Part 3, Chapter 2

Forenote

After the plunge through empty time in Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Van’s narrative slows down again in Pt. 3 Ch. 2 for the first sustained scene in the eight years since his enforced parting from Ada. Van also records here his first direct encounters since then with any of the familiar cast—two characters from what now seem the distant reaches of Part One: Greg Erminin and Cordula de Prey, now Cordula Tobak. 

At the end of Part One Van had moved directly from Cordula’s Manhattan apartment toward Paris (in the last line of Part One and the first pages of Pt. 2 Ch. 1); now, after dejectedly sampling space and filling time since his parting from Manhattan and Ada, he finds himself in Paris, in the first fleshed-out scene there in the novel.

Van’s comic chance encounter with Greg foregrounds their shared aging and their shared passion for Ada at Ardis, amid all they do not share. Greg divulges his fond memories of his old besottedness with Ada, while Van divulges nothing to Greg but just enough for us to see him bristle for a moment with instant jealous rage. Their parting leads with comic immediacy into Van’s chance encounter with Cordula, whom he propositions with comic insistence and success, despite her initial show of resistance. 

Greg informs Van that he has heard from Tobak that Lucette is staying at the Alphonse Four, and Cordula confirms it for him. Even a first-time reader can suspect where the next scene will unfold: in Paris, at Lucette’s hotel.

Annotations

453.01-02: On a bleak morning . . . in Paris: That “lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel” (173.19-20); cf. Boyd 1990: 504: “Wherever they moved, Nabokov found Paris oppressive, and in later years would always recall it as the gray, gloomy city on the Seine. Sitting in the Deux Magots with George Hessen and his French translator, he ran the city down. ‘Parizh,’ he would say, in the Russian manner: ‘Pas riche.’” 

453.01: between the spring and summer of 1901: “this was May 31” (461.22).

453.02: Paris: Also known on Antiterra as “Lute” (first at 173.18, and in this chapter, 454.27).

453.02: black-hatted: Van is wearing a black fedora (460.02). As Diana Makhaldiani notes (email, June 10, 2024), Lucette not only wears a black hat in the next scene, an hour or two after this one, but will be later remembered as having been “black-hatted”: “a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901” (545.30-31). 

453.02-03: one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket: In Mont Roux in 1905, when Van and Ada see each other for the first time in thirteen years, in a crowded room, “they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his ‘humped’ jacket” (511.08-10).

453.04: a furled English umbrella: In 1893 Demon, as he approaches Cordula’s apartment in search of Van, responds to an acquaintance “with a wave of his slim umbrella” (433.33-34); in Pt. 3 Ch. 3 Van “kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do” (460.02-03). MOTIF: cane

453.05-06: Avenue Guillaume Pitt: Nonexistent in our Paris. Evidently named after William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), prime minister of Great Britain from 1783 to 1800, and of the United Kingdom (after the Act of Union 1800) in early 1801, and again from 1804 to 1806. As Pléiade 2020: 1486 and Babikov 2022: 769 note, Pitt was a foe of revolutionary France and the leader of the military coalition against Napoleon. The English and their allies defeated Napoleon finally at Waterloo in 1815, and in Antiterra England also annexed France that year (287.30-31): hence this former enemy’s being commemorated in Antiterra’s France. 

Alexey Sklyarenko, “Avenue Guillaume Pitt,” Nabokv-L 1 November 2012, notes Pushkin’s reference to Pitt in the opening lines of his 1825 “Ode to his Excellency Count Dm. Iv. Khvostov” (1825), written in mockery of Khvostov (1757-1835), a poetaster notorious for his prolific and pompous verse:

Sultan yaritsya Krov’ Ellady
I rezvoskachet, i kipit.
Otkrïlis’ grekam drevni kladï,
Trepeshchet v Stikse lyutïy Pit.

The sultan gets furious. Hellas’s blood
is galloping fast and boiling.
The Greeks discovered ancient treasures,
ferocious Pitt trembles in the Styx.
                                                (1825)

Sklyarenko adds that “In his footnotes (as parodic as the Ode to which they are appended) Pushkin comments on ‘Pit’ as follows: G. Pitt, znamenitïy angliyskiy ministr i izvestnïy protivnik Svobodï (G. Pitt, the famous English minister and notorious enemy of Freedom).”
           
