Part 2 Chapter 10
Forenote
Neither Van nor his maker likes the idea that events are inevitable, but both stress the fatal inevitability, in retrospect, despite all the unlikelihoods, of Demon’s discovery on the morning of February 5, 1893, that his two children are not just lovers but cozily cohabiting life partners.
The threat of the discovery of their love has troubled Van and Ada, although never reduced their ardor, ever since, in the 1884 scene in the attic depicted in I.1, they deduced that they were both the children of Demon and Marina, and therefore full brother and sister. The threat was comically foregrounded in Lucette’s spying or stumbling on their lovemaking in 1884 and 1888 and 1892, and less comically through Kim Beauharnais’s blackmail album, shown to Ada in 1892, three chapters ago, and light-heartedly but threateningly through Ada’s reports at the end of that chapter about the “veritable legend . . . growing around you and me while we played and made love,” the “sacred secret and creed” among “[r]omantically inclined handmaids” and “[t]heir swains” (408-09), “All of which,” concludes Van, “only means that our situation is desperate” (409). Two chapters ago, after Lucette has provided a cover for Van and Ada to dine out together at Ursus, the chapter ends with them weighing up differently the risks of being seen together again out in Manhattan
“Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,” suggested Van. “I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.”
“Last night two men recognized me,” she said. “Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow
—with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other,
with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.”
“We shall now go for a ride in the park,” said Van firmly. . . .
“You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.”
“Au fond,” said Ada, “first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want.
After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day.”
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a
few minutes.
“Tower,” she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings
in the past, when checking up on happiness: “And you?”
“A regular ziggurat.” (422-23)
The immediately previous chapter, II.9, was unusually static in its discussion of Ada as actress; but it too ended on a high note, “even while reaching heights of happiness he had not known at his brightest hour before his darkest one in the past” (431). Now that radiant stasis will be shattered.
Despite all their precautions, and Van’s copious tipping (topped, ironically in this case, by Demon’s tip to the waiter Valerio), the accident of death (Dan’s) intervenes for the first time in their lives since Aqua’s death in 1883 led to Van’s spending his next summer, 1884, at Ardis, with his “aunt” Marina. Fate’s “tries” and alternative moves (in the sense of a chess player’s or problem’s solver’s “tries”), and normally super-assured Van’s and Ada’s blunders, when caught so off guard, eliminate other alternatives to the discovery they have dreaded.
Annotations
432.01: They took a great many precautions—all absolutely useless: Cf., in a different vein (the question of Ada’s possible pregnancy, in 1888): “Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions” (230.15-17). The theme of precautions stretches through the paragraph.
432.03-04: the agency that forwarded letters to him: The VPL, introduced, pointedly, in conjunction with Demon at the Goodson Airport: “At the Goodson Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father. . . . At the same moment a raincoated man with a pleasant, somewhat porcine, pink face accosted Van. He represented a famous international agency, known as the VPL, which handled Very Private Letters” (329.01-08). This opening of Part 2 is echoed here in Demon’s unexpectedly flying to Manhattan in the two chapters that will close Part 2 so decisively.
432.04-05: an amiable lady in waiting at Demon’s bank: A charmingly odd mix of the commercial and the aristocratic, almost royal, “lady in waiting.”
432.09-13: it so happened that the only time they broke that rule (she having got stuck in the lift for a few panicky moments and he having blithely trotted downstairs from their common summit), they issued right into the visual field of old Mrs. Arfour: Nabokov’s storytelling shows his constant awareness of the accidents that can upset plans, from the man escaped from the guillotine through the panic caused by a chance fire, in the play Dedushka (The Granddad, 1923), to the botched murder scheme at the end of King, Queen, Knave, and on through Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and Pale Fire.
432.13-16: Mrs. Arfour . . . she had known both families for years: She has known both families for years (as VN in A1 glosses at 433.34-434.03, see below) because she is the widow of one of the two dentists (Pearlman and Arfour) who serve both Demon’s and Marina’s families. Demon, when he sees Ada again at Ardis in 1888, greets her with an almost lascivious fervor, and recalls the last time he “enjoyed” her:
Old Demon, iridescent wings humped, half rose but sank back again, enveloping Ada with one arm, holding
his glass in the other hand, kissing the girl in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than
an uncle’s fervor. . . . “The last time I enjoyed you,” said Demon, “was in April when you wore a raincoat with
a white and black scarf and simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist. Dr. Pearlman has
married his receptionist, you’ll be glad to know. (245.14-28)
432.14: her tiny tan-and-gray long-silked Yorkshire terrier: Yorkshire terrier, W2: “A toy terrier of a breed developed probably from a crossing of the Skye terrier and the black-and-tan terrier, having compact body and straight, silky hair often trailing on the ground. The coloring is a dark steel blue from the occiput to the root of the tail, a rich golden tan on the head, and a bright tan on the chest. It weighs from 4 to 12 pounds.” Cf. the further apt descriptions of this specimen of the breed, one flattering (“a similar adorable pet with a similar adorable parting along the middle of the back,” 432.20-433.02), to Mrs. Arfour, one the reverse, to keep her at bay: “a caterpillar dog” (433.04-05).
432.17: from chattering (rather than chatting) Ada: Ada, nervous on being found emerging with Van from the apartment building, chatters to give Mrs. Arfour no time to think; of course her eagerness to explain draws attention to rather than distracts from her situation, as is the case when she has said too much in trying to waylay suspicious thoughts in Van on their first morning back together at Ardis the Second, 192. She also chatters nervously in the scene in the Burning Barn: “‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom’” (119.25-27).
Demon too will be voluble on his arrival at the apartment later in the chapter, but for a different reason (drugs).
432.20: in Mexico or Oxmice: Before visiting Ardis in the summer of 1888, Demon had “offered myself en effet a trip to Akapulkovo” (239), and after Van has left Ardis the Second later in the summer Demon pursues “an extensive study of Mexican spas and spices” (322.09-10). Perhaps Ada merely invents on this basis, because Demon, although in Latin America, actually travels from one Santiago, probably not in Mexico, to another (see 433.09-10 and n.)
432.20: Oxmice: anagram of “Mexico.” There is a city called Oxnard, on the Pacific coast west of Los Angeles (where Demon also visits regularly), amid Spanish place names (in Ventura County, Oxnard lies on the Santa Barbara Channel). “Oxmice” almost sounds like a fable such as Aesop’s “The Frogs and the Ox.”
432.20: Lenore Colline: The actress, whom Ada resembles (424.20-425.04).
432.20-433.01: a similar pet with a similar adorable parting: Ada’s false repetition betrays her unfelt delight.
MOTIF: adore.
433.02-03:That same day (February 3, 1893) Van rebribed the already gorged janitor: Even the sudden specification of the exact date adds a note of foreboding: some memorably noteworthy event looms.
Van will bribe the new concierge in Mont Roux’s Les Trois Cygnes hotel in 1905 to ensure secrecy for his adulterous trysts with Ada, in the face of the snoopy curiosity of Ada’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Vinelander: “I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus” (508.14-16); “The Three Swans overwinged a bastion” (527.10).
