Antichrist” (the authorship of which is attributed to a monk named Pansophius), Solovyov attempts to foretell how history will develop over the next two centuries. It is curious to compare the philosopher’s prophecy with what really happened in the 20th century, and also with what we see on Antiterra—the twin planet of Earth, on which Ada is set. According to Solovyov, “the 20th century A.D. was the epoch of the last great wars, civil strives and Revolutions,” and in the 21st century Europe would be a union of more or less democratic governments—a United States of Europe. The largest of the external wars of the 20th century would be connected with the new Mongol yoke, which would last 50 years. It is not accidental that Solovyov took for the epigraph to his “Tale of the Antichrist” the first quatrain of his 1891 poem “Pan-Mongolism” (the first two lines of which Blok would subsequently take as his epigraph to “The Scythians”).

Pan-Mongolism! The name is monstrous

Yet it caresses my ear

As if filled with the portent

Of a grand divine fate.

Solovyov had seen the danger which threatened Russia from the East long before and would inevitably lead to a war with Japan:

From the Altai to Malaysian shores

The leaders of Eastern isles

Have gathered a host of regiments

By China's defeated walls.

Countless as locusts

And as ravenous,

Shielded by an unearthly power

The tribes move north.

O Rus! Forget your former glory:

The two-headed eagle is ravaged,

And your tattered banners passed

Like toys among yellow children.

Alas, the philosopher could not know that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, in which Russia, indeed, would be defeated, would only be an episode in her history during the twentieth century. He could not know that the real danger threatening Russia like a new Tartar yoke would come in 1917, soon after the destruction of the Imperial double-headed eagle, and would last not fifty, but a whole seventy years—that this danger was concealed in Russia herself.

Two echoes of Pushkin in the above-quoted excerpt are worth noting. Its first line is an allusion to the poetic formulas which Pushkin used in such verses as “Nedvizhnyi strazh dremal na tsarstvennom poroge…” (“A motionless guard slumbered at the royal threshold…”, 1824) and “Klevetnikam Rossii” (“To the Slanderers of Russia,” 1831).

…from Perm to the Crimea,

From cold Finnish rocks

To the hot Kolkhida,

From the shaken Kremlin

To the walls of immovable China,

Won’t rise the Russian land

Sparkling with a steel bristle?

These lines also seem prophetic, foretelling distant events of the mid-twentieth century, when Stalin transformed Soviet Russia into a “steel hedgehog.” Nabokov parodies in Ada Pushkin’s “geographic flourishes” (“geograficheskie fanfaronady,” Vyazemsky), describing the map of Europe: “from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia…” and of both Americas: “from Estoty and Canady to Argentina” (1.3). It is curious to note that “Altar” (which corresponds to our Gibraltar) differs from “Altai” only in the last consonant, and its two middle consonants appear in the middle of “Yalta” and “Altyn Tagh,” mentioned below in the same paragraph of Ada. All three geographical names with the consonantal combination “-lt-” in the middle should suggest to the reader a fourth name—Altai, reminding him of Solovyov’s poem.

Another Pushkinian echo in this poem is connected with the locust. This insect figures in Pushkin’s famous dispatch to Count Vorontsov (one should note voron, raven, in the name), the governor-general of Novorossiya, who had sent the poet into the steppe north of the Crimea to study the results of the battle with the two-winged pest: Sarancha letela, letela / i sela; / sidela, sidela, vsyo s’yela, / i vnov’ uletela (“The locust flew, flew / and settled; / sat, sat, ate everything / and flew on again”). Four and а half years later, in Poltava (1829), Pushkin again remembered the locust, when he compared them to the mass of Swedes who lay dead on the field of battle:

And the entire field was covered with the fallen,

Like with the swarms of black locust.

(“Poltava,” Canto Three, 299-300)

Thus Solovyov was not the first Russian poet to compare enemy troops with locust. But, it seems that he was the first to liken the insects to an enemy and to declare war on them not in life, but in death. In the jocular poem “The sultry city grew intolerable” (1892) Solovyov wages war—and, with the aid of his beloved turpentine, vanquishes––first red bugs (“the favorites of Lev Tolstoy”), and then German cockroaches (Blatta Germanica):

Ah, I too happened to burn

With a military ardor,

When I poured French turpentine

Over German cockroaches.

All died a sorry death,

The fight is over.

The entire izba

Smells of turpentine and violets.

But the most popular (and most “mystical”) insect for Russian poets was certainly the mosquito. Derzhavin wrote the enormous, semi-comical poem, “In Praise of the Mosquito” (1807), in which the locust is also mentioned. In this poem he compared the mosquito to a sandpiper with six feet, to a prince of the Golden Horde, to a tribe’s first chief, and even to the soul, hovering in paradise. Derzhavin ended it with the thought that he himself desired to be transformed into a mosquito after death. We meet the even more picturesque and masterful comparisons to the mosquito in Pushkin. In “Advice” (1821) he compared magazine critics to horse flies and mosquitoes, with whom it was otherwise impossible to deal with—one could only swat them with a quick epigram. In “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” (1831) with whose heroine, the Beautiful Swan Princess, Lucette is linked in Ada, Prince Gvidon is transformed into a mosquito that hides in a cranny of a ship sailing to his father Saltan's kingdom, and in his court he stings the eye of the evil aunt. Finally, in “Ezersky” (1832) Pushkin compared one of the hero's ancestors to a squashed mosquito, and a second—implicitly—to a mosquito that is drunk with human blood:

Near the Kalka

One of them was taken captive in a scuffle

And then squashed, like a mosquito,

By the Tartars’ heavy buttocks;

But to make up for it, another Ezersky, Elizar,

With glory, although with losses,

Drank the blood of the Tartars

Between the Nepryadva and the Don,

When he attacked them from the rear

With an armed force of his Suzdal men.

It’s worth clarifying that the Tartars punished their Russian captives by building benches over the bodies of the unfortunate on which they then feasted. This occurred especially after the victory on the Kalka River in 1223. Elizar Ezersky took vengeance on the Tartars (whom he attacked from the rear, like a mosquito stinging one in the backside) for the death of his ancestor at the Battle of Kulikovo (Nabokov must have noticed the mysticism of Derzhavin’s comparison of the mosquito to kulik, a sandpiper), which took place between the Don and Nepryadva Rivers in 1380.

Nabokov also dedicated several “heart-felt” lines in the English version of his memoirs, Speak, Memory (1965), to the mosquito. In the book he described the winter gnats that bit him mercilessly at night in the Mentone boardinghouse, where he lived with his wife and son at the end of thirties. It would have been impossible to swat them in the darkness; but Nabokov was able to catch the insects, replete with his blood, with the aid of a butterfly net in the morning. At the end of Chapter Eleven, dedicated to his first poem (this chapter is not found in the Russian Drugie berega), Nabokov remembers a mosquito that he squashed on his cheek by chance on a July evening in 1914, at Vyra, while reading his newly-composed poem to his mother.

But what a far greater role mosquitoes play in Ada! Pushkin, whose blood they drink in Yukonsk, exclaims “Sladko!” (“Sweet!” 1.17); Ada ecstatically scratches the bites of the culex chateaubriandi in “Ardis the First,” and many years later, voluptuously rubs a mosquito bite on her thigh in a hotel in Mont Roux (Part Four); Russian peasants damn the French and their Kamargsky Komar—while the French damn the Russians and their moustique muscovite (1.12). The mosquito even penetrates into the characters' conversations about the afterlife: “Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here am I, stick me on” (5.6).

Van uses the mosquito to refute eternal life; but, however strange it may be, it is the mosquito which can serve as a proof of its existence. In the article “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia Set on Antiterra” I showed that the word komar (mosquito) hints at Komarovskiy, the seducer and villain of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957). Pasternak was subject to persecution by the government and received the Nobel Prize for this novel, which he was forced to refuse. As a result, Pasternak wrote the poem “Nobel Prize” (1959), whose third stanza reads:

Am I a gangster or murderer?

Of what crime do I stand

Condemned? I made the whole world weep

At the beauty of my land.

Nabokov, who considered Doctor Zhivago a mediocre novel, which should never even be placed next to his Lolita, wrote these lines in parody:

What is the evil deed I have committed?

Seducer, criminal – is this the word

for me who set the entire world a-dreaming

of my poor little girl?

Originally, the second line of this parody looked differently: “i ya l’ ideynyi vodoley?” (“am I an ideological Aquarius?” “Perepiska s sestroi,” Ann Arbor, 1985, p. 97). Besides many other meanings, there is an allusion to horoscopes as well. Pasternak, born on February 10, 1890, was Aquarius. So was Solovyov, who was born on January 28 and writes about it in his “Inscription on the Book The Justification of the Good:

I was born under the sign of Aquarius.

Reader! Don’t be afraid of drinking water:

It is not from me, I found it in a rock,

From under the stone of truth flows this stream.

By the “stone of truth” Solovyov means the philosopher's stone, which he considers lucky enough to have found. Alas, it is impossible to say this of Pasternak, so the reader must drink the proffered water (i.e., read Doctor Zhivago) with great care (just as, in Van's words, “the Ardis tap water is not recommended:” 1.38). While Solovyov’s book, The Justification of the Good (1895), can be compared to “living water” (“zhivaya voda” of Russian fairy-tales) Pasternak’s novel should be considered its counterpart, “dead water” (it is not accidental that on Antiterra this novel is known as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago and Mertvago Forever, mertv being Russian for “dead”). Therefore, the fourth and final stanza of “Nobel Prize” does not sound very convincing:

Even so, one step from my grave,

I believe that cruelty, spite,

The powers of darkness will in time

Be crushed by the spirit of Good.

It’s all the more remarkable that the last line echoes with the title of Solovyov’s book. Nabokov, as was Pasternak, was an optimist and believed in the final triumph of Good on Earth. Despite the fact that the present seemed to be hopeless, he believed that one day Russia would become a free country and that in the new Russia he would receive his deserved recognition. Therefore, the optimism that occurs in the last lines of his parody of Pasternak has a much firmer foundation beneath it:

Amusing, though, that at the last indention,

Despite proofreaders and my age’s ban,

A Russian branch’s shadow shall be playing

Upon the marble of my hand.

It is evident from this that Nabokov believed in his own immortality as a writer—especially in Russia, where they would erect a monument to him. But did he believe in his own immortality as a man, did he believe that his soul would live after death?

To a journalist’s direct question whether or not he believed in God, Nabokov answered: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express wouldn’t have been expressed, had I not known more” (Strong Opinions, p. 45). Nabokov knew a certain mystery which he could not communicate to the readers directly, but which shows through in one way or another in all his novels, stories and some verses. In his poem “Fame” (1942), he almost lets the secret out:

That main secret tra-tá-ta tra-tá-ta ta-tá –

And I must not be overexplicit.

But the work in which the existence of mystery is felt most distinctly is possibly Ada, in many respects, the writer’s “final” work. It is not in vain that Nabokov himself considered that of all his books, Ada most closely corresponds to the ideal fore-image from which this novel arose (Strong Opinions, p. 302). Are we, as readers, able to uncover Nabokov's innermost secret or, at least, to come close to its answer?

In Fame Nabokov says that he prefers “to stay godless with fetterless soul in a world that is swarming with godheads” (in Ada Van Veen expresses a similar disdain for “all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world:” 1.3). His poem ends thus:

But one day while disrupting the strata of sense

And descending deep down to my wellspring

I saw mirrored, besides my own self and the world,

Something else, something else, something else.

What is this mysterious “something else” echoing with the no less mysterious “ta-tá-ta, ta-tá-ta, ta-tá,” which helps the author of Fame overcome himself? It cannot be the reader (the empty dream “about readers, and body, and glory” is laughable to Nabokov), nor can it be God (since the author calls himself “godless”). But, perhaps, there is something, that is inaccessible to ordinary men (trusting “the enticements of the thoroughfare or such dreams as the ages have hallowed”), that they do not see—for example, the other world?

