Part 3 Chapter 1
Forenote
Pt. 3 Ch. 1 covers at least seven years of Van’s life, 1893-1900, in four pages, an unprecedented change of pace in this novel. (“At least” because while its action extends only to 1900, the chapter mentions the composition of Van’s works up until 1922.) Van has to survive without Ada—not without sex, of course, he is still Van, after all—and does so through travel, women, and work. Time flows colorfully but emptily by. Van’s restless journeying hardly takes him outside himself (he visits Lake Van) or distracts him from Ada, whose memory saturates everything (he visits Ladorah, a comically close echo of Ladore, and Sidra, a comic reversal of Ardis). He publishes his first philosophical and psychological books, Illegible Signatures (1895), Clairvoyeurism (1903) and Furnished Space (1913), and in 1922 begins The Texture of Time. In 1900 he visits his mother, Marina, in her dying days, but avoids her funeral because both Ada and Demon will be there. He muses on Marina’s death, torturing himself that he did not love her enough, hoping in vain for a sign, if not of forgiveness, at least “of continued being behind the veil of time” (452). He ponders why he lives on after being forced to part from Ada and after, apparently, under Demon’s guidance, she has married Andrey Vinelander:
He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio’s warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada. (452)
Annotations
449.01-02: He traveled, he studied, he taught. // He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah: As Proffer was the first to note in print (Proffer 1974: 249), this opening of Part Three echoes the famous surprise of the opening of the penultimate chapter of Flaubert’s novel L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), a sudden jump forward in time for the hero, Frédéric Moreau:
Il voyagea.
Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la tente, l’étourdissement des paysages et des ruines,
l’amertume des sympathies interrompues.
Il revint.
Il fréquenta le monde, et il eut d’autres amours encore. Mais le souvenir continuel du premier les lui rendait insipides;
et puis la véhémence du désir, la fleur même de la sensation était perdue. Ses ambitions d’esprit avaient également diminué.
Des années passèrent; et il supportait le désœuvrement de son intelligence et l’inertie de son cœur.
III.vi (L’Éducation sentimentale, ed. Édouard Maynial, Paris, Garnier, 1964, 419)
He traveled.
He came to know the melancholy of steamboats, cold awakenings in the tent, the tedium of landscapes and ruins,
the bitterness of interrupted feelings.
He returned.
He frequented society, and he had other loves. But the continual memory of the first made them insipid; and besides,
the violence of desire, the very flower of sensation, had gone. His intellectual ambitions had also dwindled. Years passed; and
he endured the idleness of his mind and the inertia of his heart.
(slightly adapted from Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, 411).
Cancogni 260-61 quotes Proust on this passage: “la chose la plus belle de L’Éducation sentimentale . . . pas une phrase, mais un blanc, . . . un ‘blanc,’ un énorme ‘blanc’ et, sans l’ombre d’une transition, soudain la mesure du temps devenant au lieu de quarts d’heure, des années, des décades (je reprends les dernier mots que j’ai cités pour montrer cet extraordinaire changement de vitesse, sans préparation):
‘ . . . et Frédéric, béant, reconnut Sénécal.
Il voyagea.
Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots. . . . ’”
(Proust, Contre Saint-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade 1971, 595).
(“The best thing in Sentimental Education . . . not a phrase, but a gap, . . . a ‘gap,’ an enormous ‘gap,’ and without the shadow of a transition, the measure of time becoming not quarters of an hour but years, decades (I repeat the last words I cited to show this extraordinary change of speed, without preparation): ‘ . . . and Frédéric, gaping, recognised Sénécal. // He traveled. . . .”)
Although for Van the abrupt change of tempo and the sense of life’s continuity as emptied time matches the change in Frédéric Moreau’s life, Frédéric’s own tardy sentimental and sexual education, and its long delayed fulfilment, before this point contrast markedly with Van’s amatory life hitherto, his precocity in sex, love, and ardently reciprocated passion.
Nabokov famously and explicitly uses the intonations of this celebrated Flaubertian chapter-opening to mark a change of pace, and the start of unforeseen travels, in the opening of Part Two of Lolita, the start of Humbert’s and captive Lolita’s travels across America and its motels: “We came to know—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court. . . . Nous connûmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious names—all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, . . . ” (Lolita 2.1, 145-46).
Alexey Sklyarenko notes (Nabokv-L, 18 December 2012): “In a letter to Ernest Feydeau [November-December 1857] Flaubert wrote: ‘Books are made not like children but like pyramids . . . and are just as useless!’ . . . The author of Texture of Time (Part Four of Ada), Van Veen went to Africa (as Flaubert did) to see the pyramids.”
The account of a young man’s jaded travels echoes also Byron’s long narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and the cult of the Byronic wandering hero that followed it. Cf. “the balsam of travel, that decisive factor used by romantic millionaires to cure their spleen” (Defense 223).
MOTIF: Byron; novel
449.01: He traveled, he studied, he taught: Cf. Demon and Marina: “They reveled, and traveled, and they quarreled” (12.23); Van, on the eve of his duel: “He ate, drank, schemed” (307.23).
449.01: He traveled: Cf. “He decided that after completing his medical studies at Kingston . . . he would undertake long travels in South America, Africa, India. As a boy of fifteen . . . he had studied with a poet’s passion the timetables of three great American transcontinental trains that one day he would take—not alone (now alone). From Manhattan, via Mephisto, El Paso, Meksikansk and the Panama Chunnel, the dark-red New World Express reached Brazilia and Witch . . . ” (345.10-18).