433.04-05: a caterpillar dog: Alluding to the Yorkshire terrier’s small size, the closeness of its body to the ground, and the impression that its long hair sweeping along the pavement resembles the progress of a hairy caterpillar such as the so-called "puss caterpillars" of flannel moths (Megalopyge), especially the most notorious, Megalopyge opercularis, the Southern Flannel Moth, which has toxic spines underneath its fur (not to be confused with the differently grotesque but also very well-defended caterpillars of the Puss Moth, Cerura vinula,that Ada raises in her larvarium, 55.17-23 and 56.22-27). Van’s distaste for the dog Ada feigns to praise could not be more concise.
433.07-08: the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel: Personified Death, as it has come to fetch Daniel Veen. Death is portrayed as a skeleton in a painting by (to anticipate) Bosch, Death and the Miser, c. 1485-1490, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Lermontov, the author of the long narrative poem Demon, from which Demon Veen seems to acquire some of his most striking attributes, also wrote a poem, “Angel smerti (The Angel of Death)” (1831), during the long period of his short life when he was also writing Demon (1829-1841).
“Old scoundrel”: cf. Van’s “I despise, I denounce death” (297.29).
433.09-10: just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another: Demon most likely left Santiago de Cuba (usually just Santiago), the second largest city in Cuba, which has been the epicenter of a number of major earthquakes recorded since 1578, the most severe being in August 1852 (7.2 on the Richter scale) and November the same year (7.0), to travel to Santiago (also known as Santiago de Chile), the capital and largest city of Chile, which suffered damage in the Chilean earthquake of May 22, 1960, the strongest ever recorded (rated at between 9.4 and 9.6 on the Richter scale), although the epicenter was 700km further south (see also Zimmer 2010: 1020 and Babikov 2022: 766). The macabre irony is that Demon could have traveled from either Santiago to see the aftermath of an earthquake in the other.
Ada’s “Mexico or Oxmice” (432.20) seems a guess, an approximation, perhaps even an expression of ignorance, and Demon’s location is likely to have been in the Santiagos already mentioned (confirmation for the Chilean Santiago comes at 437.24). But there is also in Mexico the city of Santiago de Querétaro, as it was known from 1531, until it became simply Querétaro, the capital of the province of the same name, only to revert, at least officially, to Santiago de Querétaro in 1996.
433.10: Ladore Hospital: MOTIF: Ladore
433.11-12: He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling: MOTIF: Demon; Demon’s wings
433.13-15: the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida: There is a small town of Palatka in northern Florida, founded as a trading post in 1821, population around 10,000 in 1960, whose name in Russian would mean “tent.” But the town’s name, despite the presence of the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, three hours’ drive away, and the mention of Tobakov’s sailors, derives not from Russian but from the Seminole Indian “Pilo-taikita, meaning ‘crossing over’ or ‘cows’ crossing’” (Wikipedia, Palatka, accessed May 9, 2023) over the St. Johns River. (See also Zimmer 2010: 1020 and Babikov 2022: 766.)
MOTIF: Tobakoff; transatlantic doubling
433.14-15: Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, . . . where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes: This sentence seems to prefigure two other deaths in the family. Demon’s aerial trouble when hastening, “wings whistling,” to Dan, who dies as Demon flies, seems to anticipate Demon’s own death in 1905 while in a gigantic flying machine that “had inexplicably disintegrated . . . above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region” (504.31-33). But Lucette’s death too seems implicated. By the pool on the Tobakoff, on her last day, Lucette asks Van: “‘is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not taught to swim so he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship went down?’ ‘A common sailor, perhaps,’ said Van. ‘When michman Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for hours’” (480.10-15); later in the chapter Van describes Lucette in the ocean, just before her death, swimming “like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor” (494.26-27).
433.17: the inordinately circumstantial Dr. Nikulin: Explains the copious details Van is able to provide of Dan’s decline and death, 435.21-34.
433.17-19: Dr. Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov—we can’t get rid of the lettuce): As Zimmer 2010: 1020 notes, both Russian names resemble the Latin caniculus, “rabbit,” and therefore join the motif of rabbit- or hare-named physicians, like Krolik, Lapiner, and Lagosse, who attend to various Veen family members.
MOTIF: Krolik
433.18: rodentiologist Kunikulinov: Not in W2, W3 or OED, but presumably an expert on Rodentia, which in the old sense included the Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares), now considered a separate order. W2, Rodentia: “The largest order of mammals, comprising relatively small gnawing animals with a single pair of upper incisors. . . . It formerly included the Lagomorpha (which see) which now are considered a separate order often grouped with Rodentia in Glires, a superorder or other major division formerly equated with Rodentia (broad sense).” Lagomorpha (W2): “An order of gnawing animals resembling the rodents but having two pairs of upper incisors one behind the other. It was formerly regarded as a suborder (Duplicidentata) of Rodentia.”
MOTIF: canicule
433.21-22: as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived: From the first Demon has been shown to have a deep and precise knowledge of painting: his “twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses” (4.26-27); he has taken Van in the summer of 1883 to see the so-called Primavera in the Naples Museum (9.06-08); he has identified a drawing that has come into his possession as “an unknown product of Parmigianino’s tender art” (12.30-31), and so on, up to his instant recognition of the details of Dan’s decline in a Bosch canvas (435.07-10).
433.22-24: the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch: Although Dan had “Somehow or other . . . ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer[, h]e did not have—initially at least—any particular liking for paintings” (4.32-5.01).
433.23-24: the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch: Although Bosch in a sense pervades Ada (as suggested by VN’s comment on the difference between “the Garden of Delights in Ada” and “the lawns in Lolita” [SO 306]), he has been mentioned by name only once before in the novel, also in connection with Dan, and with a whiff of misattribution: when he receives Ada’s second VPL letter, Van is standing “in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan thought it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!)” (331.15-18). The Bosch theme draws closer in II.9, the chapter preceding this, when Van objects “Bosh!” to what Ada has said about acting, and Ada replies: “Precisely—he too was hooted by hack hoods in much older Amsterdams, and look how three hundred years later every Poppy Group pup copies him!” (426.13-16): again the theme of fake paintings or imitation Bosch.