Avenue Guillaume Pitt seems to share a corner with rue Saïgon (455.30-31). Near the real Paris’s rue de Saïgon, where the Nabokovs lived from October 1938 to February 1939 (see 455.31n), less than a kilometer to the north, there is a rue Guillaume Tell, named after the legendary champion of Swiss freedom. The famous Hotel George V, on Avenue George V, a presumable “source” of the Hotel Alphonse Four in Pt. 3 Ch.3, is also less than a kilometer away from this area VN knew so well.

453.08-09: those red round cheeks, that black goatee: Even as a child of about Van’s age Greg was a “rosy-faced youngster” on his “black pony” (89.16-17). MOTIF: black-red

453.11: Grigoriy Akimovich!: Van, “the genius of total recall” (545.28), has misremembered: Grigoriy Akimovich is the name and patronymic of G.A. Vronsky, the film director (291.07), not of Greg Erminin, whom he should have hailed as “Grigory Arkadievich” (see 455.05-08).

453.11: cried Van tearing off his glove: Cf. Despair 143: “removing—as the rules of Russian politeness request—the glove from the hand I was going to proffer.”

453.12: vollbart: Full beard (German), rather than just a goatee, Van Dyke, Newgate Frill, etc.

453.15: Diet of champagne, not beer: Gennady Kreymer notes (email to BB, 29 April 2013) that the French memoirist Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755) mentions (1707) one Du Chesne, a physician, who “retained perfect health in mind and body until the end of his life (he died aged 91) by eating a salad every evening at his supper and drinking nothing but the wine of Champagne. That was the diet he prescribed” (italics added) (Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1691-1709, presented to the King, trans. and ed. Lucy Norton, 1967; rpt. Prion Books, 2001, p. 326.). Van lives to be 97.

MOTIF: Van’s drink

453.15: Professor Veen: The first and only time the title “Professor Veen” is used (although Ada will write to him as “dear Professor,” 503.04). Van has not yet been appointed to “the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston” (506.25-26), which happens in 1905.

454.03-19: Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?” . . . Might have replied “Ada Veen,” had Mr. Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. . . .  “You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long—”: For the Eugene Onegin allusions, see 454.03-10n and 454.19n. When Van does at last have to meet with Andrey Vinelander, in a hotel lounge in Mont Roux in 1905, he mistakes the film director Yuzlik for Ada’s husband, in another echo of Eugene Onegin’s meeting Tatiana’s husband, Prince N.—a character transformed, in Chaikovsky’s operatic travesty, into Prince Gremin: “The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts” (511.31-512.02).

454.03-10: Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?” “About two years.” “To whom?” “Maude Sween.” “The daughter of the poet?” “No, no, her mother is a Brougham.” Might have replied Ada Veen: Darkbloom: “see Eugene Onegin, Eight: XVIII: 1-4.” This rhymed exchange, which could be set out as four lines of iambic tetrameter, closely echoes the famous exchange between Eugene, returned from his travels after killing Lenski in a duel, and Prince N., who has married the Tatiana Larin once in love with Eugene, but whose advances Eugene had spurned, only now to be smitten by her beauty and poise:

— "Tak tï zhenat! ne znal ya rane
Davno li?” —Okolo dvukh let.”
“Na kom?” —“Na Larinoy.” — “Tat’yane!”
— “Tï ey znakom?” — “Ya im sosed.”

In Nabokov’s translation:

“So you are married? Didn’t know before.
How long?” “About two years.”
“To whom?” “The Larin girl.” “Tatiana!”
“She knows you?” “I’m their neighbor.” (EO 1.290)

--Tak ty jenat (Toi, marié)? Je l'ignorais dans ma retraite. Depuis quand?
--Deux ans.
--Avec qui?
--Fleur Sween.
--La fille du poète?
--Non, non, la nièce du marquis. . . 

Keeping close to Ada's original English echo of Pushkin, this could be rendered: "So you are married? Didn't know it, been away from it all. How long?" "Two years." "To whom?" "Fleur Sween." "The daughter of the poet?" "No, no, the niece of marquis . . . . " The "marquis" (to rhyme with "À  qui?") introduces someone irrelevant, as Greg in the English version irrelevantly, for snobbish reason, introduces (Lord) "Brougham": see 454.09n. Maude's first name changes to "Fleur," probably (since both Maud and Fleur would work in either language) to connect her with the Vanda Broom whose surname Van will remember at 454.11 ("Vanda" is a genus of orchids, see 323.20n) but who gets lost in the French translation, in the need for a rhyme with “Avec qui?” to replace the rhyme with the English “To whom? . . . Brougham.” Van's "dans me retraite" could be rendered "been away from it all," in the sense of "I was away or withdrawn (from society)," as Eugene Onegin has been away from society when he meets Prince N. and learns that Tatiana has become the Prince's wife.