449.02-06: He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) . . . Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra: These amusing echoes of “Ladore,” “Van,” and a reversed “Ardis” may seem to be invented place-names but are all real locations, or almost so, on Earth: there is a small town Ladora (1960 pop. 321) in Iowa County, Iowa; for Lake Van, see 449.05n.; for Sidra, see 449.06n.
449.02-03: He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name): Recalls the strongly Egyptian elements, and the strongly architectural elements, in the Villa Venus chapter, Pt. 2 Ch. 3, from Van’s first floramor (“Three Egyptian squaws, dutifully keeping in profile (long ebony eye, lovely snub, braided black mane, honey-hued faro frock, thin amber arms, Negro bangles, doughnut earring of gold bisected by a pleat of the mane, Red Indian hairband, ornamental bib), lovingly borrowed by Eric Veen from a reproduction of a Theban fresco . . . prepared me,” 353.17-24) to the name of his partner in his last (“was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained. . . . And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she?” 357.26-33).
MOTIF: Ladore
449.04-05: He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece: The Governor of Armenia is named Armborough and his niece, Marion (a near syllabic re-scrambling of “Armenia”): “Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece” (474.19-475.02); “she was right, they were really quite alone, he had possessed Marion Armborough behind her uncle’s back in much more complex circumstances, what with the motorboat jumping like a flying fish and his host keeping a shotgun near the steering wheel” (478.27-29). What seems like a throwaway detail in a mere narrative listing proves to have a detailed and comic narrative expansion.
On Earth, Britain never controlled Armenia, but Russia acquired the area of eastern Armenia in the wake of the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828, although this did not include Lake Van (but it did include Erevan and Lake Sevan). Britain and Russia maneuvered for influence in Asia Minor through much of the nineteenth century, in what became known as the Great Game (see 396.02n.): “According to one major view, the Great Game started on 12 January 1830, when Lord Ellenborough, [cf. “Armborough” above; Ellenbogen is a German word for “elbow”] the president of the Board of Control for India, tasked Lord Bentinck, the governor-general, with establishing a trade route to the Emirate of Bukhara. Britain aimed to create a protectorate in Afghanistan, and support the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Khiva, and Bukhara as buffer states against Russian expansion. This would protect India and key British sea trade routes by blocking Russia from gaining a port on the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. As Russian and British spheres of influence expanded and competed, Russia proposed Afghanistan as the neutral zone” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game, accessed 2 January 2024).
MOTIF: governor of
449.05: Lake Van: A large lake (3,755 km2, the largest in Turkey) in the Armenian highlands, near what is now Turkey’s eastern border. “The lake was the centre of the kingdom of Urartu from about 1000 BC, afterwards of the Satrapy of Armenia, Kingdom of Greater Armenia, and the Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan. // Along with Lake Sevan in today's Armenia and Lake Urmia in today's Iran, Van was one of the three great lakes of the Armenian Kingdom, referred to as the seas of Armenia (in ancient Assyrian sources: "tâmtu ša mât Nairi" (Upper Sea of Nairi), the Lower Sea being Lake Urmia)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Van, accessed 2 January 2024).
Nabokov, who certainly knew aspects of the history of Lake Van (see 474.18 and n.: the “Arrowroot” that echoes the old kingdom of “Urartu”), may well have known enough of its geography to see that the largest island in Lake Van was named Adır (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad%C4%B1r_Island, accessed 2 January 2024).
449.05-10: From a hotel balcony in Sidra . . . his secretary, young Lady Scramble: The letters in “Sidra,” if scrambled as in a Scrabble game (cf. 227.30-31, “the highest score ever obtained for one word by a Russian scrambler”), or if reversed in sequence, as the order of letters is reversed in a reflection, of course yield “Ardis,” a word Lucette has tried in vain to use in a game of Russian Scrabble with Van and Ada: “it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant ‘the point of an arrow’—but only in Greek, alas” (225.16-19).
MOTIF: Ardis
449.05-08: From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales: The reflections off sea-water anticipate Van’s watching the sunset from the Tobakoff on the eve of Lucette’s death (“he watched the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave,” 474.05-07) and his premonitory dream that night (“the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece,” 474.16-475.02), but they will also help inspire Van's Reflections in Sidra (503.03), “his second philosophic fable, a ‘denunciation of space’” (502.03), begun after and in a sense provoked by Lucette’s death (see Boyd 1979: 561-64). Stephen Blackwell (email, 22 February 2024) adds that the sunset reflections here also anticipate the sunset over Lake Geneva that Van watches from his suite in the Trois Cygnes Hotel in Mont Roux just before his first meeting with Ada in seventeen years, on 14 July 1922: “The wide lovely lake lay in dreamy serenity, fretted with green undulations, ruffed with blue, patched with glades of lucid smoothness between the ackers; and, in the lower right corner of the picture, as if the artist had wished to include a very special example of light, the dazzling wake of the westering sun pulsated through a lakeside lombardy poplar that seemed both liquefied and on fire” (553.09-16).
449.06: Sidra: A “fabled bay” (449.11), the name of a Mediterranean port and the gulf on which it lies (also known as the Gulf of Sirte), in northern Libya. Babikov 2022: 769 suggests an additional reference to the ancient Mediterranean port city of Syedra, on what is now the southern coast of Turkey, but the port was abandoned in the thirteenth century and only ruins remain.
449.08-09: well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary: Cf. the first introduction of Marina as an actress: “As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art” (10.03-06).