In order to attempt to answer this question, let us return from Fame, a work of the mature Nabokov, to his first poem. After the young author had finished reading it, his mother, deeply moved, gave him a mirror so that he could see the little spot of blood, left by the mosquito he had squashed. But Nabokov saw much more. “Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass.” (Speak, Memory, p. 176) So ends the Chapter Eleven of the English-language version of Nabokov's autobiography. The heart of this chapter is an excerpt about “cosmic synchronization” (Vivian Bloodmark’s term). In the opinion of this philosopher (whose name is another anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”), “while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N. Y.) is the nucleus.” (Speak, Memory, p. 169)

It is easy to notice the similarity between the theory of cosmic synchronization and the mystical experience described by Solovyov in “Three Rendez-vous.” Just like its hero who, during the third meeting/rendez-vous with the Eternal Beloved, embraces the whole universe, Nabokov’s poet is able to sense everything that happens on Earth—and even on neighboring Venus—at any given moment in time. Evidently, this is the very moment when his muse appears. It is the muse who is Nabokov’s Eternal Beloved, with whom he has had not three, but many more, meetings. Moreover, it’s not necessary for Nabokov to go to Egypt, as Solovyov did, in order to see her (it’s curious, though, that this is where Van Veen goes to complete his pilgrimage –“to the pyramids of Ladorah”– during his longest separation with Ada, his muse: 3.1). The point is that Nabokov’s muse was his wife, Vera Nabokov (and in his youth, “Tamara,” to whom he dedicates one of the chapters of Speak, Memory); while the Eternal Beloved of Solovyov, who preached asceticism and chastity, had no earthly embodiment. Solovyov’s tragedy lies in the fact that an insurmountable distance, a genuine chasm, separates Julie from his autobiographical story and the ideal heroine of “Three Rendez-vous.” For him, the revelation of earthly love did not coincide with the revelation of divine love (subsequently, a similar mismatch occurred in the life of another poet-prophet, Aleksandr Blok). It seems to me that the main difference between Solovyov (and also, Blok) and Nabokov, and especially, his character Van Veen, can be found here. The latter can even be considered the antipode of Solovyov, because he believes to reach a higher reality in the moments of physical closeness with Ada, when “reality lost the quotes it wore like claws – in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness). For one spasm or two, he was safe. The new naked reality needed no tentacle or anchor; it lasted a moment, but could be repeated as often as he and she were physically able to make love.” (1.35)

While, for Solovyov, a token of the victory over death is the possibility of contemplating the Eternal Beloved with his own eyes, the hedonist Van celebrates the same kind of victory at the moment of possessing Ada. Nabokov, of course, knew the impossibility of possessing beauty completely—be it the beauty of a beloved woman or the beauty of a sunset, astonishing us with its colors. However, he believed that in the minutes of inspiration, given us from above, a person is able to overcome his mortality. For Nabokov, “mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower… when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness.” (Speak, Memory, Chapter Two, 4) It is just at one of these minutes at the end of 1965 that a small fragment was born, from which all Ada subsequently arose and which entered the final draft of the novel without changes (“Inspiration:” Strong Opinions, p. 310). As I attempted to show in my “Addendum to Ada as a triple dream” (The Nabokovian, #53), Nabokov secretly believed that his dream of Antiterra was sent to him by the spirit of his father, V. D Nabokov (1870-1922), the memory of whom the writer held sacred. The fact that Nabokov “bestowed” his father’s birthday, July 21, upon Ada is partial evidence of this. Although Ada’s year of birth (1872) does not coincide with that of V. D. Nabokov (1870, the year of birth of the main character Van Veen, and also of Vladimir Ulyanov, who almost shares with the author of Ada his birthday), it’s worth noting that the final reunion of Van and Ada at Mont Roux occurs in 1922, the year of his tragic death.

Dates and their concurrences play a huge role in Ada. It’s hardly accidental that Nabokov made the first (1884-1888) and the second (1888-1892) periods of Van and Ada’s separation equivalent to four years. On the one hand, this is the same length of time that passes between the first and second meeting of the hero with Julie in Solovyov’s autobiographical story. On the other hand, four years also separate the first meeting of the author of Speak, Memory with Tamara (summer 1915) from the date on which Nabokov left Russia for good (April 1919). Four years later, in 1923, he met his greatest love, Vera Slonim, who became his muse until the end of his life. Nabokov bestowed his wife’s birthday, January 5, to four characters in Ada: the twin sisters Aqua and Marina and their husbands Demon and Daniel Veen (I discuss this marvelous coincidence in “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia Set on Antiterra”).

In Ada Nabokov used many dates that played an important and sometimes, fateful, role in his own life and the life of people close to him. However, not all dates met in this “family chronicle” refer back to this or that event in the life of its author and his family. For example, Van Veen’s birthday, January 1, coincides with the birthday of the main character of another Nabokov novel, Lolita, and Lucette’s birthday, January 3, coincides with the day (December 22, 1849, Old Style) on which Dostoevsky climbed the scaffold and his death sentence was announced to him. In a separate article dedicated to the L disaster that occurred on Antiterra in the middle of the past century (January 3, 1850—truly the “beau milieu” of the 19th century), I will try to show that the cruel farce of the announcement of the death sentences to the Petrashevskians and their subsequent pardons is the main event in a series of several real ones (possibly, one can even relate the publication of Lolita in 1955) standing behind the enigmatic Antiterran catastrophe.

As Yuli Aikhenvald (the leading émigré critic and a senior friend of Nabokov, who died tragically in December, 1928, returning home from the Nabokovs) noted in his Silhouettes of Russian Writers (Berlin, 1923): “Our time moves under the black omen of Dostoevsky, in his style. It has Dostoevsky as its patron or living epigraph, because the mad shuddering and trembling which the human being now experiences here and there make up the element of the creator of The Possessed. Like some heartfelt sorcerer, did he prophesy the revolution to Russia.” By “here” and “there” Aikhenvald means the emigration and Soviet Russia—that hell on Earth, in comparison with which the world where the Russian exiles have found themselves is at worst a Purgatory. However, in the universe of the two opposing worlds in Ada, we may rightfully substitute Antiterra and its twin planet, Terra, on which, Van conjectures, “human minds and human flesh underwent… worse torments than on our much maligned Demonia” (2.2) for “here” and “there.”

Solovyov was a young friend of Dostoevsky, who turned out to have a large influence on the philosopher. On the other hand, Solovyov’s personality, imbued with mystical ideas, gave creative material to Dostoevsky. It is an accepted notion that Solovyov served as the prototype for at least one of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s last novel (1880) – that of Ivan, author of the “poem” “The Grand Inquisitor” (Book Five, “Pro et contra,” Chapter Five). There is much in common between the “The Grand Inquisitor” and Solovyov’s “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” (for example, Christ appears in both works, even if he does not play a main role). However, while the action of the Ivan Karamazov’s “poem” occurs several centuries ago (in Spain during the 16th century), the action of monk Pansophius’ tale is attributed to the future, several centuries in advance. According to Solovyov, the Antichrist should come into the world and at some time take power over a greater part of humanity in the 21st century, on the eve of the second coming of Christ.

“Godless” as he was, Nabokov hardly believed in the second coming. At the same time, he should have recognized that, for the most part, Solovyov’s prophecy had already been fulfilled in the 20th century. At least three people—Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler—who caused more harm to humanity, possibly, than all the other people who have ever lived on Earth, can lay claim to the title of “Antichrist.” But how did they succeed in attracting millions of people to their side, by what means did they seduce the simple souls? At the end of “Three Rendez-vous” Mr. Zed (being, with the monk Pansophius, a mouthpiece of the author’s own views) says: “And I take back my previous words, that ‘you will not explain the Antichrist only in sayings.’ He is wholly explained by one, and besides, it's an extraordinarily simple one: Not all that glistens is gold. The brilliance of this false goodness is more than enough, but as for the real power, it has none.”

In the article “Ada as a Russian Fairy Tale…” I showed that this same saying, by which the Antichrist is explained, is applied to Van Veen. In many respects his brilliance is false; the true hero of the novel, the dobryi mólodets (“good young man”) of Russian fairy tales, turns out to be Ada's humble and seemingly unremarkable husband, Andrey Vinelander. It isn't easy for the reader to reconcile the image of this sickly man, as Van portrays him, with the traditional description of fairy tale heroes. But as Solovyov, who defined man as “the laughing animal,” used to say to his students, “it is better to be a sick man than a healthy beast” (cf. Mochulsky, Chapter Three, “The Crisis of Western Philosophy”). In spite of all his refinement, Van behaves at times like a real beast, cruel and merciless in relation to those close to him. He puts out the eyes of Kim Beauharnais without hesitating, when he finds out that the latter had spied on him and Ada in Ardis and now, after several years have passed, decides to blackmail Ada. He leaves the dying Marina, his mother, who had asked him to wait for her death, and doesn't even return for her funeral. Finally—even if it is unpremeditated—he drives his half-sister Lucette, who is hopelessly in love with him, to suicide.

In Ada Van is associated with the raven—this prophetic, even ominous, bird. But he has the features of another animal as well—the wolf. In contrast to Dr. Freud's patient, Van, this talented dreamer, did not see white wolves sitting in a walnut tree in his dream, but, like Freud's Wolfsmann, he has an affair with his sister. His “lupine” nature distinguishes Van, a habitué of all possible lupanars, not only from the more human Andrey Vinelander, but also from Mandelshtam, who in a poem which is sometimes called “Vek-volkodav” (“The Wolfhound Century,” “For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come…”) speaks of himself as follows:

Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,

And the pine reaches up to the star,

Because no wolf by blood am I,

And only my equal will kill me.

(the poem’s translation is by Nabokov: “On Adaptation,” Strong Opinions, p. 281)

Whoever Mandelshtam’s murderer was and whoever sent him off to certain death in a concentration camp was in no respect the poet’s “equal.” Executioners are always lower than their victims; and if the victims are poets, the executioners are, at best, pygmies in comparison to them:

Drink our blood, live, in destroying;

You are still a pygmy, an insignificant pygmy.

Pushkin's André Chenier turns to his executioner with these words in his last verses (“André Chenier,” 1825). Nabokov, who in one of the Russian poems of his “American” period quotes lines from Chenier's “Iambs,” scorned executioners to such a degree that he belittled them in Ada even further—he decreased them to the size of a mosquito, drinking human blood.

In contrast to the bloody wars and revolutions shaking our world in the 20th century, this was a peaceful and prospering century on Antiterra (3.7). If human blood was spilled during that time on Demonia, then it is the fault of mosquitoes (except for the unlucky extra, who, having played the executioner's assistant in Vitry’s film, was accidentally beheaded when the scene of Louis XVI's execution was filmed: 5.5). Every summer, during the last week of July the female of the “interestingly primitive mosquito” culex chateaubriandi (named after its discoverer, Charles Chateaubriand: 1.17) appeared at Ardis. The scientific name of this imaginary insect obviously hints at François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the author of the story “René” (1802), about the tragic love of a brother and sister, and of the memoirs “Notes from Beyond the Grave” (1848-1850), which also play an important role in Ada. In the latter book the author describes a Florida aborigine, the “scorched man” (le Bois-brûlé), who had abducted two Indian cousins (who served as the prototypes for Atala and Céluta, the heroines of the story “Atala,” 1801, and the prose epic “The Natchez,” 1826), because he was jealous of one of the girls, as follows: “my adversary was a gaunt, ugly black mosquito, having all the indications of the insects defined by Dalai Lama's entomologists as creatures which have their flesh inside and bones outside” (“Notes from Beyond the Grave,” Book Eight, 5). In the same chapter, a little later, Chateaubriand, having seen the heading “Flight of the King” in an English newspaper strewn under his feet, tells how he found out about the arrest of Louis XIV in Varennes (executed a year and a half later) and at that moment made the decision to interrupt a trip around America and return to France.

Chateaubriand's comparison of man to the insect—even if such an unattractive one as the mosquito—must have delighted Nabokov both as an entomologist and an artist. He surely experienced such a joy (or, perhaps, an even greater one, given that there is a moral satisfaction in addition to the aesthetic pleasure here) from Mandelshtam's comparison of Stalin's mustache to a cockroach's antennae. One exactly noted feature allowed the poet to transform Stalin into a huge disgusting insect. In this way, at least, Nabokov interpreted this image from a desparingly bold epigram on the leader (“We live, feeling no land beneath us…”), which plays a hidden, but very important role in Ada (see my “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia…”). But if Stalin is a cockroach, the “riff-raff of thin-necked leaders” around him are flies (cf. the fable “The Cockroach” by Ignat Lebyadkin, a character in Dostoevsky's “The Possessed,” and my aforementioned article), then their rank-and-file underlings, the executioners, are the even more lowly insects, the mosquitoes.

Russia has always been renowned for its horde of mosquitoes, from which (I mean insects, not executioners) foreigners have especially suffered. Thus, in Chekhov's short story “An Unpleasant Incident” (1887), “kumari, kramori, les cousins” do not allow a Frenchman (who fails to pronounce correctly the Russian word komary) to sleep. The hero of this story, a young Russian, comes from town to see his mistress in her country house and finds out that her husband has unexpectedly returned from Paris. Thoroughly vexed, he exclaims, “Vot te klyukva!” (“Here's a pretty kettle of fish!” klyukva means “bogberry” in Russian) Bad weather, the late hour and absence of a cab all prevent him from returning home. He asks the master of the house for permission to stay the night and receives it. Here the hero sees that the husband does not take advantage of his wife's favors, but sleeps (or, rather tries to sleep) in a dining-room on chairs. The hero sits in the same room with the Frenchman, who suffers from insomnia, until the wife enters and, to both the husband's and lover's surprise, leads the latter to her bedroom.

This unfinished story by Chekhov, far from being one of his best, would not be worthy of our attention were it not for this series of striking coincidences. First of all, there is the homonym cousin (Fr., meaning “cousin” and “mosquito”), which is used to good effect in Ada. On the eve of his meeting with Ada in 1886, Van “spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had” (1.29). The Ardis mosquito, culex chateaubriandi, the bites of which Ada scratched with such voluptuousness, did not show a great interest in Van. It is interesting that the Russian inhabitants of the Ladore region ascribed the insect’s virulence “to the diet of the French wine-growers and bogberry-eaters of Ladore” (1.12, my italics; for the connection between the berry and blood themes in Ada, cf. “Ada as Anti-Utopia…”). Finally, I would note the diametrical opposition of situations in “Notes from Beyond the Grave” and “An Unpleasant Incident.” Chateaubriand decides to return to his homeland, France, having barely learned about the king’s arrest in a newspaper. The Frenchman in Chekhov’s story, on the other hand, had just arrived in a foreign land: having attempted to talk with him, his wife’s lover finds out that he is in no way interested in politics or literature. He knows no contemporary French politician or writer. The name Zola means nothing to him.