In 1967 the Mercury brand of the Ford Motor Company introduced a slightly pretentious line of cars: a four-door Park Lane Brougham and a two-door Marquis. By 1972 Mercury had named a four-door version the Marquis Brougham (see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Marquis, accessed June 22 2024). Nabokov reworked the French translators' unsatisfying translation of Ada off and on between September 1971 and February 1975 (Boyd 1991: 586-87, 650).  I am grateful to Andrei Babikov for drawing the Marquis Brougham to my attention (email, June 21, 2024). One wonders how most Americans pronounced the car's name.

454.07-08: “Maude Sween.” “The daughter of the poet?”: “Sween” to rhyme with “Veen” at 454.10, “poet” to rhyme with “know it” at 454.03. Van has in mind “a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K. L. Sween, who wrote verse” (459.11-12), and who as it happens will pass by Van without seeing him, a little over an hour hence, at the start of the next chapter, but will notice Van when he lunches with Lucette shortly afterwards (465.06-08).  

454.09: her mother is a Brougham: There is a whiff of snobbishness here. Why does Greg choose to mention his wife's mother's maiden name (apart from supplying Nabokov with a visually disguised rhyme to "To whom?") rather than his wife's maiden name? Because the Brougham family is titled, ever since the first Lord Brougham, Henry Brougham (1778-1868)--a lawyer, scientist, liberal British statesman, abolitionist, free trader, M.P., statesman (Lord High Chancellor 1830-35), founder of the distinguished Edinburgh Review and designer of the carriage that came to be called a brougham--was named 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux in 1830. "Brougham was born and grew up in Edinburgh, the eldest son of Henry Brougham (1742–1810), of Brougham Hall in Westmorland, and Eleanora, daughter of Reverend James Syme. The Broughams had been an influential Cumberland family for centuries" (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brougham,_1st_Baron_Brougham_and_Vaux, accessed June 2024). Greg's wife is the real snob: she sends her chauffeur "to inform 'my lord'" that she is ready to go; Van comments to Greg "I see you are using your British title," to which Greg responds "Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way" (455.30-34). I am grateful to Andrei Babikov (email, June 19, 2024), for drawing my attention to the snobbery theme here. "Anglo-Scottish" on her mother's side, presumably: until 1974 Cumberland was an English county bordering Scotland and Westmorland another county to its southeast; they now form part of Cumbria.

Cf. (as Andrei Babikov notes, email, June 19, 2024): “the son of a notorious St. Petersburg courtesan who preferred an electric brougham to a calèche” (LATH 11).

MOTIF: snob

454.09-11: Brougham . . . Broom: Cf. VN to Irina Guadanini, 2 August 1937 (private collection): “A tvoego anglichanina zvat' Lord Brougham (proiznositsya dlya vashego svedeniya: Brum)” (“Your Englishman’s name is Lord Brougham (pronounced, so you know: Broom).”) Nabokov has Van dimly recall Vanda Broom partly in order to alert most of his readers--even among Anglophones—to the fact that "Brougham" is pronounced "Broom." He manages to include the rhyme with “To whom?” and yet to obscure it at the same time for most, until they encounter Van's "Broom" and do a double-back and a double-take.

454.11: I think I met a Broom somewhere: Babikov 2022 misunderstands and therefore mistranslates and misannotates. He translates: “Brum? Kazhetsya, ya videl etot kuzov” (452) (“Broom? I think I saw that car [or carriage] body”) and glosses “The Brougham type of car [or carriage] body” (770), as if Van was thinking of the brougham. 

Van is actually thinking of Vanda Broom, to whom in August 1888 he spoke on the phone, before passing it to Cordula, and then saw a photograph of, but did not meet: “Van happened to answer the ’phone—a deep hollow voice which he thought was a man’s wanted Cordula, but the caller turned out to be an old schoolmate, and Cordula feigned limpid delight, while making big eyes at Van over the receiver, and invented a number of unconvincing engagements. ‘It’s a gruesome girl!’ she cried after the melodious adieux. ‘Her name is Vanda Broom, and I learned only recently what I never suspected at school—she’s a regular tribadka—poor Grace Erminin tells me Vanda used to make constant passes at her and at—at another girl. There’s her picture here,’ continued Cordula with a quick change of tone, producing a daintily bound and prettily printed graduation album of Spring, 1887, which Van had seen at Ardis, but in which he had not noticed the somber beetle-browed unhappy face of that particular girl” (323.14-27). Van thinks he has met a Broom somewhere not just because he has heard her voice and seen her picture, but also because he could not help re-noticing that photograph: when Ada visits what had been Cordula’s apartment, she registers “some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected—as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait” (394.12-14) (left open at that point for more than four years, August 1888-November 1892--no wonder he thinks he might have met her!).