449.09-10: the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble: In this novel, the name seems to suggest not only Scrabble but a scrambling for sexual positions. On the Night of the Burning Barn, Van “groped for and cupped [Ada’s] hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo” (121.10-13).
449.10-12: On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer: Cf. “Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice” (504.27-30).
449.11: another fabled bay: Cf. Sineusov, in the story “Ultima Thule,” addressing his dead wife: “Oh, my love, how your presence smiles from that fabled bay” (SoVN 501)—the bay in question there apparently being the Baie des Anges, which runs from Cap d’Antibes to Nice’s Mont Boron, and seems also the likely location of Villa Armina.
449.11: Eberthella Brown: W2: “A genus of motile, aerobic, Gram-negative bacteria of the family Bacteriaceae, forming acid but no gas on many carbohydrates and occurring in the intestinal tract of man, usually associated with inflammation. The type species, E. typhi (syn. Bacillus typhosus), causes typhoid fever.” Named after its discoverer, the early German microbiologist Karl Eberth (1835-1926). An even more incidental character in Pale Fire, Eberthella Hurley (PF 238), also has this risibly improbable first name.
MOTIF: brown
449.11-12: the local Shah’s pet dancer: When VN was writing Ada, by far the most famous Shah was Mohammed Reza (1919-1980), Shah of Iran 1941-1979. Cf. “Shahs married” (PF l. 681, p. 58), referring to the year 1958-59 (Mohammed Reza married a third time in 1959). “The local Shah” nevertheless suggests a smaller country or region than Iran.
499.12: pet dancer: MOTIF: pet
449.12-13: a naive little thing who thought “baptism of desire” meant something sexual: As might the average reader. W2 explains, s.v. baptism, “The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, in addition to the canonical form [by aspersion, affusion or immersion], recognize the validity of two kinds of baptism, either of which may be received by those who earnestly desire to be baptized, but who die before the sacrament can be administered. These are baptism of blood and baptism of desire. The former comes to martyrs for the faith, as in the case of some catechumens in the early Church; the second to those animated by perfect love of God.”
449.14-19: a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van—who for hours . . . kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips: Zimmer, in his online Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, identifies as “Thaumetopoea Hübner, 1816 [Notodontidae]: a Palearctic genus of prominent moths, by some authors considered a family of its own (Thaumetopoeidae). The hairy caterpillars make large webs on the branches of trees and go out in columns to feed, single file, front touching rear. Sometimes they happen to go in a circle, and they may keep on moving this way for a week, eventually dying of starvation. The hairs are poisonous, causing a strong itch and skin inflammations. The type-species is Thaumetopoea processionea Linnaeus, 1758, in oak forests of C and S Europe. Thaumetopoea pityocampa Denis & Schiffermüller, 1775, the Pine Procession Moth, is the worst pine forest pest in the Mediterranean region and the Near East.” He explains too that “The ‘six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments’ unwarned Van picks up in Ada probably is not one but five or six Procession Moths [their caterpillars, that is] glued together.”
Cf. “vanouissements” (375.31), glossed by Darkbloom as “swooning in Van’s arms.”
Cf. SO 60: “Ah, a caterpillar. Handle with care. Its golden-brown coat can cause a nasty itch.”
MOTIF: butterflies (and moths); itch
449.14-15: a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping: In June 1884 Ada, taking Van to visit her Ardis larvarium, tells him:
“Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls),” she said.
“Personally,” said Van, “I rather like those that roll up in a muff when you touch them—those that go to sleep like old dogs.”
“Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idée, they swoon, it’s a little syncope,” explained Ada, frowning. (54.23-31)
450.02-03: discarded “merrycans” with “Billy” labels: Puns on “cans,”“Americans,” “jerrycans” (20-litre fluid containers, especially for fuel), and “billycan” (W2), also simply “billy” (W2): “A cylindrical enameled or tin vessel, with a separable lid and a loose-fitting wire handle; hence, any metal can with a lid. Orig. Australia.” Jerrycans were invented in Germany in the 1930s for military use, and quickly adopted also by the Allies in World War II; the name derives from the slang Jerry for “German.” “Merrycans” therefore seems to combine both opposing sides in the Atlantic theater of World War II.
“Merrycans” also seems to imply here (in the context of tourist detritus, and via merry in the sense of “pleasingly inebriated”) discarded beer cans rather than jerrycans; and “‘Billy’ labels”
perhaps implies such popular American beers as Miller and possibly also Budweiser (regularly abbreviated to “Bud”—with, maybe, an echo of Melville’s story Billy Budd (written 1886-1891, published 1924)?).
MOTIF: technology
450.03: the jungle jingles of exported jazz: Cf. “Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles” (524.30). Cf. also VN’s “I loathe jungle music” (SO 117) and John Shade’s “I loathe such things as jazz” (PF 67, l. 924).
450.05: the ancient torture house: MOTIF: torture
450.05-06: the suspended garden: As opposed to the more usual “hanging garden,” but cf. also “suspended gardens” (PF 162).
450.07-11: He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, . . . and on the stone tables of Latin public parks: For a list of some of Van’s other books, including work written with Ada, and a report on their composition, see 578.15-17 and, more generally, Pt. 5 Ch.4.