Wikipedia, Hieronymus Bosch, accessed May 10, 2023: “Within his lifetime his work was . . . widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell. . . . Attribution has been especially difficult; today only about 25 paintings are confidently given to his hand[7] along with eight drawings. About another half-dozen paintings are confidently attributed to his workshop. His most acclaimed works consist of a few triptych altarpieces, including The Garden of Earthly Delights. . . . The exact number of Bosch's surviving works has been a subject of considerable debate.[38] His signature can be seen on only seven of his surviving paintings, and there is uncertainty whether all the paintings once ascribed to him were actually from his hand. It is known that from the early 16th century onwards numerous copies and variations of his paintings began to circulate. In addition, his style was highly influential, and was widely imitated by his numerous followers.[39] // Over the years, scholars have attributed to him fewer and fewer of the works once thought to be his. This is partly a result of technological advances such as infrared reflectography, which enable researchers to examine a painting's underdrawing.[40] Art historians of the early and mid-20th century, such as Tolnay[41] and Baldass,[42] identified between thirty and fifty paintings that they believed to be by Bosch's hand.[43] A later monograph by Gerd Unverfehrt (1980) attributed twenty-five paintings and 14 drawings to him.[43]”
Charles de Tolnay, Hieronymus Bosch, 1965, New York: Reynal/William Morrow, 1966, 360, thinks that the Last Judgement in Vienna (see 435.23-34 and n. and 436.18-23) is “an excellent copy,” perhaps “of reduced size,” of a genuine but lost Bosch original.
A major exhibition of works attributed to Bosch in the Noordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch in 1967, while VN was composing Ada, particularly raised the question of the authenticity of his works. See Bosch Research and Conservation Project website, accessed May 10, 2023.
433.25-26: Next day, February 5, around nine A.M., Manhattan (winter) time: Again the note of portentous temporal precision.
433.25: February 5: Cf. “On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public’” (181.01-04). Do the shared dates establish a pointed connection? Do Mascodagama’s gymnastic gyrations match those of the figures in the Garden of Earthly Delights on which Demon dwells later in the chapter (436.25-437.16)? Or . . . ?
433.25: nine A.M.: corrected from Ada 1969, "nine P.M." VN corrected the error already in A1.
433.27: Alexis Avenue: Cf. “Van spent a medicinal month in Cordula’s Manhattan flat on Alexis Avenue” (322.01-02).
433.27: Avenue—an ancient: corrected from Ada 1969, "Avenue, an ancient."
433.30-31: having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks . . . : Of Demon: “Always gloves, no overcoat ever” (238.16-17). Demon’s cloaks, rather than overcoats, are presumably part of the illusion or reality of his “wings.”
His daughter, Ada, however, wears a raincoat with a hat when Van visits her at Brownhill: “The sweet cousin sported a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea” (167.15-17).
433.31-33: besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey: Van’s conjecture, although sparked by the strong evidence of Demon’s extreme and uncharacteristic volubility on his arrival in Van’s apartment. The drug-and-volubility theme will persist through the chapter. It matches Mario Bussagli’s hypothesis, in Bosch (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1967, 37),a work whose Italian original Nabokov drew on elsewhere in the chapter (see 436.28n3, 437.24n, and 438.24-25n), that Bosch’s Last Judgement was executed under the influence of drugs (see Mason 160 and 163).
433.33-34: contented himself—quite properly—with a wave of his slim umbrella: Cf. Van in Paris in 1901: “he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do” (460.02-03).
433.34-434.03: recalled with . . . delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed . . . well out of the way of Mrs. R4: In A1, VN glosses “Mrs. R4”: “widow of Dr. Arfour of the Arfour and Pearlman dentist team, see p. 245.”
Cf. Eric Veen’s wishes for the resident physicians of the Villa Venuses to be “good-looking and young (of the American secretarial or dentist-assistant type)” (348.17-19).
433.34: a paint dab of delight: Cf. “dabbed a toolbox with fresh green paint” (191.18).
434.01-04: passed . . . well out of the way of Mrs. R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation: In other words, Demon could have been informed by Mrs. Arfour that only two days earlier she had seen Van and Ada coming together out of the apartment building just nearby. But since Demon chooses to avoid talking to her, this means of informing him that Van and Ada are living together has to be abandoned by Fate, like a possible chess move (from square R4, in the old chess notation current in the Anglophone chess world, until algebraic notation became the norm there too in the late 1970s) that needs to be replaced by another not so easily countered.
The idea of Fate’s preparing alternative continuations when thwarted by chance or the free will of the characters is central to the structure of The Gift and Sebastian Knight’s novel Success: as I observe, “the very ‘failure’ of fate to impose immediate control on events may seem to form part of fate’s pattern, of ‘the feigned naïveté so typical of Fate, when meaning business’ (SM 229)” (Boyd 1985 2001: 99).
Nabokov particularly drew on imagery of chess to indicate the planning and the alternative “tries” of Fate: “In The Defense Luzhin ‘goes mad when chess combinations pervade the actual pattern of his existence’ [CE 217]. Nabokov acts as Grandmaster Fate: ‘I greatly enjoyed taking advantage of this or that image and scene to introduce a fatal pattern into Luzhin’s life and to endow the description of . . . a sequence of humdrum events, with the semblance . . . of a regular chess attack demolishing the innermost elements of the poor fellow’s sanity’ [Defense 8]” (Boyd 1985 2001: 99). He uses chess even to depict the fateful but at first averted approach of his father’s violent death: not in 1910, in a duel which has been announced but forestalled (“several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on the board,” SM 193), but in 1922, in a political assassination. Similarly John Shade, the invented writer closest to his maker, imagines behind life “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game. / . . . / . . . a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns” (PF 63, ll. 812-20).
434.05-06: As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered): The drug theme continues.
434.07-09: might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building: Demon knows about their affair but not about its recent history: after Demon disparages Cordula, when he meets Van at Goodson Airport in September 1888, Van tells his father, that “we have interrupted our affair for the time being—till the next time I return to live in her girlinière” (330.26-27).
434.07-12: living with dull little Cordula de Prey in . . . that fine building. He had never been up there—or had he. . . . (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.): But Van had himself first judged her dull in comparison with brilliant Ada: “He still hoped to get rid for a moment of dull Cordula” (168.20), before coming to enjoy her as a “really quite exciting little girl” (303.28). Demon had also rated the de Preys as “quite a notch below our set” (330.22).
434.13-15: With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute, multicolored optical sparks): In “combination” with what (apart from his drug)? Is this a kind of psychedelic flash and faux recognition? (Cf. “Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette,” 437.24-26). In any case, Van narrates as if able to penetrate deep into his father’s mind.
Cf., Diana Makhaldiani suggests (email of June 5, 2023), the also rather obscure “Estotially speaking” (30.06)
434.15-17: Demon hastened to . . . catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two: The waiter is Valerio, well established as the bringer of Van and Ada’s breakfast à deux: “our two lovers, now weak-legged and decently robed, sat down to a beautiful breakfast (Ardis’ crisp bacon! Ardis’ translucent honey!) brought up in the lift by Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman” (393.20-24); “for their breakfast to be brought by Valerio, who would roll in the laid table out of the lift into the sitting room next to their bedroom” (417.16-18).
434.17: wiggle-wheel table: Not in W2, W3, or OED, but apt enough to be instantly recognizable and vividly imaginable.
434.18: the Manhattan Times: This Antiterran New York Times offers a striking instance of Manhattan’s replacing the whole of earthly New York City on Antiterra.
434.18-19: among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas: Under the influence of the drug, Demon’s hypervigilant eye notices everything.