The connection is not, as Babikov thinks, that in the phrase on the next page “a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform ‘my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon” (455.29-31), Van is thinking (in "his lady was parked") of Maude Erminin as a car body, in the brougham style;  the idiom of a person parking ("Where did you park?" or "I am parked around the corner") is perfectly natural English, and Maude has never been a Brougham.

The connection, rather, involves the complex intertwinings of jealousy. In a few minutes Van will unexpectedly bump into the emphatically heterosexual Cordula, who in his presence in 1888 had been discommoded by a call from lesbian Vanda Broom (323.14-29). Van had once been absurdly and mistakenly jealous of Cordula, as the supposed lesbian suitor Ada had hinted at to Van at the end of Ardis the First (“Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying—,” 158.32-33), when the girl in question was actually Vanda Broom, who pursued both Ada and Greg’s twin sister Grace, just mentioned at 454.01. For once, in that 1888 scene in Cordula's apartment, Van had felt no pang of jealousy in his indirect contact (phone, album) with Vanda Broom, despite Cordula's wariness in mentioning Ada in connection with Vanda ("constant passes at her and at--at another girl," 323.23-24), but he is about to feel a fierce flash of jealousy of Greg (see 454.19 and n), even if this also refers back to 1888, now far longer after the fact.

In the French, in order to replace the “To whom . . . her mother is a Brougham” rhyme at 454.06-09 with “Avec qui? . . . la nièce du marquis,” and therefore maintain the Onegin echo, Nabokov has to substitute for “I think I met a Broom somewhere” the much weaker “Il me semble avoir rencontré cet oncle quelque part” (Pléiade 2020: 817: “I think I met that uncle somewhere”). But the “uncle” in this context may recall the famous first line of Eugene Onegin, which Nabokov translates “My uncle has most honest principles” (EO 1.95).

454.14-15: I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony—no, a black Silentium: At the Ardis picnic for Ada’s sixteenth birthday: “Greg, who had left his splendid new black Silentium motorcycle in the forest ride, observed: ‘We have company’” (268.08-10). Greg had ridden “a black pony” (89.17) to see Ada the day after her twelfth birthday. At her sixteenth birthday, after he helplessly witnesses the fierce fighting between Van and Percy, those two genuine rivals for Ada, Greg reports the tussle to Ada. “‘You’re a dear,’ answered Ada, ‘but I don’t think your brain works too well.’ ‘It never does in your presence,’ remarked Greg, and mounted his black silent steed, hating it, and himself, and the two bullies. He adjusted his goggles and glided away” (277.32-278.03). The “black silent steed” here seems an echo of the “black pony” Greg arrived on in 1884, although there is no doubt that it is a motorcycle that he glides away on in 1888 (the goggles and the glide confirm this, the “glide” ironically emphasizing that the Silentium really is silent); but the description of it as a “black silent steed,” and the “black pony” prompting that description, seem to infect Van’s memory momentarily here in Paris in 1901. And the “thudding hooves” of “good Sir Greg . . . the young knight” (276.22-24, see 454.19n below)—only his hurrying feet, in fact—have also fed into the “black silent steed.” 

454.15: Bozhe moy!: As Darkbloom glossed it at 438.15-16, “Good heavens!” Literally, “My God!” At 530.26 Darkbloom will translate as “oh, my God.” 

454.16-17: Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis!: MOTIF: agony.

454.19: You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long—: This echo of Van’s earlier “Didn’t know it. How long?” (454.03-04) and of the Eugene Onegin echo behind it (see 454.03-10n), and the coldness of “Miss Veen” indicates that Van has a sudden spike of jealousy at the thought that Greg too might have been Ada’s lover at Ardis. He is about to ask “How long did this go on?” or some such—and his umbrella at the ready (453.04), with its crook (453.16), echoes the cane or stick with which he wanted to beat Rack after learning of his affair with Ada—but Greg’s next words mean he has nothing to fear, nothing to probe, nothing to avenge.
          