450.07: Illegible Signatures, 1895: In light of “his published reports on sick minds” (471.28), this book, never referred to again, could be the fruit of Van’s work as a psychologist on madness, such as that undertaken at “Kingston University, Mayne, where there was a first-rate madhouse, as well as a famous Department of Terrapy, and where he now went back to one of his old projects, which turned on the Idea of Dimension & Dementia” (365.01-05), and where he begins in 1892 (365.01), continues in 1900 (452.05-19), becomes a professor in 1905 (506.24-26), and remains until his retirement in 1922 (507.10-15). “Illegible signatures” may suggest either mad Aqua’s attempts to decipher the speech she hears in the sound of flowing water (22.32-24.10) or the third of the three cosmologists “who had recklessly started the whole business [of Terra] half a century earlier” (339.24-25): “Z, a ruddy, white-whiskered old sport, was driving his Yakima jailers crazy by means of incomprehensible crepitations, ceaseless invention of invisible inks, chameleonizations, nerve signals, spirals of outgoing light and feats of ventriloquism that imitated pistol shots and sirens” (339.28-33).
450.08: Clairvoyeurism, 1903: This book too is never mentioned again. Its comic fusion of clairvoyant and voyeurism indicates little about its content, apart from the fact that it is more psychological than philosophical, and may perhaps be related to Van’s work on cases like Spencer Muldoon, the blind man with chromesthesia, including the ability to distinguish colors by touch, whom he attempts to study in 1901 (468-69).
450.08: Furnished Space, 1913: In A1, VN has noted in the margin: “espace meublé (Bergson).”
Bergson emphatically distinguishes space from time and stresses the contents, the objects, of space, and in doing so he emphasises la durée (duration) as the essential element of live time, as Nabokov and Van invoke accurately at 377.03-17. Nevertheless “Furnished Space, l’espace meublé” (504.21) seems in fact Nabokov’s own pseudo-Bergsonian pun on the French term for “furnished room,” “furnished apartment.” “Espace meublé” does not occur in what would seem the likeliest Bergson works, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; English, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1910), Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit (1896; English, Matter and Memory, 1911); L’Évolution créatrice (1907; English, Creative Evolution, 1911); L’Énergie spirituelle (1919; English, Mind-Energy 1920); Durée et simultanéité (1922; English, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, 1999); and La Pensée et le mouvant (1934; English, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1946).
The nearest Bergson comes to “espace meublé”—and it is not very near, for the subject matter is quite different—is in L’Évolution créatrice:
Notre action procède ainsi de « rien » à « quelque chose », et elle a pour essence même de broder « quelque chose » sur le
canevas du « rien ». A vrai dire, le rien dont il est question ici n'est pas tant l'absence d'une chose que celle d'une utilité. Si
je mène un visiteur dans une chambre que je n'ai pas encore garnie de meubles, je l'avertis « qu'il n'y a rien ». Je sais pourtant
que la chambre est pleine d'air; mais, comme ce n'est pas sur de l'air qu'on s'assoit, la chambre ne contient véritablement rien
de ce qui, en ce moment, pour le visiteur et pour moi-même, compte pour quelque chose. D'une manière générale, le travail
humain consiste à créer de l'utilité ; et, tant que le travail n'est pas fait, il n'y a « rien », — rien de ce qu'on voulait obtenir.
(L’Évolution créatrice, electronic edition, Les Échos du Maquis, 2013, 198)Our action proceeds thus from “nothing” to “something,” and its very essence is to embroider “something” on the canvas of
“nothing.” The truth is that the “nothing” concerned here is the absence not so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor
into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to him that “there is nothing in it.” Yet I know the room is full of air; but, as we
do not sit on air, the room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for the visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In a
general way, human work consists in creating utility; and, as long as the work is not done, there is “nothing”—nothing that we
want.
(Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911, 297-98
450.08-09: The Texture of Time, begun 1922: For the text of this work, and its genesis, see Part Four of Ada, 535-63.
The 1922 date here suggests to a first-time reader at this point that Van’s post-Manhattan separation from Ada may last until 1922, when in fact the action of the chapter takes us only just past Marina’s death in 1900. But although Van and Ada are briefly reunited at Mont Roux in 1905, after Demon’s death (see Pt. 3 Ch. 8), they do not properly and permanently reunite, indeed, until 1922, on the death of Andrey Vinelander, the man Demon has strongly encouraged Ada to marry, after he separates her from Van in 1893.
MOTIF: texture of time
450.09: mountain refuges: Cf. “in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge” (26.01-02), where Van is born. Van and Ada will die at Ex, not a mountain refuge but a château they have built “in the Swiss Alps” (567.11), where they will together compose and revise Ada between 1957 and 1967.
450.09-10: and in the drawing rooms of great expresses: For adolescent Van’s love of the great express trains, “three great American transcontinental trains” including the “New World Express” and two others, and the “African Express” and the “Orient Express,” see 345.15-30. Van’s favorite expresses “included at least two carriages in which a fastidious traveler could rent a bedroom with bath and water closet, and a drawing room with a piano or a harp” (345.31-33). If he “liked composing his works” on “great expresses,” these trains must have offered smoother rides on Antiterra than on Earth.
For VN’s own love of the Nord-Express in his childhood, see SM 141-46.
450.10: and on the sundecks of white ships: For Van’s checking proofs on transatlantic ships in 1891 and in 1901, see 342.23-25 and 474.09-10, retrospectively. On the Tobakoff Van looks for Lucette from the Games Deck, spying “some other redhead, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing a letter at passionate speed and he thought that if ever he switched from ponderous factitude to light fiction he would have a jealous husband use binoculars to decipher from where he stood that outpour of illicit affection” 475.33-476.04).