434.19-20: Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon: Demon “had often lunched”(434.06) at the Monaco, so he can presume the waiter would know whom he meant by “his son.”
434.20-21: placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes: Van learns his own penchant for bribes—often to ensure secrecy, not as here to penetrate it—from his father. MOTIF: gold dollars; riches;
434.21: Si, conceded the grinning imbecile: Even as narrator Van is still furious that his well-tipped waiter has disclosed what he should not have; as character, he will vent his anger later in the day: cf. “when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio’s warm bristly cheek” (452.28-29).
Diana Makhladiani (email, June 5, 2023) notes the sonic echo, masked by three different spellings, in “Si . . . conceded . . . imbecile.
434.21-22: he had lived there with his lady all winter: Demon of course assumes for now that “his lady” is Cordula; when he finds it is not her but Ada, this evidence of the duration of the cohabitation will add to his horror.
434.23-26: inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain: The drug theme again.
434.27: On that memorable morning: Another ominous time-marker.
434.28-29: strawberry-red terry-cloth robe: Cf. Van standing “in his short ‘terry’ on the roof terrace” as he awaits Ada’s first arrival at his Manhattan apartment (390.10). Van’s bright red toweling cloth links both with Dan’s death (“he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump,” 435.30-31), in an echo of Bosch’s Last Judgement (as noted by Paul Fry, “Moving Van: The Neverland Veens of Nabokov's Ada,” Contemporary Literature 26: 2 (1985), 123-39,) and with Demon’s admiration for details of The Garden of Earthly Delights (“the joy of the eye, the feel and the taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him,” 437.14-15).
434.30-34: looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance: Establishes once more the bliss before the blast.
434.31-32: yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away: Cf. “when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada” (452.30-32).
435.01-02: Demon, clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual: Black-haired Demon, known as “Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter” (4.24-25) or “Dark Veen” (37.01), is always emphatically black (“‘That’s very black of you, Dad,’ said pleased Van,” 241.21), but now, in mourning, is even more so than usual.
MOTIF: black; Demon’s monocle
435.01: black-spatted: Rather than the expected “black-hatted.” Were black spats really part of old formal mourning attire?
435.03-05: a cup of coffee in one hand, and a conveniently folded financial section of the Times in the other: He has certainly made himself at home very promptly. “Financial section of the Times”: he is “a Manhattan banker” (4.16).
Cf. Demon ensconced in a newspaper at the start of Part 2: “At the Goodson Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of imitation marblewood, behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters: ‘Crimea Capitulates’” (329.01-05).
435.06-10: put down his cup rather jerkily on noting the coincidence of color with a persistent detail in an illumined lower left-hand corner of a certain picture reproduced in the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind: In other words he has started at the resemblance between Van’s “strawberry-red terry-cloth robe” (434.28-29) and the “red bath towel” trailing from Dan’s rump as he crawls to death (435.31), in unwitting or compulsive reenactment of a detail from the lower left-hand corner of the central panel of Bosch’s Last Judgement. Demon does not yet know it, but he will soon issue a Last Judgement on Van and Ada (442-44).
435.09-10: the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind: As opposed to Dan’s bequeathing to his nurse “a trunkful of museum catalogues” (438.27). Demon knows without hesitation not only the fine details of Bosch’s Last Judgement but also that it “is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art” (436.22-23).
435.11-12: All Van could think of saying was “I am not alone” (je ne suis pas seul): At a very different but equally fateful moment Van will say to Lucette, phoning to his suite abord the Tobakoff after the screening of Don Juan’s Last Fling, “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone)” (491.31).
435.13-16: the fool who should have simply walked on into the next room and come back one moment later (locking the door behind him—locking out years and years of lost life): Presents the saving alternative to the first of Van and Ada’s numerous bad and irretrievable options on this fateful morning.
435.16: years and years of lost life: Ada 1968 had had: “three decades of lost life” before emendation to this final phrasing. Although the gap 1893-1922 is three decades, Nabokov seems to have thought better of signalling its exact end in advance.
435.18: Bess (which is “fiend” in Russian): “Bess,” usually one of several common abbreviations for “Elizabeth” but here an abbreviation for the bizarre “Bellabestia” (438.26), is a homophone of Russian bes, “demon, fiend.”
Dan has been interested in Bess since 1888, if not 1884: in 1888 “Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get ‘something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology’)” (256.19-23). In 1884 Dan, late to Ada’s twelfth birthday party, sends Marina a message via Bouteillan: “Monsieur had just arrived with a birthday present for Mademoiselle Ada, but nobody could figure out how the complicated object worked, and Madame must help. The butler had brought a letter which he now placed on a pocket tray and presented to Marina. We cannot reconstitute the exact wording of the message, but we know it said that this thoughtful and very expensive gift was a huge beautiful doll—unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills. Directions in Russian or Bulgarian made no sense because they were not in the modern Roman, but in the old Cyrillitsa, a nightmare alphabet which Dan had never been able to master. Could Marina come over at once to have suitable doll clothes cut out of some nice silk discards her maid had collected in a drawer he had discovered and wrap the box again in fresh tissue paper?” (84.09-25).
MOTIF: Bess; demon
435.20-21: to extract orally a few last drops of “play-zero” (as the old whore called it): French plaisir (“pleasure, orgasm”); her lips “play zero” by forming an O.
Cf. “Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of ‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato)” (19.13-17); and “In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings, Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or ten the sentence ‘les deux enfants pouvaient donc s’abandonner au plaisir sans aucune crainte’” (133.08-11).
MOTIF: plaisir, whore
435.22-23: even before Ada’s sudden departure: For Manhattan, on receiving Van’s aerogram inviting her to rejoin him, in November 1892. By that point Dan had become wheelchair-bound and perhaps senile: “Uncle Dan, who just then was being wheeled out by his handsome and haughty nurse into the garden where coppery and blood-red leaves were falling, clamored to be given the big book” (396.08-11).
435.23-34: a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr. Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. . . . he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape: Almost all these details reflect the figure on top of the person crawling on all fours in the central panel of Bosch’s Last Judgement triptych in Vienna (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenden Künste): the frog-rodent devil (frog legs, rodent head and forelimbs), who is riding the person underneath (a woman, in the original) toward the right-hand, Hell, panel; black (back legs and back), pale-bellied; with a black dorsal shield; and a knife in his raised forelimb, in fact cutting off the arm of a man impaled on a tree. The brown earth of the painting corresponds to the “brown shrubbery of Ardis”; the woman being ridden has a large red cloth, possibly a towel, trailing from the small of her back.
Cf. EO II,512: “In this Boschian assemblage.”
MOTIF: devil
435.23-26: a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr. Nikulin Dan described his rider: Dr Nikulin is the “grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov” (433.17-18).
435.25: to the torture house of eternity: MOTIF: torture
435.27: buckler: W2: “A kind of shield, of various shapes and sizes, worn on one of the arms (usually the left) to protect the front of the body. In the sword and buckler play of the Middle Ages in England, the buckler was a small shield, generally round and held by a handle at arm’s length, and used, not to cover the body, but to stop or parry blows.”