The cool distance of Van’s “Miss Veen” here ironically echoes Greg’s fawning eagerness toward Ada at the 1888 picnic: “mistaking her look of surprise at the sound of his thudding hooves for one of concern, good Sir Greg hastened to cry out from afar: ‘He’s all right! He’s all right, Miss Veen’—blind compassion preventing the young knight from realizing that she could not possibly have known yet what a clash had occurred between the beau and the beast” (276.21-26).
           
Another irony from even earlier in the picnic scene: on Greg’s arrival, “Van did not err in believing that Ada remained unaffected by Greg’s devotion. He now met him again with pleasure—the kind of pleasure, immoral in its very purity, which adds its icy tang to the friendly feelings a successful rival bears toward a thoroughly decent fellow” (268.03-07). That smug security would be shattered by the arrival of not Greg on a black Silentium but Percy in a steel-gray convertible, gate-crashing the party and soon crashing into Van; and for a moment, here in Paris, even Greg’s adoration has instantly reignited the fire of jealousy.

454.20-21: “Neither did she. I was terribly—” “How long are you staying—”: Since Ada did not even know of Greg’s feelings, Van can relax, and change his intended “How long did this go on?” or its equivalent into the polite neutrality of “How long are you staying in Lute?,” only for this in turn to be cut off.

454.22-26: “ . . . I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.” Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bedmakers: Greg knows something about the longing of Philip Rack, Percy de Prey, and even Dr. Krolik, for Ada (see 454.32-455.02) but all of Ladore seems to know about Van and Ada: see 408.30-409.23, especially “Romantically inclined handmaids . . . adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens . . . added freshly composed lines . . . to cyclic folk songs.” Evidently the “veritable legend” that remains “a sacred secret and creed” among the household staff and groundsmen, is not confided to their aristocratic overlords or even to someone close to them like governess Mlle Larivière—except for Blanche’s intrusion to warn Van of the rival he has in Percy.

454.25: All the rose hedges knew: Van, on the morning after the Night of the Burning Barn, sees the old postman Robin Sherwood “on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required” (128.17-20).

454.25-26: all the maids knew, in all three manors: Presumably the Ardis manor, the (Percy) de Prey manor, and the Erminins’ manor?

454.27: How long will you be staying in Lute?: When Van surprises Lucette in the next chapter, her first question to him is “How long will you be in old Lute?” (461.20).

454.27-28: No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle: But when Greg in his next utterance numbers off Ada’s admirers and presumably lovers, Percy de Prey, Dr. Krolik, and Phil Rack, rattled Van instantly invents his transparent excuse to leave: “an appointment in a few minutes, alas” (455.04-05).

454.29-30: It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree: Cf. Demon watching the rest of Marina’s performance on the night he has seduced her between two scenes: “Her meeting with Baron O., who strolled out of a side alley, all spurs and green tails, somehow eluded Demon’s consciousness, so struck was he by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life” (12.07-11); and Van’s rumination on his love for Ada: “the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality (which is the only reality), shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse . . . ” (220.34-221.03).

454.30-31: I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep: Percy de Prey, who does much more with Ada than kiss her instep, pays for it not with beheading but with a smiling old Tartar’s shooting his temple point-blank (319.29-320.04). 

Stephen Blackwell suggests (email, May 4, 2024) that "instep" continues the Eugene Onegin theme, in allusion to the famous “pedal digression” in the first Canto of the poem. There Pushkin in an aside extols the special allure of female feet. In 1945, before translating the whole novel in verse in the 1950s, Nabokov singled out the three stanzas of the digression (I.XXXII-XXXIV) to translate in a rhymed version (see V&V 100-03), which includes the lines: 

XXXII
Dian’s bosom, Flora’s dimple 
are very charming, I agree—
but there’s a greater charm, less simple
—the instep of Terpischore. 
By prophesying to the eye 
a prize with which no prize can vie 
’tis a fair token and a snare 
for swarms of daydreams. . . . 

XXXIII
. . . Oh, how I wanted to compete 
with the tumultuous breakers dying 
in adoration at her feet! 
Together with those waves—how much 
I wished to kiss what they could touch! 

XXXIV
. . . all their enchantments cheat 
as much as do their pretty feat.

MOTIF: Tartar 

454.34-455.01: and Dr. Krolik, who, they said, also loved her: Van has had a sudden suspicion of Ada’s having a sexual relationship with Krolik aroused by a photograph in Kim’s album (“How curious—in the state Kim mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I imagined. In fact, darling, he’s a big, strong, handsome old March Hare! Explain!,” 404.03-05), only for Ada to deflect it with a patently dubious claim (“that’s not my Krolik but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik,” 404.08-09). But by the time Van sees this photograph Krolik is dead already (in 1886, 219.11), and he and Ada have other concerns after leafing through the album and realizing that Kim still has the negatives or other prints to blackmail them with, so that the flash of jealousy fizzles—only to be revived here, when Greg implies it was common knowledge to others, if not to Van.