For the “white ships,” cf. Van “on board a ‘luxury’ liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!)” ( 178.02-03).
450.11-17: He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that . . . or that the marble Mercury . . . had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae: For such segues, lapses and transformations, in reverie or especially in the throes of composition, see for instance the story “Torpid Smoke”; Gift 6 (“the familiar words would rush past, swirling amid violent foam (whose seething was transformed into a mighty flowing motion if one fixed one’s eyes on it, as we used to do long ago, looking down from a vibrating mill bridge until the bridge turned into a ship’s stern: farewell!)”; SM 222 (“I would lift my head to explain—but the table had gone, and I was sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand”); and PF 67-68, ll. 941-44: “Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam / Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb / Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon / I eat my egg with.”
450.13-15: or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand: Cf. Van and Lucette at Kingston both using the remembered black divan in the Ardis library “as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher’s orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through—that’s the solution!” (373.17-23).
450.15-17: the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae: Cf. the “woman of marble bending over a stamnos” (50.12) near the oaks and larches of Ardis Park? Or, in view of the servant-like attentiveness of the arborvitae, Demon’s complaint at Ardis that “Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries” (241.19)? Or the sleuth disguised as a statue at an English Villa Venus: “Here a bedsheeted statue attempted to challenge Van from its marble pedestal but slipped and landed on its back in the bracken. Ignoring the sprawling god . . . ” (473.12-14)?
Babikov 2022: 769 suggests Mercury as the god of travelers and the guide of souls to the underworld, and in his transformation into an attentive arborvitae, the metamorphosis of Apollo’s favorite, the youth Cyparissus—after he accidentally kills his beloved stag and wishes he could mourn at that spot forever—into a cypress tree to stand as a witness of perpetual grief (Ovid, Metamorphoses X.106-143).
450.17: arborvitae: W2: “A tree of the genus Thuja and the related Thujopsis. . . . The American arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) and the Oriental arborvitae (Thuja orientalis) are commonly cultivated.” Thuja occidentalis, “also known as northern white-cedar, eastern white-cedar, or arborvitae, is an evergreen coniferous tree, in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is native to eastern Canada and much of the north-central and northeastern United States. It is widely cultivated as an ornamental plant. . . . particularly . . . in gardens, parks, and cemeteries” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_occidentalis, accessed 3 January 2024).
450.18-20: three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada: As Van’s next sentence implies, this is meant to be arithmetically riddling. The first cycle of separation seems to look from a vantage point of 1898 and count forward from 1885 (three years to 1888 and Ardis the Second, seven years to 1892 and Manhattan, thirteen years to Van’s 1898 present) and the second from a vantage point of 1900 and to count forward from 1884 (four years to 1888, eight to 1892, and sixteen to Van’s 1900 present).
450.23-25: Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon: Marina is destroyed by fire in 1900 in the sense that she is cremated (451.25, 451.34; “Then she went up in smoke,” 523.06); Lucette by water in 1901, in that she drowns (493-95); Demon by air in that the plane in which he flies disintegrates in mid-air over the Pacific (504.31-32). Demon does not die until 1905, again a time beyond the 1900 end of the on-stage action of this chapter, but a year, and an occasion, that allows Van and Ada to reunite (although not for as long as they anticipate), after their father no longer presents a resolute obstacle (see Pt. 3 Ch. 8).
As Stephen Blackwell notes (email, 22 February 2024), this is the most explicit anticipation of Lucette’s death since those we can infer at 104.8-11 (“The lusterless whiteness of Ada’s skin (at twelve, sixteen, twenty, thirty-three, et cetera) was incomparably rarer than Lucette’s golden bloom (at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis)”) and 146.13-16: “He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case.’”
For hints of a mythological play with the elemental (with earth, water, and air/sky) in the roots of the Veen family tree, see the note to the Family Tree (Zemski and Temnosiniy) in notes to Pt. 1 Ch. 1.
MOTIF: Lucette-prolepsis
450.24-25: Terra waited: In one sense, this seems to mean terra as earth, the fourth of the elements. For whom does a death by earth wait? (Dan might be seen as already having suffered such a death, 435.30-34.) The next person of moment for Van and Ada to die is Andrey Vinelander, whose slow death from tuberculosis seems to fit none of these traditional elements. Could Van and Ada in a sense be said to flatten into earth in their own final death together?
. . . if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.
. . . There was no pain to do it now—and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. “Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,” Dr. [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed (587.24-588.04)
In another sense, though, within Ada, Terra does not have the traditional meaning of “earth,” but means “another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us” (20.28-30). After the deaths of Marina, Lucette, and Demon, what does it mean in the sense of “Next World” that “Terra waited”?
MOTIF: Terra
450.26: For seven years: 1893-1900.
450.26-27: dismissed her life with her husband . . . as irrelevant: Cf. Marina’s retrospective dismissal of her torrid affair with Demon, as imagined by Van: “safely transformed by her screen-corrupted mind into a stale melodrama was her three-year-long period of hectically spaced love-meetings with Demon. . . . All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away” (253.12-23).
450.27: a successfully achieved corpse: Macabre but charmingly unexpected. “Successfully achieved” from whose point of view? Marina’s?
450.28-29: her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d’Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her): Villa Armina (as confirmed at 451.01-02 and 461.29). Demon had inherited it from his mother, born Countess Irina Garina, its name predating and having nothing to do with Marina: “Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her” (163.05-06). The villa had still been his when he and Marina had there engendered Van “in the ecstasy of reconciliation” (15.14-15); and from there Demon had sent Marina, now in Ex, Switzerland, a hundred orchids on the occasion of Van’s birth (8.01-02). Presumably it is at around this point—perhaps in gratitude for her agreeing to offer Van as a surrogate for Aqua’s still-born son?—that Demon gave her the villa. But it seems to have become his again: Van recalls staying “with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice” in “the spring of 1881” (152.25-27).