Besides the differences between characters, there are differences between the authors. While Chateaubriand, who was a descent of a poor noble family, was an aristocrat, Chekhov, whose grandfather was a serf, was the greatest Russian writer to spring from the people. Moreover, Chekhov, born January 17/29, 1860, was the best Russian prose writer who was born under the sign of Aquarius. And the best Russian poet born under this sign (it appears that Nabokov has thoroughly studied the horoscopes of Russian writers) was V. A. Zhukovsky (born 29 January/9 February 1783; Pushkin died on the same day in 1837). Zhukovsky (note that his surname comes from zhuk, Russian for “beetle,” yet another insect) was the illegitimate son of a Tula landowner and a captive Turkish girl. In contrast to Chamfort, who suffered from the same disease, which, according to Chateaubriand (cf. “Notes from Beyond the Grave,” Part One, Book Four, 12), had birthed the Jacobins, Zhukovsky was able to forgive humanity for his illegitimate origins. However, as a result of his own personal drama (the poet was in love with his own niece and she loved him; Zhukovsky’s half-sister and the girl’s mother, though, would not permit a marriage), Zhukovsky’s works—especially of his mature period—are tinged with strong mystic tones.

Aikhenvald writes in his essay on Zhukovsky: “there is, in his work, the recognizable element of the Undine, there is, in the good and the bad, something in common with the element of water: as a writer, he somewhat resembles his character Dyadya Struy—but only the good Dyadya Struy…” Dyadya Struy (“Uncle Stream”) is a character in Zhukovsky’s “ancient tale” “Undina” (1831-35), a versification in hexameters of the German writer F. de la Motte-Fouqué’s (1777-1843) tale of the same title. This stream, a water spirit, is able to assume human form; he abandons his little niece to a fisherman and his wife (in exchange for their abducted daughter, whom Struy has placed with a Duke and Duchess). The girl grows up among people and marries the knight Gulbrand. However, when the knight ceases to love Undina (and falls in love with Bertalda, the fisher’s daughter, raised at court), Struy takes her back beneath the water. Then, the knight decides to marry Bertalda, despite the warning of Undina. On their wedding night, Undina, sent by Struy, comes to her husband and weeps him to death.

In Ada the fairytale situation of “Undina” is turned upside down and treated in a more “realistic” manner. Marina abandons her newborn son (and future hero and narrator of Ada, Van Veen) to her kind, but feeble-minded sister Aqua (Van’s aunt’s name clearly echoes the name Dyadya Struy), who had miscarried several weeks after Van’s birth. Aqua’s doubts about whether Van is her son or not only makes her mental suffering worse. Her namesake, water, the language of which Aqua believes to have learned to understand, becomes one of her tormentors. Aqua, not having the strength to fight against disease, commits suicide, and after a year or so Van travels to Ardis for the first time. Here he begins his romance with Ada (who turns out to be not just a cousin, but his sister). This romance continues, with interruptions, right up to their deaths. Lucette, their half-sister, becomes the victim of the impetuously developing relations between Van and Ada. Her love with Van is unrequited and she commits suicide, jumping into the Atlantic from the deck of the ship she and Van were sailing to America. Only many years later, at the end of their lives, Van and Ada realize that they have teased Lucette (to whom they now refer as “our mermaid”) to death.

Such is the external canvas of events in “Undina” and Ada. There is something in common in these two works beyond all the differences: otherworldly forces act in both. However, while these forces openly intervene in affairs and human fate in Zhukovsky’s story, their influence is less evident to the readers (and remains completely unnoticed by the characters) in Nabokov’s novel. On clear summer nights in Ardis, Van is fascinated by the sight of fireflies, which seemed to him, when he first saw them, “golden ghouls or the passing fancies of the garden” (1.12). It seems to me that just as “komary” (first mentioned in the same chapter) hint at Komarovsky, the character in Doctor Zhivago, these little beetles (zhuki) hint at Zhukovsky, the author of “Undina” and many mysterious ballades, in which the dead play a part. Aikhenvald has justifiably noted Zhukovsky’s somewhat aqueous nature. At the same time, the critic speaks of his goodness—both as an artist and as a person. The word of this poet was not at variance with the deed. Russia should be thankful to Zhukovsky that he raised the heir to the throne, the future Aleksandr II, who repealed serfdom in 1861, in the liberal spirit.

Zhukovsky’s father was A. I. Bunin, a distant ancestor of I. A. Bunin (1870-1953). The latter was born during the reign of Aleksandr II and was the most important of those writers who had already become famous and who emigrated after the October coup. While Zhukovsky was a young contemporary of Chateaubriand, a witness to many of those events which the French writer describes in his memoirs, Bunin, living one hundred years after Chateaubriand, was an older contemporary of Nabokov and, simultaneously, the same age as Nabokov’s father, V. D. Nabokov. In addition, Bunin is a native of Voronezh, a fellow-countryman of Koltsov, and author of the short story “Voron” (“The Raven,” 1944), in which a father and son enter into amorous rivalry. In 1933 Bunin became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize “for the strict craftsmanship with which he is developing the traditions of Russian classical prose.” Nabokov applauded Bunin’s Nobel Prize win, but preferred his “marvelously flowing verse” to the “brocaded prose” for which Bunin was celebrated. In two especially beautiful poems, “The Last Bumble-bee” and “A day will come when I shall vanish…,” written in 1916, shortly before the Revolution, an insect calls forth thoughts of death in the author:

THE LAST BUMBLEBEE

Sewn with gold is your sable-black jerkin of velvet,

Loud your hum as you boldly fly into my room.

Why, O bumblebee, drone you so mournfully, tell me?

Would you share my dejection and gloom?

Blazing heat. Light streams in from outside. Summer’s mellow,

Its last days are serene, but not long will they keep.

Fly about, hum your fill – on the hard, pale-red pillow

Of a thistle go soundly to sleep.

You don’t think as do we, you don’t know of the boldly

Rising winds that will soon scour an emptying lea

Or that onto the grass they will sweep the once golden,

The by then dried and dead bumblebee.

(Translated by Irina Zheleznova)

(It is interesting to note that Ivan Shmelyov, 1873-1950, whose family name comes from shmel', Russian for “bumble-bee,” more than any other Russian writer was convinced of the immortality of the human soul. In his tale “Kulikovo Field,” 1939-47, written in emigration and set in Soviet Russia, the Saint Sergey of Radonezh, who lived in the 14th century and who gave his blessing to Dmitriy Donskoy before the battle of Kulikovo, appears to a forester.)

But the second poem was probably even closer to Nabokov's heart, because his favorite butterfly appears in it:

A day will come when I shall vanish,

And in this empty room

All will be the same: the table, the bank

And the icon, old and simple.

And there will fly into the room

A colored butterfly in silk

To flutter, rustle and pit-pat

On the blue ceiling…

And the bottom of the sky

Will look, as it does now, into the open window

And the sea with its even blueness

Will lure one into its empty expanses.

Nabokov cites the second quatrain completely in Speak, Memory—in the chapter devoted to lepidoptery (Chapter Six, 3)—calling it an “impeccable evocation of what is certainly a tortoiseshell.” But that offensive role, which, in Bunin’s thought, this elegant butterfly should play in his poem, and that mysterious significance, unknown even to the author, which Nabokov ascribes to it, differ from each other. For Bunin, the butterfly is only a part of “indifferent nature,” which, as he suggests, won’t notice his disappearance and, after his death, “will shine with an everlasting beauty.” It seems to me that, for Nabokov, the appearance of this insect in that very same room in which this poem was written, would have had another, directly opposite meaning. It would hint that the author had not completely disappeared from this world and that his soul, having fluttered out of the cocoon of its mortal body, would continue to live.

The Greek word “psyche” means both “soul” and “butterfly.” The human soul is immortal. Nabokov believed this despite everything. In his Commentary to his translation of Eugene Onegin (1964), he analyses one of the most famous of Pushkin’s poems, “Exegi monumentum” (1836), in which the author confirms that his soul will outlive his ashes:

“I’ve set up to myself a monument

not wrought by hands. The public path to it

will not grow weedy. Its unyielding head

soars higher than the Alexandrine Column.

“No, I’ll not wholly die. My soul in the sacred lyre

is to survive my dust and flee decay;

and I’ll be famed while there remains alive

in the sublunar world at least one poet.

“Tidings of me will cross the whole great Rus,

and name me will each tribe existing there:

proud scion of Slavs, and Finn, and the now savage

Tungus, and – friend of the steppes – the Kalmuck.

“And to the nation long shall I be dear

for having with my lyre evoked kind feelings,

exalted freedom in my cruel age

and called for mercy for the downfallen.”

To God’s command, O Muse, obedient be,

offense not dreading, and no wreath demanding;

accept indifferently praise and slander,

and do not contradict a fool.

In Nabokov's opinion the first four stanzas of this poem (which are a parody of Derzhavin's “Pamyatnik” should be in quotation marks, and only in the last quatrain can one distinguish the author's own voice. The last line, “although ostensibly referring to reviewers, slyly implies that only fools proclaim their immortality.” (Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, vol. II, p. 310)

Nabokov was not a fool, therefore, he never claimed that he was immortal. On the contrary, he makes his clever characters who, like Van Veen, are disposed to skepticism, to doubt the possibility of an afterlife. Van indignantly rejects Ada’s proposal to visit the grave of Krolik, her teacher of natural history, and says that Krolik may feed his maggots in peace and that the entomologies of death leave him cold (1.41). Nevertheless, what Nabokov offers in Ada is exactly an “entomological” proof of immortality. In his argument he uses almost all existing insects, even a flea. Having learned of Tolstoy’s depressed mood caused by thoughts of death, Turgenev wrote in 1880 to A. I. Urusov: “I’m very sorry for Tolstoy. But chacun a sa manière de tuer ses puces [everybody kills his fleas in his own way].” (cf. “Turgenev in Yasnaya polyana” in S. L. Tolstoy’s “Sketches of the Past,” 1949)

Trying to get rid of his fear of death, Tolstoy wrote “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), one of the greatest short stories in the world literature. Now, how did Nabokov kill his fleas? A closer analysis of Nabokov's novels shows that a work, “handed over” to one of the book’s characters, was suggested to him by another, deceased character. In the article “Aleksandr Blok's Dreams as Enacted in Ada by Van Veen—and vice versa” (), I attempted to show that the idea of “memoirs” was suggested to Van by the spirit of Lucette, who, from Terra or wherever she was found, helped him to write them. Van does not suspect his half-sister’s participation in the creation of Ada, but this participation is evident to novel’s attentive re-reader. And its fascinated re-re-reader can see that Nabokov himself believed that Ada or Ardor was suggested to him by the spirit of his father. In general, this is a work which is so complex and profound, has so many subtexts and secret meanings, that it seems that no single person could have composed it (even if that one person is a genius). An impression involuntarily arises that many people worked on it—nearly all the Russian writers of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, about whom Aikhenvald writes in his Silhouettes. It’s as if Nabokov wants to re-address Famusov’s famous words in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, “Vy nyneshnie – nutka!” (“You, the young generation – come on, try to do it!” Act II, scene ii) to young authors. It is not without purpose that Griboedov, whom Ada translated into French and English, is mentioned in the epilogue of Ada (5.4), and the name of old Van’s old, deaf valet is Stepan Nutkin (5.1).

You can believe against your will that some unseen favorable spirits helped Nabokov in the creation of his greatest masterpiece. It seems to me that Nabokov himself believed it. Otherwise, why are there all these unusual mosquitoes, hinting at the scoundrel Komarovsky, the fireflies hinting at the mystic Zhukovsky, and the wonderful butterflies hinting at immortality? At the moment before Van’s duel with Tapper, a transparent white butterfly flies above the forest road. With utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live (1.42). However, Van was not killed by his adversary, but was only slightly wounded. He survived and the white butterfly, which seemed to him the messenger of Death, turned out to be the messenger of Life (it was Zhukovsky who called the moth “a messenger of immortality” in his poem “The Moth and the Flowers”). It is possible that this is the spirit of Aqua, who sent Van the mysterious dream on the eve of his duel. In Pale Fire (1962) Shade tells Kinbote, “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” None of us knows what awaits him/her beyond the grave, “what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.” But for some reason it seems to me that, like Derzhavin and Pushkin, Nabokov “did not die completely.” And please, don’t contradict the fool!

Translated by Michael D. Johnson

FATHERS AND SONS, DON JUANS, FLORAMORS AND DOCTORS: THE THEMES OF TURGENEV’S LIFE AND WORK AS REFLECTED IN NABOKOV’S ADA

Un levreau d’une assez jolie taille s’est noyé avant-hier dans les fossés. Comment et pourquoi? C’est qu’on ne saurait dire. Se serait-il suicidé? Cependant, à son âge, on croit encore au bonheur. (From a letter of Turgenev to Pauline Viardot)

Karl Marx (1818-1883), German philosopher and economist, the founder of the theory of “scientific communism,” is known on Antiterra – the planet, on which Ada is set – as “Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays” (2.5). Although the real Marx did not write plays, it is true that he had as many as seven children. Three of them died in infancy or childhood, one was an illegitimate son for whom the father had no paternal feelings (it was Engels who took care of this child), and of the remaining three daughters the most talented and sympathetic was the youngest, Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1855-1898), author of the first English translation of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Her tragic end (Eleanor committed suicide because of her civic husband’s betrayal) seems to play a certain role in Ada (cf. my article “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia Set on Antiterra”). Besides, in his “Reminiscences about Turgenev” (Krasnaia Nov’, 1917, #8), German Lopatin (1845-1918), the Russian revolutionary and translator of Marx’s “Capital” (who is mentioned, along with Marx, in Nabokov’s novel “The Gift,” 1937), says that Marx felt for him, Lopatin, a purely paternal love.