455.01-02: Rack, a composer of genius: MOTIF: of genius

455.03-04: I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl: One of Van’s vicious apparent non-sequiturs: he ignores the claim about Dr. Krolik, disqualifies himself from a comment on Rack as “a composer of genius,” but exults once again in the partial and interim vengeance he could exact on Percy de Prey, in Greg’s presence, at Ada’s 1888 birthday picnic (275.12-19). 

455.04-05: I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas: As it turns out he will bump into Cordula in a few minutes, but he knows nothing of that yet. His having just ordered a bottle of champagne to drink with Greg, before Greg’s mention of Ada’s lovers drives him away, shows the spuriousness of his excuse. 

455.05: Za tvoyo zdorovie: Darkbloom: “Russ., your health.”

455.05-06: Grigoriy Akimovich . . . Arkadievich: This seems to echo a passage early in Ardis the Second, when G. A. Vronsky, as film director, tries to explain to Marina the intricacies of the film she is starring in, with its comic (to us) echoes of Ada’s situation:

“Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?”
           
“Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,” said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns of her own past. 
(201.08-15)

The film director’s surname, Vronsky, evokes the resolute adulterer of that name in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, while Greg’s correction of Van’s “Grigoriy Akimovich,” mistakenly echoing G.A. Vronsky’s name, to “Arkadievich,” allows both Anna Arkadievna Karenin and her brother, Stepan Arkadievich (Stiva) Oblonsky, both adulterers, to hover in additional implication. 

In the 1888 Ardis poolside scene the complicated (slozhnïe) patterns in Marina’s life, including the adultery she engaged in with her cousin and former lover Demon, despite his marriage to her twin sister, seem nothing in comparison with those involving Ada, or her reflection in the film script, with her simultaneous “lover number one . . . lover number two . . . number three” (201.08-11). Here in the Paris 1901 scene, Greg has raised the subject of Ada’s “numerous boy friends” at Ardis, prompting Van to take stock (“Numerous? Two? Three?,” 454.23-24) before Greg spells out the three possible lovers he knows of, Percy, Krolik, and Rack. Greg’s adding Krolik as another of Ada's lovers makes the story of her infidelity to Van even more complicated than he finds out at the end of Ardis the Second—not just the suspected Percy, but the unsuspected Rack; in this 1901 scene in Paris, when it very briefly seems as if Greg too is admitting to being one of her lovers, Van thinks for a moment that Ardis had been even more complicated than he found out at its bitter end. 

Greg is about to refer to Ada as “a movie actress” (455.18); her love life is even more complicated than that of her actress mother. But Greg himself, once adoring of Ada but too shy to disclose it to her, now married to Maude Sween (Van thinks: “Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever,” 454.12-13), seems decidedly no adulterer, despite his “Arkadievich” patronymic.

455.12: Adelaida Danilovna: The name-and-patronymic theme continues, with this sole use of Ada’s name-and-patronymic combination—itself ironic, in view of our knowledge that she is not Dan’s daughter but Demon’s.

455.12-13: Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?: Christopher Vinelander rates no other mention in the novel, but in the context of the European-discoverer-of-America theme in the name “Vinelander,” his first name evokes Christopher Columbus.           

On his arrival at Ardis in 1888, in the midst of a party, Van acknowledges “with a nod the raised
glass of the stout blond fellow (Percy de Prey? Or did Percy have an older brother?)” (188.31-33).

MOTIF: explorer

455.14: In California or Arizona: Van echoes Greg’s two alternatives for Ada’s husband’s name with two alternatives for the wedding venue, since he knows that Ada has spent much time in California, because of her mother’s and her own acting careers, and that Andrey hails from Arizona; the second alternative is the correct one in both cases (480.22: “in Valentina,” in other words Arizona). MOTIF: Arizona

455.18: Somebody told me she’s a movie actress: Greg has sent Van the movie magazine Belladonna for its photograph of Marina and Ada together “on a California patio just before the film [of Four Sisters] was released” (429.02-03). Marina had the role of Varvara, the fourth sister, in the film; Ada acted only in a stage version of the play.