450.30-32: illnesses, which . . . she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower: By 1930 Nabokov’s own mother, Elena, had developed a faith in Christian Science, in which a practitioner “might deny other religions, the existence of evil, . . . . and the symptoms of whatever the illness is. She concludes . . . by asserting that disease is a lie, that this is the word of God, and that it has the power to heal” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science, accessed 3 January 2024).
450.33-34: Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions: He glimpses her in 1899 at the Nice railway station on his way to, and Lucette’s way from, Marina, 461.28-33. For Lucette as “dutiful,” see Boyd 1985/2021:145.
Cf. Cordula de Prey: “She dutifully visited her mother at their Malbrook castle” (322.02-03).
451.01-02: the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina: “Arbutus is a genus of 12 accepted species of flowering plants in the family Ericaceae, native to temperate regions of the Mediterranean, western Europe, the Canary Islands and North America. . . . Arbutus are small trees or shrubs with red flaking bark and edible red berries” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbutus, accessed 3 January 2024). Laurel (W2), “Any tree of the genus Laurus; specif., Laurus nobilis of southern Europe, called also bay, bay laurel, or bay tree.”
Cf. “None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose” (350.33-351.04).
451.02: a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion: Invited to attend the ailing Marina, presumably, by Dasha Vinelander (see 451.14), who will retire to a “subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr. Brod or Bred . . . who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii” (532.11-14). As decidedly Russian, Marina naturally inclines, within Christianity, to the Eastern Orthodox (Russian Orthodox or, as Nabokov usually refers to it, Greek Catholic) branch of the faith, even if her main spiritual allegiance is with Hinduism (see 451.13-15 and n.). In 1893 she was “flirting . . . [in Tsitsikar] with the Bishop of Belokonsk” (437.20).
451.03-04: his Nice parish near the tennis courts: Pléiade 1485 notes that this alludes to Nice’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, the largest Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe, inaugurated in 1912, and located near the former Hotel Impérial, a palace of the Belle Époque built in what was the Russian Quarter of Nice, and is now the Lycée du Parc Impérial, where tennis tournaments were and are still played.
451.04-05: Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater: The theater has always been her main topic of conversation, even insufferably so (see Pt. 1 Ch.10, Ch. 37), but she has also introduced religion (as at 90.31-34, commenting on Judaism: “‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp)”). Terra seems a new topic for her to discuss with Van (although she does refer to notions of eternity: “the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games—who said that? I said that,” 234.16-18).
451.05-07: never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis: As Lucette informs Van in 1901, Demon tells Marina the full story by 1899, at some point after he parts Van and Ada in 1893, having heard from Van about their knowledge of their true parentage: “I did not see you [in 1899] or I would have stopped to tell you what I had just learned. Imagine, mother knew everything—your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!” (461.34-462.03).
MOTIF: Ada, the ardors and arbors of Ardis
451.07-08: none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay: Cancer: see 451.24.
451.08-09: “self-focusing” or its opposite device, “self-dissolving”: The contrasted options superimpose terms from psychology or meditation on those from cinema, in which Marina has been a low-magnitude star.
451.11: dyakon: Darkbloom: “deacon.”
451.11: ambon: OED: “An elevated lectern or pulpit, typically located in the nave before the chancel, and raised on two or more steps.”
451.13-15: her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism: First mention of the person who will prove to be Ada’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Vinelander. The Russian word and the Russian diminutive of Daria (Dorothy) help highlight Dasha’s championing of her Russian Orthodoxy.
Dasha, introduced into the narrative here, does not step onto the novel’s stage to meet Van in person until the last chapter of Part Three. Ada, in a letter to Van, appears to wish for their meeting, when she explains that Ardis has become “a ‘Home for Blind Blacks’—both my mother and L., I’m sure, would have backed Dasha’s advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, . . . )” (503.14-17) but, knowing that Dasha will be perusing her letter, in fact warns him against her in a code that Dasha herself cannot decipher: Dasha, “who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to ‘renew’ your acquaintance—maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type” (502.18-23).
Marina’s devotion to Hinduism first features at 90.31-34.
451.18: the name of her illness: Cancer: cf. 451.24. Cf. Greg Erminin, in the next chapter, on Ada: “‘She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’ Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor” (455.23-26).
451.18: Van had a “verbal” nightmare: Cf. “Van often had word dreams” (309.30).
451.18-20: nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus: The nightmare proves “premonitory” (583.03-04), and the musky smell appears not a recollection but an anticipation of “mummy-wizened Marina” and “the smell in her hospital room that no breeze could dislodge” (452.07-10). Cf., from Van’s lecture on dreams: “All dreams are affected by the experiences and impressions of the present as well as by memories of childhood; all reflect, in images or sensations, a draft, a light, a rich meal or a grave internal disorder” (362.28).
Cf. also the end of Van’s nightmare last visit to a Villa Venus, in that chain of floramors that supposedly materialize Eric Veen’s “organized dream”: “The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s ‘organized dream,’ but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada” (358.17-23).
451.19-20: the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus: Miramas is a town in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of France, 43 kilometers northwest of Marseilles, population in 1962 around 10,000. “Miramas” continues the “Marina”-“Armina” (and “Armenia”-[Marion]) theme.