435.34-436.03: On the other hand, had he attempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door:While as narrator Van supplies the full account of Dan’s description of his torments, and his fatal crawl through Ardis in winter, Van as character broods on whether the alternative that he now wishes he had tried, of attempting to warn Ada of Demon’s presence, would have worked in any case.
436.02: something irrevocably cozy: A near-oxymoron but apt in the context.
436.06-07: Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle: MOTIF: Demon's monocle
436.08-09: “It’s another, much more impressionable girl”—(yet another awful fumble!): Van reproaches himself in thought immediately as well as retrospectively, as narrator.
436.09-11: Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs. Tobak.” “Oh, of course!” cried Demon. “How stupid of me!: Lucette had made a similar mistake, in visiting Van in his rooms at Kingston in November (“what about Cordula de Prey? She won’t mind?”), and Van had had to point out to her that “Cordula is now Mrs. Ivan G. Tobak” (382.31-34).
Cf. Demon’s “‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me” (241.07).
436.10-11: I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me: Snob Demon, who disapproved of Van’s association with Cordula de Prey because “They’re quite a notch below our set” (330.22), dotes on the idea of Ada’s marrying Andrey Vinelander, who is “the scion . . . of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols” (437.28-30) deep in Russian history. Vinelander has proposed to Ada (385.02-03), but of course he has not been accepted, because Ada has persuaded Van to block that move by taking her back.
436.11-14: he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!”: Phoenix bank, because Andrey hails from Arizona; Demon, as a snob and a banker, is predisposed to approve of both men, given their long European lineages and their time working in banks.
436.13-14: Backbay Tobakovich!: Back Bay’s Beacon Street runs through Beacon Hill, a famously élite area of famously (historically) snobby Boston (cf. 456.17-18 and n.)
436.15-16: “I don’t care,” said clenched Van, “if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad: The inadvertently Boschian image provides a perfect segue into Demon’s disclosure of the details of Dan’s death.
436.15: clenched Van: An unusual usage: with clenched fists, with taut angry body.
436.17: Funny your saying that: MOTIF: your saying that.
436.18-23: an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. . . . The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art: Again describes the detail accurately, and Demon, drawing on “the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind” (435.09-10), can also stipulate the location of the painting (there are other Bosch Last Judgements elsewhere, whole and fragmentary, but different in design and detail).
436.19-20: fantastic rodent . . . Nikulin’s clinic: A comic wordplay in itself, amplified by Nikulin’s descent from Kunikulinov, the rodentiologist (433.18).
436.21-22: I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family: As he explains further at 437.18-28. Ironically, having found Van, Demon is about to find Ada too (and about to describe Bosch’s blending of art and science as “incestuous,” 436.27).
“Deuce” in this sense means “devil” or “hell.”
MOTIF: devil
436.22-23: now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Arts: See Das Weltgerichtstriptychon von Hieronymus Bosch in der Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Wien (Vienna: Kreymar and Scheriau, 1988).
MOTIF: painting location
436.25-437.33: If I could write . . . Western casinos: Late in this cascade of words, more than a page long in print, Van first realizes that his father may be under the influence of some narcotic stimulant (437.24-26).
436.27-28: how incestuously—c’est le mot—art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet: Ironically, Demon extols the “incestuous” meeting of art and science in Bosch’s work, and with the help of information from Ada and Lucette, just before he recoils with horror at the incestuous relationship of his son and daughter. He never learns, either, of Ada’s and her half-sister Lucette’s incestuous relationship, or of Lucette’s and Van’s incestuous desire for each other.
Nabokov often praises the fusion of art and science. He recalls his juvenile unawareness that “there existed a Russian prose which borrowed its romantic sweep from science and its terse precision from poetry” (CE 158); he affirms that “In art as in science there is no delight without the detail” (EO I,8); he stresses the need for good readers to have “an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience” (LL 5); a great work of literary art produces in readers a joint impression of “The Precision of Poetry and the Excitement of Science” (LL 123); in mimicry, he “discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception” (SM 125); “There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts” (SO 79); “In high art and pure science detail is everything” (SO 168); “Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of ‘scientific’ knowledge joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?” (SO 330).
MOTIF: incest
436.27-29: how incestuously . . . art and science meet in an insect: Cf. Ada, just turned twelve, playing anagrams with Grace Erminin: Grace suggests “insect,” Ada offers “scient,” then answers Grace’s objections with the instant example, “Dr. Entsic was scient in insects,” before bringing the game to a close with the equally puzzling “incest” (85.09-17).
Cf. “What, then, was it that raised the animal act to a level higher than even that of the most exact arts or the wildest flights of pure science?” (219.30-32).
436.27: c’est le mot: Darkbloom: “that’s the right word.”
436.28: thrush: D. Barton Johnson notes: in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, not only is there something wrong with his Tortoiseshell butterfly, but “Demon's ‘thrush’ is also amiss. From Demon's description we assume that the bird he refers to is the one on the central, bright-red, conical tree trunk. None of the picture's other birds appear to be thrushes. While the bird in question does resemble a thrush (most likely a Song Thrush or a Nightingale) in contour and, for the most part, in color, its blue wing-patch is not a feature of any European member of the Thrush family. It is almost certainly a Eurasian Jay [Garrulus glandarius]. . . . the Jay's Latin genus name serves as commentary on Demon's drug-induced, ‘garrulous,’ verbal torrent” (Johnson 2000: 174-75).
436.28: thistle: There are three blue thistles prominent in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, one toward the left side, near the front, exuding a bubble in which a man pays court to a woman; and two in the center, a little before the middle distance, emerging from an opaque pink sphere with three men inside. On the larger thistlehead here a butterfly rests with folded wings.
436.28: of that ducal bosquet: A “bosquet” is a grove or thicket; “of that ducal bosquet” renders in English the precise name of the town in which Bosch was born, worked, and found his nom de plume, ’s-Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc) (“of the ducal bosquet”), at the edge of the Duchy of Brabant, now in the Netherlands’ Nord Brabant, and usually shortened to Den Bosch. Nabokov drew, as he and Dan do at 438.24-25, on Mario Bussagli, Bosch (Florence: Sadea Editore, 1966): “Il mistero di Bosch è confinato nelle sue opere, mentre anche il cognome—piuttosto consciuto per appartenere ad una famiglia di buoni pittori—oscilla fra grafie diverse, apparendo come Aken, Aeken, Aquen, Acken, il che, tavolta, complica il compito non facile dei critici. Nato verso il 1450—la data precisa ci è ignota—a ’s Hertogenbosch (vale a dire Bois-le-Duc) piccola citta del Brabante, trasse dalla ultima sillaba di questo nome lo pseudonimo col quale è divenuto celebre” (3) (“The mystery of Bosch is confined to his works, while even the surname—rather familiar for belonging to a family of good painters—swings between different spellings, appearing as Aken, Aeken, Aquen, Acken, which, at times, complicates the difficult task of critics. Born around 1450—the precise date is unknown to us—in 's Hertogenbosch (i.e. Bois-le-Duc), a small town in Brabant; he derived from the last syllable of this name the pseudonym with which he became famous.”)
