As a mystical novel near the poet Koltsov

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” http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyar1.htm). 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).