Van can evidently face the thought of visiting his dying mother only if he has the compensation of a Villa Venus relatively near (182 kilometers) to her in Nice.
Note, as Babikov 2022:769 has, that Nabokov has added to the real name of the Bouches-du-Rhône department the adjective rouges: not just the mouths (Petit-Rhône and Grand-Rhône) of the Rhône river delta, but the red mouths or lips of accommodating florindas in the local Villa Venus.
MOTIF: Villa Venus
451.20-24: Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating “I can’t!” (meaning “can’t die”—a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming “You can, sir!”: The “ball” here presumably being a pistol ball, and “bowl” a bowl of poison (or a bowl to bleed one’s slashed wrists into?). “You can, sir!” puns on cancer, a diagnosis Van has not yet heard (451.16-18). VN translated this into French as “On ne le peut qu’en serrant, qu’en serrant . . . ” (Pléiade III.814: “You can do this only by tightening, by tightening”), where, as Pléiade 1485 notes, the repeated “qu’en serrant” is a homophone, in the first two syllables, of French cancer (with a grim added sense of the tightening grip of the tumor on the organ it encircles).
Cf. Van’s referring back to this dream in 1967, at 583.01-06.
451.26-27: Van, a lucid soul, considered himself less brave morally than physically: Cf. “Being, as I had reason to believe, plucky . . . ” (124.34).
451.27-28: He was always (meaning well into the nineteen-sixties): One of the few anticipations of Van’s (and Ada’s) living so long (cf. 121.19-20, 122.12).
451.30: the later antlers may have been set right then: The “antlers” of the multiple cuckold; see 4.11n. Although Van does as it were add another prong to Andrey Vinelander’s “antlers” (Ada has clearly been unfaithful with others since her marriage), the image does not recur in Pt. 3 Ch. 8’s depiction of his and Ada’s adultery at Mont Roux in 1905.
MOTIF: antlers
451.31-32: with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed: A fusion of artificial lighting turning green bushes greener, and even seeming to make them grow faster, and the antlers budding, as it were, new shoots?
Evading wary Demon’s vigilance in Nice would have been much more difficult for Van and Ada than evading Dorothy Vinelander will prove in Mont Roux in 1905.
For a similar alliterative riff on g in a not dissimilar setting, cf. “with her guests under the golden globes of the new garden lamps that glowed here and there in the sudden greenery” (211.05-06), both passages perhaps paying homage to “To a green thought in a green shade” (l. 48) in Marvell’s “The Garden” (see 65.08n and 161.24-26).
451.32: stayed),: Corrected from 1969: “stayed)”.
451.34: funeral dash cremation dash: As Stephen Blackwell notes (email of 22 February 2024), the double spelling out of “dash” is a hilarious violation of the orthographic economy normally sought in telegrams.
451.34: after tomorrow: Nabokov’s habitual solecism for “the day after tomorrow.” Cf. 463.33.
452.03: Demon had already arrived with Andrey and Ada: The first time that readers learn of Andrey Vinelander’s first name, apart from his appearing at the bottom of the Family Tree over four hundred pages previously.
Lucette has divulged his surname to Van, in exchange for a kiss on the armpit, on their drunken return from the Ursus restaurant (415.31), and Van throws the name in Ada’s face the next morning when he calls her “the future Mrs. Vinelander” (420.22); Demon, snobbishly excited by the prospect of a family connection to an ancient noble lineage, gabbles to Van on his fatal visit to the Manhattan apartment about “Ada’s fiancé” (436.11) and his lineage (“He is—I mean Vinelander is—the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians . . . ,” 437.28-29), but he does not disclose Vinelander’s first name. As narrator Van has just mentioned that “the later antlers” of adultery “might have been set right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed” (451.30-32), the first confirmation that Ada has actually married her Arizonian suitor; and Lucette’s cable divulges her brother-in-law’s first name to Van, just as she has earlier disclosed his surname. Her wording— “Demon had already arrived with Andrey and Ada”—confirms that Demon continues in his eagerness for Vinelander to be associated with the family. In the next chapter, when Van bumps into Greg Erminin by chance in Paris, Greg asks him: “Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?” “In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I gather” (455.12-14).
Although Van does not attend Marina’s funeral, he later learns about Demon’s behavior there. Aboard the Tobakoff Lucette tells him: “He had ‘wept like a fountain’ in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either” (480.21-23)—at Ada’s wedding to Andrey Vinelander, in other words. And in Mont Roux Ada fills in more detail: “Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: ‘I will not cheat the poor grubs!’” (522.32-533.07).
452.04: Désolé de ne pouvoir être avec vous: Darkbloom: “distressed at being unable to be with you.” Does Van refuse to fly to Nice because he cannot bear having to see Ada with Andrey Vinelander, and then having to keep his distance from her, or because Demon is there? See previous note for Ada’s 1905 report to Van on Marina’s funeral and Demon’s role there.
452.05: Kingston’s Cascadilla Park: As Pléiade 1485 notes, the Cascadilla Gorge Trail flanks the stepped waterfalls of the Cascadilla Gorge, between the campus of Cornell University (where Nabokov taught from 1948 to 1959) and the Collegetown area of Ithaca to its south (where the Nabokovs lived in a number of different locations). Ithaca and Cornell form the underlay for Pale Fire’s New Wye and Wordsmith University, but apart from “Cascadilla Park” Ada’s Kingston seems to have nothing in common with Ithaca other than being a smallish university town a few hours’ drive inland from Manhattan.