Despite certain congeniality between them, Lopatin of course was not Marx’s son. Similarly, another author of reminiscences about I. S. Turgenev (1818-1883; note that, like another novelist, Captain Mayne Reid, Turgenev was born and died the same years as Marx), Elena Ivanovna Blaramberg-Aprelev (who wrote under the pen-name E. Ardov) was not the writer’s daughter – as the peasants of Spasskoe, Turgenev’s ancestral seat visited by the memoirist, believed (see Ardov, “From the Memoirs about I. S. Turgenev,” Russkie vedomosti, January 1904). As Ivan Turgenev himself suggested, his former serfs had been misled by Aprelev’s patronymic (another interesting coincidence: the name-and-patronymic of Nabokov’s mother was the same as Aprelev’s). The mistake of the peasants must be excused: Aprelev’s kindness, and her entire personality, made her look like Turgenev’s daughter much more than Pauline, Turgenev’s actual daughter (who had little in common with her father and who, having been raised in France, didn’t even speak Russian) by a serf-girl, did. Children often differ from their parents (thus, gentle Turgenev was a complete antithesis of his willful and despotic mother) and parents, like many lonely people, often experience paternal or maternal feelings toward someone else’s children. It would have been much fairer, if Nadya, the heroine of Ardov’s novel Bez viny vinovatye (“Guilty Though Guiltless,” published, with Turgenev’s help, in the magazine Vestnik Evropy, 1877, #7-8), was the daughter not of her egoistic mother, but of her good aunt, her father’s sister. Similarly, “it would have been so much more plausible,” as Ada’s protagonist and narrator, Van Veen, says after the death of his poor aunt Aqua (1.3), “esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking – if she were really my mother.”

Aqua married Demon Veen (the mistake for which she paid at first with her sanity and then with her life) on April 23, 1869, on St. George’s Day (1.3). While April seems to refer to Aprelev, the surname of Turgenev’s “pseudo-daughter” (whose pen-name, Ardov, sounds not unlike Ardis, Ada Veen’s stage-name which she took after the name of the manor first mentioned in Aqua’s suicide note; it is here, in the rose garden of Ardis Manor, that Van says his epitaph to Aqua), “St. George’s Day,” corresponding to the Russian Yuriev Den’, hints at the famous Russian saying: Vot tebe, babushka, i Yuriev den’! (“here’s a fine how d’ye do!”). This sacramental phrase was the last thing the cruel father of Susanna – the heroine of Turgenev’s novella Neschastnaya (“An Unfortunate Woman,” 1868) – said before his sudden death of an apoplectic stroke. After the death of Ivan Matveich, buka pakhuchaia (“the smelly misanthrope”), Susanna, his illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter, finds herself under the guardianship of his no less appalling younger brother Semyon, whom she once calls “your brother’s brother” (chapter XVII, “My Story”). If we take into consideration that Aqua’s last note was signed “my sister’s sister” (1.3) and that Aqua committed suicide by taking poison, as Susanna does in Turgenev’s novella (it is possible though that Susanna was poisoned by her own relatives), we’ll have to admit that there are certain parallels between Ada and “The Unfortunate Woman.”

But Ada is also linked to some other of Turgenev’s works (two of which, the novels “Fathers and Sons,” 1861, and “Smoke,” 1867, are directly mentioned in it). Moreover, certain parallels seem to exist between the protagonist of Nabokov’s “family chronicle” and Ivan Turgenev himself. With all the dissimilarities in the biographies of Van Veen and Turgenev, they have one feature in common: both Van and Turgenev never married, having remained bachelors through all their lives. But, unlike Turgenev, who spent the second half of his life “on the verge of the strangers’ nest,” in the family of his beloved singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Van, during his last forty-five years of existence, lives, in every sense of the verb, with his sister Ada with whom he even dies on the same day. To put an end to their sufferings, Doctor Lagosse, their physician, makes Van and Ada, at their request, a mortal injection of morphine (5.6; Turgenev, who went through a terrible agony, asked doctors to give him poison, too, but he was denied it).

On the same day died not only Van and Ada, but also Fimushka and Fomushka, the old couple in Turgenev’s novel Nov’ (“Virgin Soil,” 1876), and – as usually believed – Shakespeare and Cervantes. It allegedly happened on that same St. George’s Day, April 23 (in Ada, Andrey Vinelander, Ada’s husband, dies on this day), 1616. This remarkable coincidence (note, by the way that April 23 is also Nabokov’s, as well as Shakespeare’s, birthday), if it only really took place, is mentioned by Turgenev (who wrongly believed April 26 to be the date of both Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ death) in his famous speech “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). According to Turgenev, all people more or less belong to one of the two types: that of the egoist Hamlet or that of the altruist Don Quixote. It seems to me that, among many other things, Ada is Nabokov’s attempt to show that a third, intermediate, type exists: that of Don Juan.

Unlike his father (with whom he once even entered into an amorous rivalry subsequently described in the novella “First Love,” 1860), Turgenev wasn’t a Don Juan (cf. L. F. Nelidov, “In Memory of Turgenev,” Vestnik Evropy, 1883, #9). And also all of his works are distinguished for a Victorian chastity and purity of descriptions. As Ludwig Pietsch has noted (cf. “Foreign critics about Turgenev,” St. Petersburg, 1908), Turgenev “surpasses Flaubert and Zola with the purity of his soul and the elegance of his refined taste that has never smirched itself with the depiction of seductive scenes; from all of his works, however hot the passion pulsating in them might be, all its aspects are excluded that his colleagues, the French naturalists, were explaining with such an undisguised pleasure.” However, some critics considered this not a merit, but, on the contrary, a deficiency. Moreover, Yuli Aikhenvald thought that it was a big mistake to see a chaste poet in Turgenev. In Aikhenvald’s opinion, Turgenev “lacked the courage to speak of love as he would like to; he invented women, enveloped them with a false significance, idealized insincerely the not ideal Irina [the heroine of “The Smoke”]; he has not concealed that he was learned in the ‘science of tender passion,’ but he should have gone further and freer and then he would have revealed the now concealed features of a Russian Boccaccio (“The Silhouettes of the Russian Writers,” Moscow, 1994, p. 260).

It was Nabokov, who – as if refuting, and, at the same time, justifying the words of Aikhenvald who, having heard Mashen’ka (“Mary,” 1926) in the author’s reading, called him “the new Turgenev” – eventually became a Russian (or, rather, Russo-American) Boccaccio. According to Van (1.1), Part One of Ada, which is chiefly set in Ardis, is close to Tolstoy’s “Childhood and Fatherland” (sic, instead of “Boyhood;” actually, of course, “Childhood” and “Boyhood” are two separate works). However, in contrast to Ada, the love-story is practically absent from Tolstoy’s novellas. Therefore, the Ardis part of the book reminds one even more of Turgenev’s novels – differing only in the fact that the young heroes of Nabokov’s family chronicle are not only in love with each other, but also make love in all secret nooks of the manor. When, in “Fathers and Sons” (chapter 16), Bazarov and Anna Sergeevna, go botanizing, while Arkadiy and Katya stay at home and make some music, the reader can be certain that no one’s morals suffered any harm. The picked wild flower in the hands of the Odintsov woman and Bazarov’s strange behavior as they return don’t mean at all that something happened between them during their walk in the fields (as the reader might expect). In Ada, on the contrary, the very word “botanizing” signals that the heroine most probably met in the woods one of her lovers – the unknown rival of Van. In Ardis the Second (1.40), shortly before the break between Van and Ada, the latter goes “brambling” (as Ada calls her botanical rambles) and returns in the evening with a lone flower in her satchel. Soon Van (and, with him, the reader) finds out that Ada had a farewell tryst with Percy de Prey, the neighbor gentleman, who loved her “to the point of insanity.”

But Van, a confirmed libertine, much surpasses his sister and lover in sexual laxity. According to his own words, during his first separation with Ada (1884-1888), he was unfaithful to her six hundred and thirteen times (1.31). When thirteen years later Van and his half-sister Lucette cross the Atlantic on board the Tobakoff liner (3.5), it turns out that Van can not live without girl pleasure for more than forty-eight hours. Ever since 1887 he was a member of the elite Villa Venus Club and could visit ‘floramors’ – one hundred luxurious brothels built all over the world by the Dutch architect David van Veen (2.3). If there is a literary character that is close to Van, it is certainly Don Juan, the insidious seducer and lady-killer. It is not accidental that the name of Ada’s protagonist initially was, in the very first fragment of the novel jotted down by Nabokov in the last days of 1965 and later included, almost without changes, in the final version of the book, Juan (Strong Opinions, p. 310).

One’s attention is drawn by the “botanical” name of the Antiterran palatial brothels thought up by poor Eric Veen, whose adolescent erotic dream was realized in marble and stone by his grandfather David. It seems to me that this name can be traced back to the novel by A. Dumas fils “La Dame aux camélias” (1848). After its appearance (soon followed by Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” which was contemptuously mentioned in Turgenev’s novels “Nest of the Gentry” and “On the Eve,” and, as the work that caused Lenin to shed tears, in Nabokov’s “The Gift,” and which was eventually transformed into “Traverdiata” in Ada: 1.39) the women of easy virtue began to be called – in Russia, at least – “camellias” (cf., for instance, “The Gift,” in which Chernyshevsky’s wife and her sister were mistaken for “young camellias” by an uhlan). Moreover, the “camellia” in Dumas’ novel has a floral name, Margarita. (Varvara Pavlovna, the unfaithful wife of Lavretsky, the hero of Turgenev’s novel “Nest of the Gentry,” 1859, found her ideal in the dramatic works of M. Dumas fils. She dreams that her daughter, Mademoiselle Ada, will become an actress and play the part of Margarita Gautier.) The heroine’s love for flowers (not only camellias) is stressed in the novel which is set in Paris and Bougival, the country place near the French capital. Here, in Bougival (“the most beautiful place in the world, despite its awful name”), the heroine’s miraculous transformation into a virtuous girl takes place: “this courtesan who made one spend for bouquets more money than is necessary for the carefree life of a whole family sometimes sat for hours in a lawn looking at an ordinary flower that bore her name” (chapter XVII).

In Paris and Bougival is also set Maupassant’s novella “Yvette” (1884). It tells the story of a young innocent girl (who somewhat resembles Lucette, Ada’s most sympathetic character), who is seduced by a libertine – a playboy and a Don Juan like Van Veen. The novella’s last scene, its apotheosis (that promises the heroine’s transformation into a camellia in the near future), is set in Bougival. Nevertheless, in the history of world literature, Bougival is known mainly for the fact that Turgenev spent his last years and died here. Along with Flaubert, Turgenev was the older colleague and literary mentor of Maupassant (the authorship of several short stories by this writer, who doesn’t exist on Antiterra, is ascribed in Ada to Mlle Larivière, Lucette’s governess), who dedicated to Turgenev his first collection of stories “La Maison Tellier” (1881). The action in the title story (mentioned in “The Gift”) famously takes place in a brothel. It is interesting to compare this fact with another: all the hundred Antiterran floramors (also known as “Villa Venus”) opened on September 20, 1875, the same day (Monday, by the “Terran” Gregorian calendar), on which, in our world, Turgenev moved into a newly-built chalet in Les Frênes (“The Ash Trees”), his and Viardot’s recently bought villa in Bougival (see Turgenev’s letter of 7/19 September, 1875, to N. V. Khanykov: I. S. Turgenev, Letters in 13 volumes, M.-L., 1966, vol. 11, p. 127). That this is not a mere coincidence is confirmed by a number of facts and other striking coincidences.

The first of them occurs in Ada (2.3) and consists in the fact that the old Russian word for September, ryuen’, echoes the (invented) name of the hometown of the nephew and only heir of David van Veen (who perished during the erection of the hundredth floramor), the Dutch clothier known as ‘Velvet’ Veen, Ruinen. But the Russian word ryuen’ is even closer to Rouen, the name of Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880) hometown. (Unlike ‘Velvet’ Veen who is said to have traveled once – and only once – to the nearest floramor with his entire family, Flaubert loved to visit brothels, particularly in exotic countries.) Among several invented places that serve as the setting of “Madame Bovary” (1855), Rouen is the only real city (Paris is but mentioned). In Rouen one of the novel’s most famous scenes is set. Because of this scandalous scene, in which Leon seduces Emma in a cab aimlessly driving around the city, the author and his publisher were accused of pornography and very nearly jailed. Fortunately, Flaubert was acquitted by the court; still, it is interesting to think of the charge leveled against Flaubert in the following context: one of Flaubert’s closest friends, Turgenev, once attended in Paris a lecture on pornography, in which experiments on live people were demonstrated. (The happy, but humorless, nineteen century!)