455.19: I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen: Pléiade 2020: 1486 notes that Van isn’t quite lying: he does know Ada was to play a bit part in Vronsky’s The Young and the Doomed (424) but knows also that even that was cut from of the film, which he watched with her (425).

455.19-23: I’ve never seen her on the screen.” “Oh, that would be terrible, I declare—to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund: Cf. “She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; . . . but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw . . . ; she saw . . . ; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath” (494.22-32). MOTIF: Lucette-prolepsis

455.20-26: terrible . . . Likes the word “terrible,” I declare. . . . a terrible tumor: Greg has also used “terribly” a few minutes earlier, in an interrupted and resumed sentence: “I was terribly . . . terribly shy” (454.20-22). The even more boring and indeed quite insufferable Dorothy Vinelander will try to commiserate on Van’s later losses in the same terms: “I can’t tell you how profoundly affected [Andrey] was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end” (518.21-23).
           
Note that Van’s “Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare” picks up not only on Greg’s “terrible” but also on his repeated “I declare”: “I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare. . . . Oh, that would be terrible, I declare” (454.30-31, 455.20). See also last paragraph of 455.32-33n.

455.21: dorotelly: Not used elsewhere. But, as the previous note mentions, “terrible” will later be used of another death, not Van’s mother but his father. Diana Makhaldiani (email, June 10, 2024) suggests the “dorotelly” here may pun on “Dorothy” Vinelander, who commiserates with Van on the “terrible death of your father.”   

MOTIF: doro; technology

455.22-23: his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund: Greg appears to be thinking especially of the day or so after Ada’s twelfth birthday, when, his first feelings for her stirred, he visits her at Ardis on his new pony: “Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden. Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog. . . . [while Dan retreated from the sun to read his newspaper] on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm” (89.01-09). But for all his attentions, he is only spurned:

 “I mean, I would love lending him to you for a ride any time. For any amount of time. Will you? Besides,
I have another black.”
            But she shook her head, she shook her bent head, while still twisting and twining her daisies.
            “Well,” he said, getting up, “I must be going. Good-bye, everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess
it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?”
            “No, it’s an elm,” said Ada. (92.25-34)

455.30-33: to inform “my lord” . . . . “I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel”: Nevertheless, Greg’s father is referred to by others as “Lord Erminin”: Demon declares at Ardis that “You have all sorts of rather odd neighbors. Poor Lord Erminin is practically insane” (242.02-03); “Demon’s father (and very soon Demon himself), and Lord Erminin, and a Mr. Ritcov, and Count Peter de Prey, and Mire de Mire, Esq., and Baron Azzuroscudo were all members of the first Venus Club Council” (352.26-29). And in Van’s fantastic excursus on a duel with Andrey Vinelander at the close of Part Three he imagines Greg as Lord Erminin: “Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel” (531.20-22).

MOTIF: snob

455.31: rue Saïgon: The Nabokovs, Vladimir, Véra, and Dmitri, lived in a studio apartment at 8, rue de Saïgon, a short street in the sixteenth arrondissement, “between the Etoile and the Bois de Boulogne” (Boyd 1990: 492), from October 1938 to February 1939. 

455.32-33: Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel: At Ada’s twelfth birthday party, “Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr. Krolik” (79.17-21). Which Chekhovian colonel? Proffer 1974: 276 suggests “Colonel Vershinin in Three Sisters, a well-meaning cad”; Pléiade 2020: 1486 suggests a pseudonym that Chekhov used for an early humoristic note, “Colonel Kochkarev,” a hybrid of two Gogolian characters, Colonel Koshkariov in Dead Souls (1842) and Kochkariov in his play Zhenitba (Marriage, 1842); I had thought perhaps the figure of the Colonel in Chekhov’s story “A Problem” (1884? 1887?), the paternal uncle of the central character, Sasha Ushkov, who insists that his nephew should face the responsibility for his forging a promissory note. None yields the satisfying click of a Nabokovian answer. 