Nabokov spent two weeks in late April 1966, the year he began working intensely on Ada, in Florence, exploring a dozen galleries with his wife for his Butterflies in Art project. They may have encountered the newly-published Bussagli volume in a gallery shop. Véra Nabokov had learnt some Italian in 1961; Dmitri Nabokov, living in nearby Monza, by then spoke fluent Italian.
Possibly the hedge behind insect, thistle, and thrush in the painting could mark the perimeter of a ducal bosquet: the procession of people riding quadrupeds (horses, deer, cattle, swine, camels, unicorns, cats, four-legged birds) resembles that in for instance the Duc de Berry’s forest, in the May scene from the Très riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c.1412-1416).
On his last night at Ardis, shortly before learning from Blanche about Ada’s infidelity, Van “retired to his bosquet” (291.14).
436.28-29: Ada is marrying an outdoor man: Demon can hardly contain his pleasure at what he supposes to be Ada’s acceptance of Andrey Vinelander’s proposal. Vinelander is no sportsman, but an outdoor man in that his interests are breeding cattle, collecting cactuses, and observing birds.
436.29: her mind is a closed museum: A natural history museum, that is; “the copiously illustrated catalogue of [Demon’s] immediate mind” (435.09-10) is that of art museums, in which, surprisingly, Lucette, usually set in contrast to Demon, for once almost seems to take after her uncle.
436.30-32: she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500: Creepy because Dan, officially their father, has died in a kind of reliving of “that other triptych” of Bosch’s, his Last Judgement.
Nabokov had first written about Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and indeed about the butterfly in its right panel, in 1949, in a November 12 letter to Life (published on December 5) written after Life had reproduced the painting in its November 14 issue: “the butterfly wings in the third panel of the Bosch tryptich [sic] . . . can be at once determined as belonging to a female specimen of the common European species now known as Maniola jurtina, which Linnaeus described some 250 years after good Bosch knocked it down with his cap in a Flemish meadow to place it in his Hell” (SL 93-94).
436.33: and, namely, to the butterflies in it—a Meadow Brown, female: The satyrid butterfly Maniola jurtina; as Zimmer 2001 notes, 199: “a still very common butterfly in all of Europe.”
436.34: Tortoiseshell: Any of the butterflies in the genera Nymphalis, Aglais and Vanessa with mottled wings. Zimmer 2001: 99 identifies this specimen as “most likely . . . Aglais urticae [the Small Tortoiseshell or Nettlefly] or possibly the similar but larger Nymphalis polychloros, the Large Tortoiseshell.”
437.08-10: I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time: Bosch’s work has been subject to many symbolic and esoteric readings, the most noteworthy of which was Wilhelm Fraenger’s The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (1952), which argued that Bosch was an Adamite, a member of the heretical sect formally known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit. “Fraenger claims that The Garden of Earthly Delights illustrates the sect’s ‘chain of rituals,’ employing a symbolic language comprehensible only to the elect” (Peter S. Beagle, The Garden of Earthly Delights, London: Picador, 1982, 30). Erwin Panofsky, however (whose essay “Et in Arcadia Ego” Nabokov liked), rejected this reading firmly in his Early Netherlandish Painting: “There is no conclusive evidence for his familiarity with Gnostic, Orphic, and Neoplatonic mysteries; and I am profoundly convinced that he, a highly regarded citizen of his little home town . . . could not have belonged to, and worked for, an esoteric club of heretics, believing in a Rasputin-like mixture of sex, mystical illumination and nudism, which was effectively dealt with in a trial in 1411 and of which no one knows whether it ever survived this trial” (quoted in Beagle, 31).
Demon’s anti-symbolic reading squares with Nabokov’s own taste (and Van’s own distaste for symbols, in his lectures on dreams in II.4): “Nothing, incidentally, is more depressing than the arbitrary symbols that English commentators read into these pieces” (the pastoral poems of Virgil and Theocritus) (EO II,322); “Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as ‘Old Europe debauching young America,’ while another flipper saw in it ‘Young America debauching old Europe’” (Lolita afterword, 314); in a note he wrote in response to one of Alfred Appel, Jr.’s annotations to Lolita, Nabokov explained: “There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression” (AnL 364); “I do remember that my approach and principles irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends,’ and ‘schools,’ and ‘myths,’ and ‘symbols,’ and ‘social comments’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought’” (SO 128).
437.09: the myth behind the moth: As Leona Toker comments about the strange central figure in “Ultima Thule”: “the mad mathematician Falter, whose name is German for ‘butterfly,’ an emblem of the soul (Psyche, ‘the myth behind the moth’: A, 437)” (Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, 6).
437.09-10: the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of this time: In “masterpiece-baiter” does there lurk a suggestion of “masturbator,” of critics who pleasure themselves at the expense of the works they discuss? The verb “express” seems to bring the pun to a head.
Note that “some bosh of his time” echoes Van’s “Bosh!” and Ada’s retort, “Precisely—he too was hooted by hack hoods in much older Amsterdams” (426.13-15). And cf. Van’s standing “in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan thought it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!)” (331.15-18).
437.13: as I was telling your cousins: For the last time, Demon maintains to Van the fiction that Ada and Lucette are only his cousins, rather than his sister and half-sister. MOTIF: family relationship
437.14-15: the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him: A man just to the right of the middle foreground of the central panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights is embracing a woman-sized strawberry. In a painting that reflects the fact that “plucking fruit” was a Dutch term for “making love,” there are other giant strawberries, such as in the left background (dwarfing a whole circle of admirers and would-be consumers) and many other fruits, echoes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as well as of the Dutch idiom.
Bosch’s painting was taken to Spain in 1568 and added to the Escorial in 1593. Philip II’s spiritual counsellor, Father José de Sigüenza, describes the painting at length in his History of the Order of St. Jerome (1604), referring to the whole painting as The Strawberry Plant, and stating that it centers on “a picture of the transient glory and fleeting taste of the strawberry, and its pleasant fragrance that is hardly remembered once it has passed” (Beagle 46).
437.15-16: or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice: Like the bunch of flowers stuck in the anus of a man just above the strawberry-embracer.
437.17-18: so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast!: Plays on both “The Beauty and the Beast” and, with that fairy-tale prompt, “Sleeping Beauty.” MOTIF: beauty and the beast; fairy-tale
437.18: A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette: “A propos” because the idea of Van’s interrupting a beauty’s sleep makes him think of his own failure to alert Lucette?
437.18-19: Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy: In pursuit of art, most likely.