Cf. “the Cascade in the larch plantation of Ardis Park” (140.26-27).
452.07-17: The last time he had seen mummy-wizened Marina and told her he must return to America . . . she had asked, with her new, tender, myopic, because inward, expression: “Can’t you wait till I’m gone?”; . . . and she had said, stressing . . . the exact kinship: “Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua,” whereupon he had nodded, with a smirk, instead of answering: “Yes, mother”: Cf. the start of the last chapter of Ada: “should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature—I mean, premonitory—nightmare about ‘You can, Sir,’ she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha—never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend . . . (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling)” (583.01-06).
“Mummy-wizened Marina” of course puns on Marina as Van’s mother and her being wizened and wrinkled in the last stages of cancer, like a mummified body, almost herself already a “successfully achieved corpse” (450.27)—and this in a sentence that ends “Yes, mother”! She calls him “Vanya, Vanyusha”; he does not call her “Mother,” let alone “Mummy.”
MOTIF: family relationship
452.13: an address on the Psychology of Suicide: Van had of course still thought Aqua was his mother when he learned of her death in 1883. After Lucette’s suicide Cordula writes to Van, as if in inadvertent repudiation of his right to have given such an address: “La psychologie du suicide est un mystère que nul savant ne peut expliquer” (499.20-21) (Darkbloom: “The psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain”). Disregarding Cordula, as it were, Van will later publish Suicide and Sanity (1912) (578.15-16).
452.14: tripitaka (safely packed): What seems to follow the novel’s common pattern of a Russian word and its gloss (cf. on the previous page: “naperekor (in spite of),” 451.14) is actually a Sanskrit religious term and a non-equivalent parenthesis: Tripitaka (W2): “[Skr. Tripitaka . . . ] The three divisions, or ‘baskets’ (Pitakas) of Buddhist scriptures,— the Vinayapitaka . . . or Basket of Discipline; Suttapitaka . . . or Basket of Discourses; and Abhidhammapitaka . . . or Basket of Metaphysics.”
“Safely packed” could mean that Ada is now safely married off to Andrey Vinelander; but more likely, that Marina has “safely packed” her concerns into the “baskets” of knowledge of a Buddhism-inflected Hinduism. Cf. Van’s analysis of Marina’s memories of her torrid affair with Demon: “All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away” (253.22-23).
But despite her apparent spiritual consolations, Marina is more troubled than she seems to Van, as Dorothy Vinelander discloses in 1905: “Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium . . . our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other—that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?” (519.12-19).
452.15-16: your silly aunt Aqua: “Aunt” rather than “mother,” as Aqua is officially supposed to be. In Van’s reconstruction of what Aqua in her madness might have heard in the talk of flowing water, he writes: “tu, voce sbigottita . . . spigotty e diavoletta . . . de lo cor dolente . . . con ballatetta va . . . va . . . della strutta, destruttamente . . . mente . . . mente . . . stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St. Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade” (23.26-32).
452.18: on the bench: Cf. in Van’s report of a sample dream, in his lecture on dreams: “In an intricate arrangement of thematic recollections and automatic phantasmata, Aqua impersonating Marina or Marina made-up to look like Aqua, arrives to inform Van, joyfully, that Ada has just been delivered of a girl-child whom he is about to know carnally on a hard garden bench” (361.25-29).
452.18-19: he had recently fondled and fouled a favorite, lanky, awkward black girl student: In the report of Van’s dreamlike “last visit to one last Villa Venus” (356.29) he writes: “He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained” (357.25-27).
452.19-26: Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection . . . . He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding, sign of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand.: Cf. Charles of Zembla, after the death of Queen Blenda but before his own coronation: “He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom” (PF 109). Cf. also Kinbote’s sense of wonder at holding the index cards of the as yet unread long poem Shade has been working on: “as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits” (PF 289). After the death of his father in Glory, Martin Edelweiss “even made certain experiments: if, right now a board in the floor creaks or there is a knock of some kind, that means he hears me and responds” (11-12).
452.27: on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth: Cf. “the Terror of Terra” (73.19-20) and “while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world” (21.03-08).
MOTIF: Terra
452.28-29: when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio’s warm bristly cheek: Valerio was the waiter of the “Monaco” who on February 5, 1893 (Pt. 2 Ch. 10) allowed Demon to ride the elevator with him as he took breakfast to Van and Ada and who accepted Demon’s bribe for answering his question whether his son was still living there: “Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter” (434.21-22).
452.29-32: and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star . . . when another man was in every bedroom with Ada: First-time readers know of course from early in Ada that Van and Ada are reunited and collaborate on the composition and revision of Van’s memoir of his love for his sister; but they do not yet know the details of how Van and Ada next come together after this point in 1900. As narrator, Van has already dropped a clue on the previous page: “for, actually, who knows, the later antlers might have been set right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed” (452.29-32). They will indeed cuckold Andrey Vinelander in 1905 while Ada shares a hotel with her husband—and shares, as a day visitor, Van’s suite in another hotel in Mont Roux (Pt. 3 Ch. 8).
452.30-31: when everything had an edge of agony and despair: Cf. Van, on the morning Demon will discover and separate him and Ada, “looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away . . . )” (434.30-32).
MOTIF: agony
452.31-32: an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada: The day Ada marries Andrey Vinelander, Van is in “a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego” (481.03).
Afternote to Part Three, Chapter 1