Turgenev didn’t mention this – apparently, entertaining – lecture anywhere in his works. But he told about it to Sergey Tolstoy (the son of Leo, whom Turgenev gave a volume of short stories, “La Maison Tellier,” recommending its young French author to Tolstoy), who mentions this fact in one of his “Sketches of the Past” (1949), “Turgenev in Yasnaya Polyana.” Eric Veen wrote his essay, “Villa Venus: An Organized Dream,” having read too many erotic works found in the library that his grandfather had bought, with the house, from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole (2.3). It seems to me that “Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole,” refers in the present case not to the author of “Anna Karenin,” and not to two other Russian writers who bore that celebrated name (interestingly, the first name of both was Alexey making them namesakes of Anna’s husband and lover), but to Tolstoy fils, who left interesting memoirs about his father and some other writers he had met in his life. The children of famous authors (Marx, Dumas père, Tolstoy, all of whom are mentioned in Ada; note that Dumas, thanks to his African origins, is mentioned along with his namesake Pushkin: 1.24) are as important in Nabokov’s novel as their fathers.

From the children of literati let us return to children in books, namely to Evgeniy Bazarov, the hero of “Fathers and Sons.” His accidental death has no inner motivation (it seems that the author simply did not know what to do with his hero), but it deeply moves the reader who feels compassion for Bazarov’s old parents. The following detail is of interest to us: in his deathbed delirium Bazarov sees red dogs running around him (and even his father appears to him to be a hunting dog pointing at him, as if he were a quail. On the other hand, red dog (“one hund, red dog…”) is the last image that crosses Van’s mind before he falls asleep (2.2). In my article “Ada as a Triple Dream” (The Nabokovian, # 53) I attempted to show that Eric Veen and the floramors are but products of Van’s dream. This dream begins with a red dog. No wonder: Van not only falls asleep but also dies a little, for his erotic (if not “pornographic”) dream must have been sent to him by his late half-sister Lucette from the other world – or, as they would say on Demonia, “from Terra” (see my article “Aleksandr Blok’s Dreams as Enacted in Ada by Van Veen, and vice versa” ). That this dream is connected, through the red dog, with the death of another literary character, Bazarov, seems to support my oneiric theory.

For the inhabitants of Demonia, Terra is not only the other world where Antiterrans find themselves after death, but also a parallel world combining the features of Earth with its traditional portrayal in the works of the realist writers (interestingly, Ludwig Pietsch called one of Turgenev’s “mystical” stories, “The Ghosts,” 1864, “the dream of a realist”). The very notion “Terra” appeared on its twin planet after the mysterious L disaster in the very middle of the nineteen century. In my article “The Fair Invention in Nabokov’s Ada and Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin” (The Nabokovian, # 58) I argue that there is a connection between the Antiterran L disaster and the poor pun (“life is given to us for lying rather than living it”) of one of Gorky’s “tale’s” characters, Vladimir Liutov. By a coincidence, the same “terrible” surname, Liutov, had a gendarme who interrogated Lopatin after he had been arrested in St. Petersburg in March, 1879 – an incident that he describes in his “Reminiscences about Turgenev.”

Lopatin was warned about the impending arrest by Turgenev whom the authorities had politely asked to leave for Paris (also known as “Lute” on Antiterra and jokingly called “Lutetia” by Turgenev in his letter to P. V. Zhukovsky of 11/25 July, 1875) and who implored Lopatin to follow his example. But the revolutionary did not heed the writer’s advice and was arrested several days later. To his surprise, he recognized in the gendarmes interrogating him the two men he had seen the day before at an art exhibition: all three admired Repin’s painting Ne zhdali (“The Unexpected Return”). Such coincidences, rare as they are, happen sometimes in life and there seems to be nothing supernatural in them. But this particular coincidence was accompanied by several other, no less striking, ones. Also, Nabokov could not fail to notice the prophetic aspect of the eerie ending of Lopatin’s reminiscences about Turgenev.

But first an obvious error of the memoirist (who managed to retain, despite the twelve years spent in the Schluesselburg fortress, a comparatively good memory) should be corrected. Ilya Repin, whom both Turgenev and Lopatin met in Paris, has painted “The Unexpected Return” (the painting that Lopatin describes in minute detail) only in 1884, five years after Lopatin’s arrest. The latter must have seen some other Repin’s painting at the exhibition but thought of “The Unexpected Return,” because, despite Turgenev’s warning, he ne zhdal (“didn’t expect”) that he will be arrested. Besides, his memory could have been influenced by another incident he evokes in his “Reminiscences.” In Paris where Lopatin did arrive after all, having escaped from his Vologda exile, Turgenev introduced him to Nezhdanov – or, rather, the man who had served as the prototype of the hero of “The Virgin Soil.” This man turned out to be Turgenev’s secretary and Lopatin’s former University friend, A. F. Otto (1845-1925), who deserves several words to be said about him (Lopatin managed to define him in only one word: sopliak, “a milksop”). According to rumors, an illegitimate son of the poet Zhukovsky (and the half-brother of the above-mentioned correspondent of Turgenev), he was raised in the family of a certain Otto but then took the surname Onegin (after the Pushkin hero) and moved to Paris where he founded the first Pushkin museum in the world. Nabokov mentions several times Ott-Onegin (sic!), and his collection of Pushkin’s autographs, in the Commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (1964).

Like his prototype, the fictional Nezhdanov is an illegitimate child. His father, Prince G., himself chose the surname for his son by a governess, who came to this world unexpected (in Ada, both Van and Ada are unexpected children of Demon and Marina). “The Virgin Soil” begins in Nezhdanov’s flat in St. Petersburg in which several of his friends meet each other. One of them, the Mashurin girl, just passed the examination allowing her to work as a midwife. It is interesting to note that the most famous Russian obstetrician, the director of the Obstetrician Institute in St-Petersburg, the obstetrician of the Imperial Court, was D. O. Ott (1855-1929). His family name differs with only one letter (or, rather, its absence) from the name of the man who has served as the prototype of the hero of “The Virgin Soil.” Moreover, Nabokov wrote the name “Otto-Onegin” without the second “o,” thus creating a semblance of kinship between the family in which the prototype of Nezhdanov was raised and that of the famous physician. It seems to me that this (as well as the fact that Lopatin’s memoirs appeared in the magazine Krasnaia Nov’, “The Red Virgin Soil”) allowed Nabokov to link Mashurin’s profession not only to the theme of illegitimacy in Ada, but also to the theme of doctors and the floramors in this novel.

Commenting on the name of the first in the series of Ada’s doctors, “Dr Lapiner” (from lapin, French for “rabbit”) – who assists in the delivery when Van, Marina’s first child, is born (1.1) – Vivian Darkbloom, the author of “Notes to Ada,” says: “For some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits.” Rabbit (painted by Bosch near Eve in the left panel of “The Garden of the Earthly Delights”) is a popular symbol of prolificacy; therefore it is no wonder that the name of the doctor who assists in the childbirth is connected to rabbits. But how to explain the fact that the name of the doctor who helps Van and Ada to pass away, Lagosse (with lagos, Greek for “hare,” in it), is also linked to rodents? It seems to me that the answer to this question should be looked for in the last paragraph of Lopatin’s “Reminiscences about Turgenev.” The author of “The Hunter’s Notes” was once summoned to the Senate to be interrogated in connection with the affair of Serno-Soloviovich (“the Turgenevian dash” in this name is mentioned in “The Gift”). The writer was given the possibility to learn in advance the questions he will be asked and the depositions about him. “And, reading those depositions and explanations,” Turgenev said, “I so often heard in them the ‘hare cry’ that is so familiar to us, hunters.”

One of Turgenev’s best books is the collection of stories “The Hunter’s Notes” (1852). It has deeply impressed the future Emperor Alexander II and is said to have affected his decision to abolish serfdom in Russia (with the introduction of which by the tsar Boris Godunov the appearance of the saying about the Yuriev den’ is connected). But the revolutionary movement did not subside with the liberation of serfs; on the contrary, it received a new impulse. One attempt upon the life of the “tsar-liberator” followed another. Telling to his retinue about the attempt of Soloviov (April 2, 1979, twelve days after Lopatin’s meeting with Turgenev in St. Petersburg; one of the next attempts proved fateful for Alexander II), the tsar said that he (Soloviov) “had hunted me like a hare.” The terror in Russia was only increasing since then, having reached its apogee in the nineteen thirties, when the country was ruled not by the Romanovs anymore, but by sons and grandchildren of those “nihilists” who had been hunted like hares by the government and to several representatives of whom the author of “Fathers and Sons” had felt such a warm sympathy. Those new people turned the whole country into one big hunting ground, from which, in the course of several decades, the incessant heart-rending hare cry was heard. The best book on Turgenev that appeared in the twentieth century, “The Life of Turgenev” (1931), was written by the émigré author, B. K. Zaitsev (1881-1972; zaiats is Russian for “hare”).

One can object that this is another coincidence, that no connection exists between rabbit, the emblem of the Playboy magazine (known as Povesa on Antiterrain), and the floramors in Ada; between the hare that, in Turgenev’s story “Chertopkhanov and Nedopiuskin,” is wounded by Yermolay (the narrator’s hunting friend) and then cruelly killed by Chertopkhanov and the bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off whose image Ada evokes in her first letter to Van (2.1); between the young hare that drowned in a ditch mentioned by Turgenev in a letter from Courtavenelle to Pauline Viardot, and Lucette, whom – because she embarked the “Tobakoff” at the last moment – Van calls “the transatlantic stowaway” (3.5; zaiats being Russian for “stowaway”); finally, between Dr Bazarov (the father, as well as the son) and Dr Krolik (krolik means “rabbit” in Russian), Ada’s “court jeweler” (1.13). All this might be true, but there definitely is something in common between Bazarov junior’s attitude to death and that of Van Veen. Just as Bazarov believed that, after his death, a burdock will grow on his grave, young Van, who despised death, flatly refuses to visit the late Krolik’s grave (1.41). On the other hand, there is something in common in the respective attitudes to death of Bazarov’s and Van Veen’s creators. Openly denying – usually, through the mouths of their characters – the immortality of human soul, both Turgenev and Nabokov secretly believed in it (about Nabokov’s attitude to death see my article “Ada as a Mystical Novel”). Turgenev said (see Edmond and Jules de Goncourts’ “Diary,” the entry of March 6, 1882) about a certain “Slavic haze” veiling from him the thought of death. “In our country, when one is caught by the snow-storm, people say: ‘don’t think of the cold, or you’ll freeze!’ Well, thanks to the Slavic haze, of which I was talking, the Slav doesn’t think of the cold during a snow-storm, and, in me, the thought of death pales at once and vanishes.”

In his article “Near ‘the Russian idea’” (1912), V. V. Rozanov recounts an actual episode from the life of Bismarck, who, in his ambassador days in Russia, was caught by a snow-storm during a hunt. Bismarck was rescued by his Russian coachman, who firmly believed that he and his master will not freeze and kept repeating only one Russian word: nitschego (in the sense “everything will be fine”). Bismarck memorized this word (that he barely understood) for all his life and, having become the Chancellor, liked to repeat it at difficult moments. It is not clear whether he knew that, literally, nichego meant the same as Latin nihil, from which “nihilists” derive – but this does not matter. What matters is that Rozanov begins his piece (to which I hope to return in one of my future essays) with the analysis of “several most interesting articles on the present and future of Russia” by a certain T. Ardov (the pen name of Vladimir Tardov, a specialist in Persian culture and minor poet, 1879-1938, who perished in the USSR). I hope that this coincidence (the last one in this article) will convince the still doubting skeptics if not of the immortality of the soul, then at least of the truth of the assumption that Turgenev and his works play an important role in Ada.

According to Ada (1.37), the Ardis larch plantation was borrowed from Mansfield Park, the estate in the eponymous novel (1814) by Jane Austen. It seems to me that many trees in the wonderful park of the Ardis manor were transplanted there directly from Russian classics. Thus, “Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak” (1.34), clearly hints at Pushkin, the master of Boldino and author of the famous line U lukomor’ia dub zelionyi (“A green oak [grows] near the creek”). Interestingly, it was also Turgenev who gave names to trees, calling the beloved birch tree “Gretchen” and the oak tree, “Homer.” We do not know what was the name of the birch tree, under which Ada explains to Van that “the circular marbling she shared with Turgenev’s Katya… were called ‘waltzes’ in California” (1.17), but it is possible that it had once grown in Turgenev’s Spasskoe. Katya is a character in “Fathers and Sons” and it seems to me that the interplay of sunlight and foliage shadow and Ada’s games with light and shade, her “roundlets of live light” (1.8), can be traced back to this Turgenev novel. One of its crucial scenes, the dialogue of Arkadiy with Katya, takes place in the shade of the big ash tree (chapter XXV). I think that the same breeze that, “stirring the leaves of the ash tree, lightly moved back and fore, and along the dark path and the yellow back of Fifi [the resting borzoi dog that assumed a “rabbitlike posture”], pale flecks of sunlight” blows in Ardis moving the shadows and eclipsing Ada’s golden gouts of light. And is it not from Turgenev’s “Smoke” beginning with its characters (among whom there are several ardent admirers of “camellias”) meeting under l’arbre russe, “the Russian tree,” that nocturna – a keen midnight breeze that, according to Sore, the old night watchman at Ardis, “came tumbling the foliage troussant la raimée” (1.34) – blows?

Thanks to Sergey Karpukhin for his help in the translation

ADA AS NABOKOV’S ANTIUTOPIA SET ON ANTITERRA

I’m not a raven (voron), I’m a baby raven (voronionok); the raven is still flying.

Pugachyov’s words in reply to Count Panin who called him vor, “a thief.”

These are only little flowers; little berries are yet to come.

Russian saying.

