As a mystical novel near the poet Koltsov

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 Russia should be thankful to Zhukovsky that he raised the heir to the throne, the future Aleksandr II, who repealed serfdom in 1861, in the liberal spirit.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 14^th 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” (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyar1.htm), 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 19^th and beginning of the 20^th 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.