As a mystical novel near the poet Koltsov

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).