All great dreams of Russian literature are prophetic. But even some of its less brilliant dreams can be prophetic. For instance, much of what is going on and talked about in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (the novel that resembles a rambling nightmare) actually came true in the twentieth century. This can possibly be explained by the fact that, according to Dostoevsky (see his wife’s “Reminiscences”), all of his dreams were prophetic. Unlike the Russian writer, George Orwell (1903-1950), the English journalist and author of several novels that Nabokov disliked as much as he did Dostoevsky’s work, apparently didn’t possess that gift of having prophetic dreams. His dark fantasy, Nineteen eighty-four (1949), was never fulfilled. Fortunately for Orwell’s countrymen, Britain didn’t become a totalitarian country, Airstrip One, a small part of Oceania.

The political situation on Antiterra – the planet on which Ada is set – much more than Orwell’s fully totalitarian world resembles the situation that has developed on our Earth in the years of the Cold War (when Ada was written). It is determined by the confrontation between the free West and Tartary, the totalitarian country occupying the territory from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, which is concealed from the rest of the world not by the Iron Curtain, though, but by the Golden Veil. This veil instantly reminds one of “the golden cover” cast over the abyss in several poems by Tyutchev: “Day and Night” (1839) and “Holy night has climbed across the sky…” (1849). For Tyutchev, the day is that blissful cover cast “over the secret world of spirits.” Night comes and tosses this cover aside,

revealing the abyss

with all its mists and fearsome sights.

No wall divides us from them,

which is why we’re afraid of the night!

(“Day and Night,” translation by F. Jude)

Nabokov uses in Ada Tyutchev’s metaphor, but interprets it in his own way. Golden veil is cast not over the part of the planet lit up by the sun, but only over Tartary, the dark totalitarian country. Were it not for that veil, the eternal night would reign there, as it does in Tartar. But, as it is, Percy de Prey, who had landed in the Crimea and was wounded in a fight with Tartars, thinks that a serene sky over his head is not much different from Ladore’s (1.42). However, “the sun of love” that poured its rays so generously over Ardis apparently doesn’t shine on this sky, because already in the next moment Percy is shot dead by the good-natured Tartar who was examining with curiosity Percy’s automatic pistol.

Besides Percy, another character of Ada reflects upon the oneness of the sky (that he sees colored differently). As Demon Veen, Van’s and Ada’s father, is heading for Ladore where he will attend his cousin Daniel’s funeral (2.10), the thought crosses his mind that, “after all, there is but one sky (white, with minute multi-colored optical sparks).” This casual thought makes him interrupt his hurried walk across Manhattan and enter the skyscraper in whose penthouse apartments his son is living (as Demon believed, with little Cordula de Prey, the second cousin of the late Percy). That step of Demon proved fatal to Van and Ada, because it led to their exposure. Instead of Cordula, Demon finds at Van’s place Ada and finally learns that his children have been lovers for many years. He orders Van to stop the affair with his sister – the edict that Van, as a loving son, cannot disobey.

Now, the curious thought that “the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here” also comes to Winston Smith, the hero of Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four. It happens just before the Thought Police bursts into the room that Winston hired to meet Julia, in order to arrest the lovers and throw them into the torture-chambers of the Ministry of Love (Part Two, 9). Since this can hardly be a mere coincidence, we have to look closer at the plot of Orwell’s novel (which, like the plot of Orwell’s fairy story Animal Farm, 1945, at first seems to have little, if anything, to do with that of Ada). It is particularly interesting to compare the geopolitical situation on Antiterra to the one we see in Nineteen eighty-four. Unlike the politically bipolar Antiterra, the world in Orwell’s novel is divided in three great powers: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, each perpetually at war with the other (this war will never end, because, as one of the Party’s slogans says: “war is peace”). Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Straight. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. The novel is set in London (unlike the country, its former capital hasn’t been renamed). The time is presumably 1984 (the calendars have stopped to be entirely reliable). Oceania is ruled by “the Party” that came to power in the middle of the twentieth century, after a series of revolutions and civil wars. The protagonist is an ordinary Party member. The Party’s leader is the mysterious Big Brother. The posters with his portrait (looking very much like Stalin) are everywhere, even on the landings of the house in which Winston has his apartments. The caption beneath the portrait says: Big Brother is watching you. The party members indeed are always under cover. Even when they are at home, they are watched by the telescreens – television sets that simultaneously serve as video cameras. A girl in the telescreen (the instructress in the morning gymnastics program, for example) can see all the program viewers just as they see her and can even address the particular person whom she singles out for reprimand or praise.

Nothing of this exists on Antiterra (at least, in the free Western hemisphere and countries of the British Commonwealth). But there are no ordinary television sets there either (the Antiterrans have “dorotellies” that use water instead of the electricity banned as a result of the L disaster). And yet at least one technical device mentioned in Ada is an obvious reference to several words in Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. Minirechi (“talking minarets” invented in Tartary and used for propaganda: 1.24) echoes both “Miniluv” (the ministry of love) and “speakwrite” (rechepis, if translated to Russian), Winston’s main tool – a kind of dictophone that he uses in the writing of his articles. Another word in Newspeak, duckspeak, “to quack like a duck,” is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. “Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise” (Part One, 5).

A similar dichotomy of meaning is inherent in the English word ‘husked’ that, depending on the context, can stand for opposite things, covered and uncovered. Ada points out this word to Van when they make love just before the grand picnic on Ada’s birthday in Ardis the Second (1.39). The drunken Percy de Prey arrives at it as an uninvited guest (who is, according to a Russian saying, worse than a Tartar). At one point the scuffle starts between Van and Percy, in which Van wins. A few days later the pity for Percy makes Ada succumb to his persistent advances. But she doesn’t really love him and, knowing that, Percy goes to the war in the hope to get killed. It is interesting how Ada attempts to excuse her weakness. “We are all doomed,” she says to Van, “but some are more doomed than others.” (1.41)

But also Winston Smith, the hero of Nineteen eighty-four, would have agreed with this (although he would have interpreted Ada’s words differently). As he talks to Syme (the specialist in Newspeak, who draws Winston’s attention to the word duckspeak) he cannot help thinking that one of these days Syme will be vaporized. “He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party doesn’t love such people. One day he will disappear. It is written on his face” (Part One, 5). And Winston is not mistaken. One day Syme simply disappears. A list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one, gets one name shorter (Part Two, 6). At the same time, Winston, who secretly hates Big Brother (which is already the greatest thought crime), constantly feels that he, too, is doomed – especially after his affair with Julia has started (party members are not allowed to have sex with anyone except their wives). He knows that sooner or later he will be arrested. Like Ada, Winston realizes that “we are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others.”

This maxim, particularly when given the narrow political meaning, looks singularly like the only commandment that remains undeleted (and is complemented compared to its initial version) on the barn wall at the end of Animal Farm (Chapter 10): “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell’s “fairy story” (1945) is a satire on the USSR, in which Orwell, the confirmed Trotskyist, believed the Revolution leaders had “degenerated.” In the beginning of the story, farm animals revolt against humans and expel them from their farm. In the end, the pigs, who, under the leadership of the boar Napoleon (another caricature on Stalin!), have usurped all power at the farm, abandon the main principle of “animalism” (“Four legs good, two legs bad”), enter into dealings with neighbors and begin to turn into humans themselves. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which is which.”

Nabokov saw the Revolution as a directly opposed process. Not animals become humans, but, on the contrary, men turn into animals of different colors and habits. The Revolution leaders become blood-thirsty beasts, while the vast masses of common people are made into a dumb herd that submissively allows the yokes to be put on their necks. In Nineteen eighty-four, the “proles” (not only proletarians, but all ordinary people, the Party non-members) are compared to “cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina” (Part One, chapter 7). Orwell’s mistake is that his O’Brien (one of the Party bosses, Winston’s evil genius), despite his incredible brutality, is depicted as a human being. The same can be said of Big Brother under whose black mustache there lurks a mocking smile. True, his looks are not too attractive, but still he is an anthropomorphic creature. In a sense, the portrait drawn by Mandelstam in his epigram on Stalin (“We live feeling no land beneath us”) is closer to the original:

His fat fingers are worm-fat,

And his words are absolute, like heavy dumb-bells.

His cockroach whiskers are laughing,

And his boot tops shine.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -

fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger.

The Stalin of Mandelstam’s epigram is a monstrous insect in boots. It resembles Tarakanishche, the monster of a cockroach that in Korney Chukovsky’s fairy tale of that title (this wonderful children’s tale in verse, written in 1921 and first published two years later, when Lenin was still alive, wasn’t meant as a satire on Stalin, as almost all adult readers believed it to be) terrorizes all the animals on Earth, including even elephants (only the kangaroo isn’t scared by it, and the sparrow that comes and pecks the villain). On the other hand, this is the grown-up cockroach from the fable Tarakan (“The Cockroach”) by Ignat Lebyadkin, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (more about him, see my essay “Russian poets and potentates as ‘Scots’ and Scandinavians’ in Nabokov’s Ada):

Zhil na svete tarakan,

Tarakan ot detstva,

I potom popal v stakan,

Polnyi mukhoedstva…

There was once a cockroach,

That had been cockroach since childhood,

That one day found itself in a tumbler

Full of flies trying to eat other…

As to Stalin’s retinue, the “thin-necked leaders,” they remind one of the monsters in Tatiana’s prophetic dream who surround Onegin (Eugene Onegin, Chapter Five, XVI-XVII):

One horned, with a dog’s face,

Another with a cock’s head;

Here is a witch with a goat’s beard;

Here, prim and proud, a skeleton;

Yonder, a dwarf with a small tail; and there,

A half crane and half cat.

Still more frightening, still more wondrous:

There is a crab astride the spider;

There on a goose’s neck a skull

In a red calpack twirls;

There a windmill the squat-jig dances

And with its vane-wings rasps and waves.

Barks, laughs, singing, whistling and claps.

Parle of man and stamp of steed!

Onegin turns out to be the master at this orgy of demons. Everybody obeys his orders: “He gives a signal – and all bustle; / he drinks – all drink and all cry out…” Similarly, Stalin in Mandelstam’s poem is the host at the feast – or, rather, the banquet with Caucasian wines. He is a grosser master of ceremonies (“prates and points a finger”) but also a much crueler one. While Onegin, at the end of Tatiana’s dream, murders only Lensky (whom he is soon to kill in waking life), Stalin issues one death sentence after another:

Kak podkovy kuiot za ukazom ukaz:

Komu v pakh, komu v lob, komu v brov’, komu v glaz.

Chto ni kazn’ u nego, to malina

I shirokaia grud’ osetina.

[He is] forging his decrees like horseshoes –

Into groins, into foreheads, in eyebrows and eyes.

Whatever the execution, it’s a raspberry

And [he has] the broad chest of an Ossete.

Mandelstam’s epigram plays in Ada a covert but very important role. Nabokov plays upon the blunder that Lowell has made in the translation of the penultimate line (in Lowell’s version, Stalin puts in his mouth a raspberry after each execution). Characteristically, for his elaborate parody he turns to Eugene Onegin (the novel that has also suffered from many mistranslations). Nabokov makes Demon Veen a spectator of a remarkably silly performance, Eugene and Lara, the stage adaptation of Pushkin’s novel (Tatiana Larin must have been confused in it with Lara, the heroine of Pasternak’s “Doktor Zhivago,” whose illegitimate daughter by Zhivago is named Taniusha), in which Marina, the future mother of Van and Ada, plays the part of Lara (1.2). One of the crucial scenes (the heroine’s tryst with Baron O.) is preceded by a lyrical intermezzo. “In a splendid orchard several young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed – the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat.”

Demon watches this intermezzo (one can recognize in it the tremendously distorted episode of servant girls picking berries at the end of Canto Three of “Onegin”) from his seat in the pit. A moment ago he “deflowered” Marina in a green room, winning a bet that he had made with Prince N. (a homonym of Tatiana’s husband). He acted not quite gentlemanly, but very much like Onegin (who is also “a honorary citizen of the coulisses” and “inconstant worshipper of enchanting actresses:” Chapter One, XVII). Demon begins a love affair with Marina but soon discovers that he has a rival, Baron d’Onsky (the name that as I will show below can be traced back to Onegin’s horse). Demon challenges d’Onsky to a duel, in which the latter receives a serious wound in the groin (strictly speaking, the dueling code prohibited thrusts or shots “below the waist,” but Demon had strong reasons to break this rule). One of the seconds in this duel is a certain “Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel.”

Stalin (reduced from generalissimo to colonel) can be easily recognized under that disguise, but why is his name split in two parts? Is it not because there is alin in malina, the Russian word for raspberry – the berry that, according to Lowell, Stalin put into his mouth after each execution? Besides, alyi (red) is the traditional Russian epithet of blood. Finally, there is an old connection in Russian literature between berries and duels. The hero of Pushkin’s “Vystrel” (“The Shot,” 1830) calmly eats cherries waiting for his adversary, Silvio, to shoot at him (the episode mentioned in Nabokov’s Despair). Thus, the “baccate” theme (as we shall call the theme of berries) in Ada is inseparably connected, on the one hand, with the theme of sensual pleasure and voluptuousness (thanks to a woman-sized strawberry in Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which is mentioned by Demon: 2.10, and Khlestakov’s phrase in Gogol’s “Inspector” popol’zovat’sia naschiot klubnichki, literally: “to treat oneself to strawberries,” but meaning: “to make love to a woman,” that became proverbial in Russian), and, on the other, with that of blood and death. (It is worth noting that in another poem mistranslated by Lowell, “Net, ne spriatat’sia mne ot velikoi mury…” “No, I can’t hide from the great nonsense,” 1931, in which Moscow is called kurva, a whore, Mandelstam says of himself: “ia tramvainaia vishenka strashnoi pory:” “I am a little streetcar cherry of horrible times.”) This connection becomes particularly explicit when poor Aqua, Demon’s mad wife (and the twin sister of Marina), who commits suicide by taking an overdose of drugs, is compared to a Russian country girl lakomyashcheysya yagodami, feasting on berries (1.3).