437.19-20: I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar—flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk: Varvara, the fourth sister in the Antiterran Chekhov’s Four Sisters, and the role Marina takes in her last play, “comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady” (429.04-06). For an interlude in the first play in which Demon sees Marina, her impresario Scotty brings a Russian ballet company “all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty” (11.24-25). Marina, according to Ada, in her role as “the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters) . . . sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and rôle overflow into everyday life” (333.10-13): here her role of Varvara as a nun from Tsitsikar seems to blend with that much earlier role, in her “flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk.”
Cf. Van’s glimpse of “a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion” leaving Villa Armina when he visits his mother there (451.01-02).
437.20: Belokonsk: MOTIF: Belokonsk
437.21: pleureuses: Darkbloom: “widow’s weeds.”
437.22: we shall then travel à trois to Ladore: Demon, Van, and Marina, in Demon’s plans; cf. 438.11-12.
437.24-25: Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug?: Cf. in the English-language version of Bussagli’s Bosch, 7: “On the other hand, the painter’s fantastic caprices—though strictly controlled by an outstanding sense of form and composition—may well be the result of a dream-like abnormal experience, or of hallucinations produced by the use of some drug. R.L. Delevoy (Bosch, Geneva 1960, p. 76) points out that various cures which doctors carried out with ‘witches’ ointment’ (of which the formula was published in a sixteenth-century book, and which caused a sensation when it was discovered) produced in a number of subjects hallucinations extraordinarily similar to those of Bosch’s weird world.”
“Chilean” confirms that one of the two Santiagos Demon visits (433.09-10) is the capital of Chile.
437.25-26: That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette: Cf. also Demon’s thoughts as he enters the apartment building: “With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute, multicolored optical sparks)” (434.13-15); and the opening of the next chapter, an hour or so later: “The dragon drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind. Now clad in a gray dressing gown, Demon . . . ” (439.01-04).
437.27-28: no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is—I mean, Vinelander is: Despite his sense of the public proprieties of family, Demon is so besotted with the idea of Ada’s marrying Vinelander that he prefers not to bother her to have her attend the funeral of the man he assumes she thinks of as her father.
437.27-28: her Agavia: Agavia Ranch is Andrey’s residence in Arizona, and will indeed become Ada’s home (see 503.01).
437.28-31: He is—I mean, Vinelander is—the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols: Cf. Van to Lucette at Kingston: “I’m amazed! I never imagined that a hand-reared scion of Scandinavian kings, Russian grand princes and Irish barons could use the language of the proverbial gutter” (379.25-27).
In contrast to Demon’s enthusiasm for Vinelander as Ada’s fiancé, because of his lineage, cf. Demon’s rejection of the possibility of Van’s marrying Cordula: “If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set” (330.21-22).
437.28: the scion, s,c,i,o,n: Presumably not Demon spelling out the word in Van’s apartment on February 5, 1893, but Van as narrator in 1967 spelling it out to Violet Knox, who types the letters dictated, as at the end of V.4, the chapter describing the composition, revision and retyping of the manuscript of Van’s memoir. After Violet mistypes “epistemic,” Van concludes the chapter: “redictated the entire thing to indefatigable Violet, whose pretty fingers tapped out a final copy in 1967. E, p, i—why ‘y,’ my dear?” (578.27-29). The other occurrences of such spelling out are at the scene of Lucette’s death: “her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l— . . . Oceanus Nox, n,o,x” (494.07, 14).
MOTIF: Composition—Typist
437.29: Varangians: Cf. “Varangian tragedies” (322.12), and see 322.12n. “The Russian tribes were organized in confederations or principalities (knyazhenia) when, from the first half of the 9th century, came from the north a new invader—the Rus, a Varangian tribe, in ancient annals considered as related to the Swedes, Angles, and Northmen” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., 19.781). Pléiade 2022: 1483n14 suggests that Nabokov proposes in Ada an alternative history by way both of Vinelander, as much a descendant of Vikings as Russian, and of the Vineland saga and map: an Antiterran history of the pre-Colombian colonization of the North-east of North America by the Varangians/Russians.
But Demon’s fawning admiration for Vinelander’s heritage and his racing mind and tongue also muddle in this paragraph whatever history might be inferred.
437.29-30: Copper Tartars or Red Mongols: Versions of the Golden Horde, the Mongol Tartars who overran eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, with a whiff or more of the Red (Communist) Russia of the twentieth century?
“Juchi’s son Batu (q.v.), in a series of brilliant campaigns, expanded its [Genghis Khan’s empire’s] frontiers to encompass most of European Russia. . . . The Mongol invasion of Russian in 1237-40 did more than destroy a few cities; it brought to an end the promising evolution of Kievan Russia. Muscovite Russia, which was to emerge from the receding Mongol tide, was geographically, socially and culturally a different state, ruled from a capital more distant from the European centre of gravity than Kiev had been” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., 10.540-41).
“The last Khan who was undisputed ruler over the whole territory was Tokhtamish (1378-95). He joined forces with the White Horde, an agglomeration of tribes in western Siberia which had been led by the descendants of Orda, Batu’s eldest brother. . . . The later history of the Mongols, or rather of the Tartars, in Russia followed a similar course to that of the other Islamic Mongol empires: internal struggles and feuds, disintegration and finally division into independent states. Meanwhile the Moscow kingdom emerged as a major power and the history of the Tartars became a part of Russian history” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., 15.725-26).
Cf. “Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree” (9.15-24).
MOTIF: copper
437.31: Bronze Riders: Pushkin’s long poem Mednïy vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, which could equally be translated The Bronze Rider; see 171.07) focuses on a famous statue of Peter the Great, another empire-builder, erected in 1777. These Bronze Riders earlier than the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols could, if we take the Red Mongols as the Bolshevik Red Army, themselves be the Golden Horde in earthly history. It is hard to infer much from Demon’s rapid rambles through the pleasures of Vinelander’s venerable descent but the slippery instability of princes and peoples.
Cf. Despair 71: “that bronze rider’s identity.”
437.31-32: before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo: Who are this we? Perhaps it pays not to ask; perhaps Demon is thinking, if that’s the word, of the eighteenth-century Zemski-Temnosiniy lineage, with its nineteenth-century O’Reilly extension.
437.31-33: introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos: “Places where gamblers can risk their money against a common gambler, called a banker or the house, have existed since at least the 17th century. . . . Roulette is played at all casinos throughout the world” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., 9.115D). But not, of course, Russian roulette (W3): “an act of bravado consisting of spinning the cylinder of a revolver loaded with one cartridge, pointing the muzzle at one’s own head, and pulling the trigger.” (A standard cylinder has six chambers.)
437.32: Irish loo: W2, loo: “A game played for stakes with three, or sometimes five, cards dealt to each player from a full pack.” Irish loo (W2): “A variety of loo played without a widow but with a draw to improve the hands.”
Cf. EO II,349: “English lu or loo.”
438.01-02: my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold: Another attempted ploy that only adds to the irretrievability of the situation once Ada emerges.