Aqua’s poisonous berries (multicolored pills) help her to get out from the prison of her own sick mind (“for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures”). That’s why it seems to me that those “berries” hint at the two odious heads of Stalin’s secret police: Yagoda and Beria. While the name of the former is homonymic with yagoda, Russian for berry, the name of the latter sounds, by a rare coincidence, like the English word “berry.” By swallowing “a little lethal” Yagoda and Beria, the torturers of millions of men (but both of whom were later themselves executed), Aqua manages to break free – even if she has to pay her life for it.

In order to commit a suicide in a mental institution, Aqua, its patient, repeats the clever trick of a certain Eleonore Bonvard, the patient of a similar clinic in France. In his “Annotations to Ada” (The Nabokovian, no. 33, fall 1994, p. 59), Brian Boyd comments that “Eleonore Bonvard” is a distorted Antiterran version of Emma Bovary’s name. This is not quite correct. “Eleonore Bonvard” combines Emma’s surname with the first name of Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), the first translator of Flaubert’s novel into English (Nabokov used this translation, which he had to revise considerably, in his Cornell lectures on Flaubert), while hinting at Bouvard, a character in Flaubert’s unfinished novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet” (1880). The youngest daughter of Karl Marx (who is known on Antiterra as Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays: 2.5), Eleanor committed a suicide when she found out that Edward Aveling, her civic husband, had secretly married another woman. Like the heroine of the novel she had translated, Eleanor took poison (another instance when life mimics art). She didn’t eat, though, like poor Emma, arsenic, but drank prussic acid.

The person who took prussic acid dies an agonizing death but much more quickly than the person who took arsenic. Chemists and medical people (or those, who, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, dubbed in chemistry and medicine) know that the dead body of such a person reeks of bitter almonds. That unappetizing detail is important because it evokes once again the name Mandelstam (German for “almond tree”) and introduces a new name: Gorky (Russian for “bitter”). Gorky (the penname of Alexey Maximovich Peshkov, 1868-1936) was the writer, of whose sudden death Yagoda (who was actually responsible for the murder of Gorky’s son Maxim) was accused in 1938. While his name mysteriously links Mandelstam to Eleanor Marx’s death, “the berries of the poisonous cold” (as the poet called stars in his “Lines on the Unknown Soldier,” 1937) link him to her birth. Both of them are Capricorns, whose birthdays practically coincide. Mandelstam was born “in the night of January the second and third of the unreliable year eighteen ninety-one” (“Lines on the Unknown Soldier”). That old-style date corresponds to January 15 by the new style. Eleanor Marx was born on January 16. This near-coincidence seems to play a hidden role in Ada where birthdays of a number of characters coincide (Aqua, Marina, Demon Veen, and his cousin Daniel were born on January 5; besides, Demon’s love affair with Marina started on that day in 1868).

In real life, January 5 is Vera Nabokov’s birthday. Another important date in Ada is April 23 (on that day Aqua marries Demon in 1869 and Andrey Vinelander dies in 1922). By the old style, it is Yuriev den’ (the serfs in ancient Russia could change their masters on that day, its “abolishment” by Boris Godunov practically meant the introduction of serfdom) and the birthday of “Marx-père” (b. on May 5, 1818), while by the new style it is Shakespeare’s and Nabokov’s birthday. (Interestingly, it was in her letter of April 23, 1886, that Eleanor Marx wrote her sister Laura Lafargue of the completion of her translation of “Madame Bovary.” Nabokov might have known this, but what he would know for sure is that in her foreword to the first edition, London, 1886, Eleanor Marx described her translation as that of “a conscientious worker.”) It coincides, or almost does, with the birthday (April 22, 1870) of one of Nabokov’s bêtes noires, Lenin. In his famous essay “V. I. Lenin” (1924), Gorky accused the émigré periodicals of failing to display tact in regard to Lenin’s death and set them the example of foreign newspapers that had paid – often despite their enmity toward the Soviet régime – the tribute to “the great man.” According to Gorky, one doesn’t feel in the tone of their obituaries the physiological pleasure cynically expressed in the aphorism “the corpse of an enemy always smells good.”

This aphorism (whose authorship belongs to the Roman Emperor Aulus Vitellius, 15-69; see Suetonius, “The Life of Twelve Caesars”) is not mentioned in Ada directly. But the name of its author is present in ‘Vanvitelli’ (who is mentioned in the same sentence as ‘minirechi’) and its intonation can be perceived in a malicious thought that crosses Van’s mind. Looking at the flowers in a botanical atlas and coming across a piece of text saying that in order to attract bees some orchids imitate the odor of dead workers, Van (who just learned that Percy is about to leave for the Crimea in a couple of days) can’t help thinking that “dead soldiers might smell even better” (1.40). Nabokov prompts the reader to remember the proverb about an enemy’s corpse. Why does he want us to do it? It seems to me that this is his roundabout way of saying that Lenin’s corpse (that of “the leader of the world proletariat”) in the mausoleum “smells good” to him. However, the corpse of “the great military leader” Iosif Stalin (that at one time has been lying beside Lenin but later was brought out of the mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin wall, beside Gorky) smells even better.

Of course, this shouldn’t be understood literally. Nabokov knew too well that all corpses – of soldiers, workers and their leaders, or even of heroes and saints – smelt equally bad. Their smell may be attractive to flies (some orchids take advantage of it by imitating the stink of a putrid flesh) but never to bees (which is as absurd as marshmallows and peanuts growing on fruit trees, or the famous razvesistaia kliukva, “spreading cranberry,” of Dumas-père). Nabokov is not rejoicing at the death of this or that smerdyakov (he would certainly remember, though, Herzen’s amusing comment on the death of Nicolas I: “the tsar was enrolled in the department of chemistry”), but engages in a controversy with those who, like Nesbit in Speak, Memory, condemn Stalin as a traitor of the Revolution, but see in Lenin’s rule a kind of “quinquennium Neronis.” To people sharing this opinion belong both Orwell and Pasternak, who’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” (1957) Nabokov considered an anti-Stalin book, but not an anti-Lenin one. Interestingly, there is in “Zhivago” its own baccate theme: the chapter that deals with the hero’s stay in a Red guerillas camp (Book Two, Part Twelve) is entitled “Ashberries in sugar.” At the end of this chapter Zhivago leaves the camp in which he spent one year and a half, and it is a rowan tree that helps him to do it. To a sentinel who challenged him Zhivago says that he wanted some ashberries from a tree growing outside the camp. Having reached the tree on his skis and shaken the snow (“sugar”) off its twigs and blood-red berries, Yuri realizes that he will see Lara once again: “Ia uvizhu tebia, krasota moia pisanaia, kniaginia moia riabinushka, rodnaia moia krovinushka” (I shall see you, my fabulous beauty, my princess rowan tree, the drop of blood which is my own).

Pasternak (another “botanical” name that means “parsnip” in English; Nabokov, however, plays on the name’s different aspect) has “sweetened” not only these ashberries, but his entire novel, turning it into a second-rate melodrama. As a result, the effect when, at the end of another chapter (Part Fourteen “Again in Varykino”), the drops of blood on the snow beside the corpse of Strelnikov, who shot himself, are compared to frozen ashberries is also melodramatic. Nabokov as it were gives back to berries their authentic taste and, to the disastrous events of Russian history, their tragic bitterness. He achieves this by means of three oppositions:

ZHIV –– MERTV

SLADKO –– GOR’KO

MINIMUS –– MAXIMUS

Of the six words, three (zhiv, mertv and sladko) are in the text of Ada; the other three are present in it implicitly and should be discovered by the reader. Doctor Zhivago became on Antiterra Doctor Mertvago, the hero of two novels: Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, “a mystical romance by a pastor” (1.8), and Mertvago Forever (2.5). As Vivian Darkbloom explains in his “Notes to Ada,” zhiv means in Russian ‘alive’ and mertv ‘dead.’ What is ‘alive’ in Pasternak’s novel proves ‘dead’ in Ada. ‘Alive’ and ‘dead’ change places on Antiterra. But the same must also happen in the case of two other pairs: sladko – gor’ko and minimus – maximus.

The exclamation “Sladko (sweet)!” is put in Ada into the mouth of Pushkin, who voluptuously scratches a mosquito-bitten spot (1.17). With even greater rapture Ada scratches mosquito bites (of the different species Culex chateaubriandi) causing blood literally stream down her shins (it should be noted that all this happens practically on the eve of the night of the Burning Barn, when Van and Ada make love for the first time). While the Latin name of the invented insect alludes to Chateaubriand, the word komar (Russian for “mosquito”) hints at Komarovsky, the villain in Pasternak’s novel who is responsible for the suicide of Yuri’s father and who seduces Lara when she is still very young (four years older, though, than the barely twelve-year-old Ada at the time her romance with Van starts; besides, it is not Van who debauches the innocent girl, but rather the other way round: Ada seduces her Adam). Recalling this in a conversation with Zhivago, Lara irritates, as it were, an old wound: “I am broken; there is a crack across my whole life. I was prematurely, criminally too early made a woman, which initiated me to life from the worst side…” (“Doctor Zhivago,” Part Thirteen “Opposite the house with figures,” section 12). She doesn’t mention the name of her seducer, but Yuri guesses it and names the man himself, making Lara blush. (Interestingly, this habit is also characteristic of Ada who blushes, for instance, when, on the morning following the night of the Burning Barn, Dan asks her what she was doing when everybody admired the fire: 1.20).

“Sladko!” is an untypical exclamation in the Russian language, unlike its antonym, “gor’ko.” It is the word, with which guests at a Russian wedding summon the groom and the bride to kiss. The guests ask to “sweeten” the wine and shout “gor’ko!” at Lara’s wedding with Pasha Antipov, the future Red Commander Strelnikov (“Doctor Zhivago,” Part Four “The pressing inevitabilities,” section 4). But this marriage proves unhappy, just as unhappy prove the marriages of Van’s and Ada’s parents: Demon’s with Aqua and Marina’s with Dan. In the beginning of Ada Van and Ada find in the attic of the Ardis House Marina’s old herbarium and solve, with its help, the mystery of their births (1.1). They deduce from it that Van is not Aqua’s son and Ada is not Daniel’s daughter and that they are not first cousins but brother and sister (incest in Ada matters only in so far as it is an anagram of “insect”). Their parents’ marriages are only a screen concealing this fact. But Marina’s album is what we call in Russian tsvetochki (“little flowers,” nothing in comparison to what is yet to come); yagodki (“little berries,” a really bad thing) are the two tragedies to which Demon’s and Marina’s deception eventually leads: the suicide of Aqua and, many years later, the suicide of Lucette. But Ada is a novel that can be read on several levels. That’s why it seems to me that Nabokov puts into the saying about little flowers and little berries (mentioned also in the epilogue of “Doctor Zhivago”) yet another meaning. Namely, ghastly as they are, the horrors of Lenin’s rule are only “little flowers” when compared to “little berries” of Stalin’s terror.

Nabokov would certainly know the pun whose authorship is ascribed to Karl Radek (a big joker, whom Stalin, an even bigger one, later sent to a labor camp where he perished): my zhiviom v maksimal’no gor’kuiu epokhu (“we live in the maximally bitter epoch”). On the other hand, he knew that Gorky was the author of the preface (its main idea is “one has to know one’s enemy in order to beat him”) to the Soviet edition of Chateaubriand’s “René.” We shan’t dwell here on this foreword (apparently written with the only purpose to enable the publication of the story by a “counterrevolutionary” author), neither shall we discuss Chateaubriand’s story itself (which is very important in Ada’s). We shall limit ourselves to noting that Nabokov, like Radek, plays on both the “name” and “surname” of Alexey Peshkov’s pseudonym (and perhaps also on his real surname that comes from peshka, Russian for “pawn” – since Gorky was but a pawn in Stalin’s game). The adverb “maximally” derives from maximus, Latin for “biggest” or “greatest.” Apart from the fact that Maximus was the name of several Roman Emperors (who lived after Suetonius, so the latter couldn’t compile their curriculi vitae), its opposite, Minimus, is the name of the poet in Animal Farm, who composed an ode celebrating Comrade Napoleon (chapter VIII).

Orwell belongs thus to the writers (Tolstoy, author of the short story “The Berries,” 1906, should be added to their list) who are important in connection with Ada‘s baccate theme. This is confirmed by the fact that, in Animal Farm, one of its inhabitants, a gander, commits a suicide by swallowing deadly nightshade berries (chapter VIII). To the baccate theme, and to Orwell, is linked in Ada the “ursine” theme. And no wonder: the words “bear,” berry,” and “beer” (Aqua’s last doctor, Sig Heiler, had a reputation of a “near-genius in a usual sense of near-beer:” 1.3) sound similarly in English (the first to discover this similarity was Jansy Mello; see her post to Nabokv-L of 26.02.05). Besides, all of them are close to bor (Russian for “pine forest”), one of the words that Tatiana looks up in her dream interpretation book (note that Aqua, too, passes a pine forest on her way to the gulch where she eats her “berries”). Finally, a bear is a great lover of berries (particularly, raspberries).

Another connection between Ada’s baccate and ursine themes can be established via Floeberg’s Ursula. Van quotes a short fragment from that invented novel when he describes the scenery of his first tryst with Ada on the day following the night of the Burning Barn (1.20). The style of this “quotation” suggests that Ursula is the Antiterran version of “Madame Bovary.” Unlike the slightly distorted name of the author (incidentally, “floeberg” is a mass of floes resembling an iceberg), the name of the title character radically differs from the one that was given to her by Flaubert. Why? The name “Ursula” (that of a legendary British princess, who is said to have been martyred, with eleven thousand virgins, at Cologne) comes from ursus, Latin for “bear.” Flaubert, who famously said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” also called himself a bear (the animal that he physically resembled). On the other hand, Ursus is a character in Hugo’s “The Man who Laughs” (1869), whose tame wolf is named Homo (Latin for “man”). In Ada, ‘Ursus’ is the name of the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major (or simply “Man”), to which Van takes his sisters (2.8). Here, in a heart-rending scene, the slightly tipsy Lucette pours upon Van her wild passion: “I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevynosimo)…”

We first learn that Lucette is madly in love with Van in the Part Two of Ada (2.5), when, after a four-year-long separation, she visits him in Kingston (a year before she wrote Van a long letter, in which, like Pushkin’s Tatiana, she made her declaration of love). “A black bear [Lucette has a fur coat on] with bright russet locks (the sun had reached its first parlor window) stood awaiting him.” Despite her beauty, this and all the rest of Lucette’s desperate attempts to win Van’s heart fail: he invariably spurns her. She makes her last try on board the transatlantic liner, where, a few hours before Lucette’s death, she and Van eat a roast bearlet à la Tobakoff (3.8).

While the baccate theme is mostly associated with Aqua, the ursine one is inseparably connected to Lucette. Like the theme of berries (or that of feasts, which also plays a prominent part in Ada), the ursine theme goes back to “Eugene Onegin.” There is in Tatiana’s dream one more character whom we didn’t mention – the bear, “the shaggy footman,” who comes to her rescue at the perilous footbridge over the brook and brings her to the hut of his “gossip” (Onegin reveling in the company of demons) in the woods. Not only all the bears (of which there is actually none in Ada), but all animals (of which there are more than it might seem) in the novel, descend, in a sense, from this bear. The point is that URSA (Union des Républiques Socialistes Animales) was the title that Orwell suggested, in a letter to Yvonne Duvet, for the French translation of Animal Farm that, in the same letter, he described as “a novel contre Stalin.” Ada is also a novel contre Lenin, Stalin & co. (see my essay “Russian poets and potentates as Scots and Scandinavians in Ada; three ‘Tartar’ poets” in The Nabokovian, no. 56), but, unlike Orwell’s satire (or, say, Pushkin’s heart-rending “Fairy Tale about a She-Bear,” 1830, in which animals are given features, and even professions, of men), many animals in it are disguised as humans (and not vice versa). For instance, one can discern in d’Onsky (“an easy-going, lanky, likeable fellow,” nicknamed ‘Skonky,’ which is an anagram of konksy, Russian for “of a horse”) Onegin’s Don stallion, on which he leaves his house from the back porch of every time his neighbors come with a visit (EO, Chapter Two, V). D’Onsky must be a strong and tough lover (as befits a stallion), for even after he has received a wound in the duel with Demon, he is capable of procreation (much later, at Marina’s funeral, we meet his son, a person with only one arm: 3.8). Demon (note that he and d’Onsky have the same London hatter; and, toward the end of Ada, 5.5, we learn that “horses wore hats – yes hats – when heat waves swept Manhattan”) is also a horse (a cross of an Arabian racer with Gogol’s myshinyi zherebchik, “old lecher”), just as his London pal, a certain Paul Whinnier, apparently is one (2.8). Another lover of Marina, the film director G. A. Vronsky, is a boar (as suggested by his name and initials that taken together form the word havron’ia, colloquial Russian for “sow”). He is notable for his indiscriminateness in sexual matters, and his entire appearance (“elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest,” 1.32) that neither hay fever nor dark glasses can improve (1.41) makes him look like that animal. There is something of a pig in the burly, lecherous Percy de Prey, who appears kak ziuzia pianyi (drunk as a sow) at the picknick on Ada’s birthday and “grunts” in a fight with Van (1.39). The Latin actor Pedro, yet another lover of the ageing Marina, is, of course, a monkey (but with beautiful nostrils of a lynx). Making cruel fun of him, Van suggests that Pedro gets himself a cocoanut (1.32). As to Marina herself, she is a cuckoo – the bird that plants her eggs into other birds’ nests (in the present case, into the nest of Aqua, who is associated with a more colorful bird, a pheasant).

Ada’s zoo is heavily populated with animals, whose list can be easily continued. There are animal features in the two main characters, Van and Ada. Ada, who adores everything that crawls and poisons her love portions, is a snake. During her first walk with Van in Ardis Park she informs him that “we can squirm from here in the front hall by a secret passage” (1.8). As to Van, the son of Demon, who is known in society as “Raven Veen,” he resembles sometimes that sinister bird. Its croak is believed to prophesy ill, and it is symptomatic that Ada once calls Van “sinister insister” (1.31). Indeed, Van’s gravest misgivings that he and Ada will never be able to marry prove correct. Even after the death of Marina and Demon, when not a single soul knows that Van and Ada are brother and sister and nothing seems to prevent them from marrying each other, fate separates them once again. Ada refuses to leave for Van’s sake her husband, Andrey Vinelander, when she learns that he is sick with tuberculosis and spends with him his last seventeen years (3.8). Here is a fragment of the dramatic dialogue between Van and Ada just before their longest separation:

‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’

‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’

‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet – ’

‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).

‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène – ’

‘Ach, perestagne!’

‘et le phalène.’

‘Je t’emplie (“prie” and “supplie”), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’

What is it (Van’s curt utterances) but a raven’s croak? It is also more than a mere occurrence that Van is compared in that scene to an epileptic. One might say that Van, “the sinister insister,” nakarkal (“has brought down by his own prophesies;” literally: “has croaked into life”) an epileptic fit to himself. For it is the epilepsy that he prophesizes himself in one of his conversations with Ada in “Ardis the Second:” ‘at worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, “we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds”’ (1.31). Most interestingly, Van’s prophesy comes true: after Andrey Vinelander’s death, Van and Ada reunite and spend the rest of their lives (nearly fifty years) together. It is not for nothing that raven is believed to be a prophetic bird that lives, moreover, three hundred years.

Features and habits of this or that animal can thus be discovered in almost all characters of Ada. Most of them only seem humans, but actually are beasts; and it is not by chance that Antiterra’s other name is Demonia. The creatures that feel well on this planet are demons (like Van and Ada). But those, who don’t have demon blood in their veins or in whom human being predominates over beast (as in Lucette, Aqua, or Van’s black nurse Ruby Black), perish as soon as they come in close contact with fair demons. Lucette, the novel’s central tragic character (she is linked not only to Tatiana of EO, but also to the beautiful Tsarevna Lebed’ from Pushkin’s “Fairy Tale of the Tsar Saltan”) commits a suicide because of the unrequited love to Van. When she looses all hope ever to become his mistress, she jumps from Tobakoff (after having swallowed five pills of a tranquillizer, which connects her suicide to that of Aqua) into black waters of the Atlantic (3.5). Van is responsible, even if he didn’t want it, of her death (for “non-love nearly equals murder,” as Zhivago’s wife Tonia puts it in her fare-well letter to her husband: Part Thirteen, “Opposite the house with figures,” section 18).

It might seem that Van Veen and the invisible and omnipresent Big Brother, the cruel ruler of Oceania in Orwell’s novel, have nothing in common. But the kinship that connects Van to Lucette (he is her older half-brother) and the place where the tragedy happens (ocean) suggest the opposite. There is a direct connection between Orwell’s Big Brother (whose prototype was Stalin) and Nabokov’s hero (note that when Ada meets Van for the first time after Lucette’s death, 3.8, he wears mustache that Ada promptly commands him to shave). But, unlike Orwell’s character, who doesn’t leave his poster, Van Veen is three-dimensional, demoniac and not without special charm. While Big Brother distantly resembles the mighty but somewhat lubochnyi (in the style of lubok, cheap popular print in old Russia) Stalin of Mandelstam’s epigram, Van is closer to the demonically irresistible Onegin of Tatiana’s dream. Like Shakespeare, Nabokov is not afraid of picturing evil in attractive vestments. It seems to me that here lies Nabokov’s main disagreement with the author of Nineteen eighty-four and Animal Farm. In his essay “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) Orwell says: “we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible. No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James.”

We know that there was at least one such man. Although Nabokov felt the world’s injustice and misery at least as deeply as Orwell did (to see this, one has just to read such of his stories as “Cloud, Castle, Lake” or “Tyrants Destroyed”), he didn’t think a purely aesthetic attitude to life impossible. But it doesn’t mean that he has fled the world to live in an ivory tower. On the one hand, Ada is set on the invented planet, Earth’s double, whose description, with all its inhabitants, must have given Nabokov an incomparable aesthetic pleasure (we can only guess how tremendous it was – much surpassing, anyway, the pleasure that I derived from solving some of the riddles implanted by him in the novel). On the other hand, Antiterra is by no means an ideal world, and even in its Western, better, hemisphere, and the free countries of the Eastern, things are not quite perfect. Therefore Ada is not a utopia, but rather an antiutopia, and as that, it is one of the most powerful blows that Nabokov delivered the totalitarian systems, which the twentieth century, one of the most terrible in the history of mankind, was so generous to produce.

Another fruit of that century abhorred by Nabokov was the Freudianism. Nabokov considered the theories of Freud (who almost shares his birthday, May 6, 1856, with Marx and who also has a representative on Antiterra: a certain Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu), with the sexual myth lying at their basis, totalitarian by nature and was surprised that police states didn’t use them to their own purposes. On the contrary, sexual love that had to be replaced by love to the Party and its leaders was suppressed in puritan countries like the USSR. This has found its reflection in Nineteen eighty-four: in the totalitarian Oceania even the love between husband and wife is not encouraged. Sex can be excused only when it serves to procreation. Party members are allowed to marry only if they are physically not too attractive to each other. In order to kill in people the sexual instinct, the Junior Anti-Sex League, to which Julia also at one time belonged, had been founded. Therefore, Winston regards even a simple sexual act, particularly if its goal is pleasure, as a rebellion against the Party and Big Brother.

A different picture we see on Antiterra whose entire Western hemisphere, and part of the Eastern, is covered by the chain of palatial brothels – floramors (their “botanical” name apparently can be explained by the fact that, after the appearance of Dumas-fils’ novel “La dame aux camélias,” 1848, later dramatized by the author and turned into the opera, La Traviata, by Verdi, courtesans were called in Russia “camellias”). Their idea belonged to Eric Veen (not a relative of the protagonist), author of the essay “Villa Venus: an Organized Dream” (2.3). Eric didn’t live to see the realization of his boyhood dream, because at fifteen he perished during a storm in Switzerland (at Ex-en-Valais, the place in which Van was soon to be born), where he recovered from tuberculosis. It was the disease of which another Eric, Blair, who is known to the world under the alias George Orwell, died. Unlike his Antiterran namesake, he didn’t suffer from erotomania in his boyhood, but at least one detail of his biography deserves attention: he studied at Eton. ‘Note,’ the preparatory school, to which Eric Veen went, is not just an anagram of Eton, but its inversion. Similarly, the freedom of love enjoyed by the inhabitants of Antiterra (at least, of its Western hemisphere) “mirrors” the puritan chastity in Orwell’s Oceania.

Remarkably, despite this chastity, pornographic literature is not totally banned in Oceania. Moreover, it is secretly produced and distributed among the proles by the state, and it is young girls that manage the production (because men are believed to be in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handle). Julia at one time also worked in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department, before returning to the production of normal books. All novels – normal, as well as pornographic – are composed in Oceania by the machine (people only service its electric motor) and poetry, by another machine called “versifier.”

In “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Nabokov says that in pornographic novels action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. But, in that case, Orwell’s non-erotic antiutopia must also belong to this category. For, as Nabokov remarked in his foreword to the second edition of Bend Sinister (1963), Orwell’s novel almost entirely consists of clichés. Provided it has a sufficiently powerful electric motor, the novel-composing machine could have composed Nineteen eighty-four, but it would never compose Ada! Therefore Ada, with all her erotic scenes, is a much more chaste book than Nineteen eighty-four. And if certain details of Eric Veen’s “Organized Dream” appear dirty to some, it is not Nabokov who is to blame, and not even Eric (for Eric is but a character in Van Veen’s dream, just as Van is a character in the creative dream of Nabokov’s), but Orwell, whose novel fits in Nabokov’s definition of pornography. After they had been metamorphosed in Nabokov’s imagination, Orwell’s clichés acquired a new unexpected form on Antiterra where they began to play with bright colors of the eroticism. But, whatever eroticism there might be in them, the dreams of true art, like Lolita and Ada, are never “dirty.”

Thanks to Sergey Karpukhin for his help in the translation

Alexey Sklyarenko, St.-Petersburg

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