438.03: that infernal paraphernalia: MOTIF: infernal
438.04-08: After all we haven’t seen each other—since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!” Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether: Cf. “‘The last time I enjoyed you,’ said Demon, ‘was in April when you wore a raincoat with a white and black scarf and simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist’” (245.24-26). Demon’s next glimpse of Ada will not be quite so enjoyable for either of them.
Cf. Van meeting Andrey Vinelander for the first time: “His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudobronchitis” (513.08-11).
438.07: Volatina . . . dragonara: A1: “drugs.” Volatina is invented, with hints of “volatile” (in Demon’s last words, “volatile boy!” in the preceding line, 438.06) and “voluble” and perhaps “Latina” (Demon has just been to two cities in Latin America). Babikov 2022: 766 suggests the Latin name, Volatinia jacarina, of the blue-black grassquit. This bird inhabits Latin America, from Mexico to northern Chile, and, I note, is the only species of a genus whose name derives from the Latin volatus, “flying,” appropriate to winged Demon, to his rapid flight from Latin America, and to his getting so voluble here when “high.”
438.07: dragonara: Babikov 2022: 766 suggests that this echoes the name of the nineteenth-century Dragonara Palace on a promontory in Malta, in whose caves, legend has it, a dragon lived. A casino opened in the former palace in 1964, and it would therefore be appropriate to Demon’s passion for gambling and casinos. Pléiade 2022: 1483 proposes that “dragonara” alludes to “chasing the dragon,” a technique for ingesting through a tube or straw the fumes of heroin resting on foil and heated from below, a practice known since at least the 1950s.
Cf. “‘Draconite,’ a stimulant no longer in production but still advertised on fences and even cliff walls” (TT 94).
438.13-14: And here Ada entered. Not naked—oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio: In implicit criticism of novelists who would sacrifice plausibility for dramatic impact.
438.15-16: She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second: Van and Nabokov imply that even at this moment the fateful loss looming ahead would not have been inevitable if Ada could have found some other way of reacting.
Cf. Ada’s imminent announcement that she cannot leave Andrey Vinelander so long as he has to contend with tuberculosis: “She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish ‘merci,’ blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost” (529.24-26).
438.15-16: Bozhe moy!: Darkbloom: “Russ., good Heavens.” Literally, “My God!”
438.18-19: I’ll cancel my appointment: Dan’s funeral, that is: a strange way of referring to a funeral, but an indication that compared with the discovery of incest the death even of a rather close cousin is a minor matter for Demon.
438.22: a voluble broker: Demon is a banker.
438.22: a guilty schoolboy: Young Van, presumably.
438.23-24: when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im: A pleasingly odd twist, almost a Boschian wrench, on “gone to the dogs” and “gone to hell”—with a play also on “curse”?
MOTIF: chort; hell;
438.23-24: k chertyam sobach’im: Cf. Ada’s recollection of her first glimpse of Van, in 1878, at Radugalet, “the other Ardis”: Marina angrily takes Ada away, leaving Dan to leer over the “lovely wild Irish rose” whom Demon has spirited from the Ardis scullery, and she deprives Ada “of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds—and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg)” (151.12-14). There are certainly hellish hounds in the Hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights; in the Hell panel of The Last Judgement the animals are too distorted for dogs to be recognizable.
438.24-25: of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinanti of his enigmatica arte: Draws on the opening sentence of Mario Bussagli’s pocket illustrated introduction to Bosch, 3: “la vita di Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken, meglio noto con lo pseudonimo—da lui stesso creato—di Hieronimus Bosch, con il quale firma varie sue opere, molti aspetti affascinanti della sua enigmatica arte. . . . ” (first noted by Julia Bader, Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972, 147). “If we knew more details about the life of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken—better known under the pseudonym (invented by himself) of ‘Hieronymus Bosch,’ with which he signed his paintings—many intriguing facets of his enigmatic art would become much clearer” (Bosch, trans. Claire Pace, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, p. 3).
“Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken”: Äken is probably an erroneous transcription of Aeken (cf. “Een sleutel in Meppel”, note 6). (Van der Weide and Siccama to BB, July 13, 2004).
438.24: Anthoniszoon: corrected from Ada 1969 “Anthniszoon.” Jeroen’s father Anthonis van Aeken is also recorded as having been a “Schilder” (painter).
438.25: affascinanti: corrected from Ada 1969 "affascinati."
438.25-26: as Dan explained with a last sigh: Cf. “all ends are banal—hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital” (439.20-440.02).
438.26: nurse Bellabestia (“Bess”): Cf. “According to Bess (which is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse” (435.18-19).
In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Bk. III, Ch. 5, Bella Wilfer retreats to her room and muses with herself: “‘Then pray,’ said Bella, sternly putting the question to herself in the looking-glass as usual, ‘what do you mean by this, you inconsistent little Beast?’”
MOTIF: beauty and the beast
438.27: bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues: Cf. “Uncle Dan in an overstuffed chair was trying to read, with the aid of one of the dwarf dictionaries for undemanding tourists which helped him to decipher foreign art catalogues, an article apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper somebody on the train had abandoned opposite him” (68.16-20).
438.27-28: bequeathed . . . his second-best catheter: Alludes both to Shakespeare’s will, in which he famously added to his first draft “Item, I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture” (i.e. bedclothes etc.)—that is, the marital bed, as opposed to the best bed, reserved for guests—and to Joyce’s Ulysses, in which in Chapter 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis,” in the Homeric titling Nabokov dismissed) there is an extended discussion of Shakespeare. Near the opening of that chapter, Stephen Dedalus recalls a bawdy verse by medical student Buck Mulligan (and by his real-life model, Oliver St. John Gogarty): “First he tickled her / Then he patted her / Then he passed the female catheter” (151: 9.22-24); just past half way, Stephen elaborates on Shakespeare’s will, in a passage set out as a verse riff: “And therefore when he was urged, / As I believe, to name her / He left her his / Secondbest / Bed. // Punkt. // Leftherhis / Secondbest / Bestabed / Secabest / Leftabed” (167: 9.696-706). In the dream of chapter 15 (“Circe”), Bello (a transmuted Bella Cohen, “a massive whoremistress”) tells Bloom: “You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written” (443: 15.3198-99) (Ulysses: Student’s Edition: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). The bequest to “Bellabestia” of the “second-best catheter” reflects all three passages in Ulysses, as well as Shakespeare’s celebrated will.
In his scathing 1941 review of the unfounded speculations in the biographical part of Frayne Williams’s Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, Nabokov writes: “Finally, it is interesting to learn that ‘it takes two to make a conversation and the same number to make love’—which fact, together with the second-best bed (‘the most intimate monument of her life’), is about all we and the voluble author really know concerning that particular marriage” (TWS 183).
Since Bess, as a nurse, seems to have procured for Dan (see 256.21-23) his twelfth birthday present for Ada, the “huge beautiful doll—unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills,” which Ada responds to by saying “You tell him to take a pair of tongs and carry the whole business to the surgical dump” (84.16-29), the “second-best catheter” has a ghoulish aptness.
Afternote to Part Two, Chapter 10