But the quote in the paragraph above from the chapter on Ada's twelfth birthday picnic gives the real clue, as Andrei Babikov intuited (email to BB, June 24, 2024): there is an incidental colonel in the Chekhov story "The Pecheneg" (1897). The central character, a former Cossack officer, Zhmukhin, a landowner in the steppes, allows his wife and sons to live in utter abasement, but idly dreams of a finer future for the world. His chance guest, a sensitive attorney, is a vegetarian. Late in the night, yet again foisting his ideas on his guest, who cannot sleep in this disconcertingly brutalized environment, Zhmukhin tells him "When we were in the Caucasus, you know, we had a colonel who was a vegetarian as you are. He never ate meat and never hunted or allowed his men to fish. I can understand that, of course. Every animal has a right to enjoy its life and its freedom. But I can't understand how pigs could be allowed to roam wherever they pleased without being watched--" (Anton Chekhov's Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, New York: Norton, 1979, "The Pecheneg" trans. Marian Fell, 166-67). Unable to stand it any longer, the attorney asks for a horse to take him to his appointment nearby, even though the last rain of a thunderstorm is still falling. Like an earlier guest, he wants to call out to his host from the tarantass that takes him away that he is a "Pecheneg" (a savage); he restrains himself, until he cannot stop himself shouting out "in a loud, angry voice: 'You bore me to death!'" (166).

The allusion in other words undercuts the ideas of social pretension in Greg's wife's asking her chauffeur to summon her lord. Zhmukhin, despite being the landowner responsible for the condition of his estate, despite his vague dreams of a world of betterment, neglects his wife and sons to the point of degradation. At the start of the story, in the railway carriage where the attorney has sat opposite him, Zhmukhin muses, unprompted, on marriage: "No . . . . it is never too late to marry. I was myself forty-eight when I married, and everyone said it was too late, but it has turned out to be neither too late nor too early. Still, it is better never to marry at all. Everyone soon gets tired of a wife, though not everyone will tell you the truth, because, you know, people are shamed of their family troubles, and try to conceal them" (159). His own wife has cried every day since their marriage, "for twenty years; her eyes must be made of water! She does nothing but sit and think. What does she think about, I ask you? What can a woman think about? Nothing! The fact is, I don't consider women human beings" (165). As the attorney leaves, Zhmukhin's wife's "sorrowful face showed how much she envied her guest his liberty. Ah, with what joy she, too, would have left this place!" As the attorney is seen into his carriage, "she stood shrinking timidly and guiltily against the wall, still waiting for the moment to come that would give her an opportunity to speak" (166). Van's musing on what Greg's unseen wife might be like (454.09-13), and the evidence just now of Maude's snobbishness, give Nabokov the opportunity to throw open momentarily a window on other lives, other marriages, other inequalities. 

As Babikov also notes in his email, Zhmukhin, like other Chekhov characters, and like Greg, with his "terrible" and "I declare," has his favorite verbal filler, "you know," which has even become his nickname: "Zhmukhin himself was known as 'old man you know,' because he talked so much and used the words 'you know' so often" (160).

455.34: Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way: She is the daughter of a mother whose maiden name was Brougham, the original Lord Brougham being from Cumberland (northern English) stock and raised in Edinburgh: see 454.09n.

MOTIF: snob

456.01-02: By the way, somebody told me—yes, Tobak!—that Lucette . . .  : Perhaps Lucette comes to Greg’s mind not only because he knows Van is her “cousin,” but because the scene with “the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund” that he has just recalled at 455.22-23 prominently features Lucette, nibbling a daisy (the flower from which Ada wreathes her anadem for Dack) as Van “ploughs around” with her (91-92).  

456.01-02: somebody told me—yes, Tobak!—that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four: The hotel name is probably in part a play on the Paris hotel deluxe the George V, opened in 1928 and named for the British King George V (1865-1936, reigned 1910-1936), on the Avenue George V, which ends at the métro stop George V. Nabokov was in the Hotel George V at least once: on March 29, 1937, he wrote to his wife, “I am having tea with Gr. Duch. Maria Pavl. at the George V” (LTV 335) (Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, Duchess of Södermanland, Princess Putyatin (1890-1958)). As noted above, the hotel is near the area where the Nabokovs would live in Paris. Pléiade 2020: 1486 instead suggests that the Alphonse Four refers to the Grand Hôtel de Paris, built by Alphonse-Nicolas Crépinet in 1861-62.
           
An hour or so later, over lunch with Van at the Alphonse Four, Lucette will greet (“Hullo, Alph”) the son of “Alphonse the First of Portugal” (465.11-17). The son of the real Alphonse IV (Alfonso IV) of Portugal (1291-1357, reigned 1325-57), Pedro, fell in love with Inês de Castro, the daughter of a Galician nobleman and the lady-in-waiting of his new wife Constanza. They had a long affair, and when Constanza died in childbirth Pedro began living openly with Inês, to his father’s wrath. Afonso hoped to arrange a dynastic marriage for his son, but when Pedro would not budge, the king had Inês beheaded in front of her children. When Pedro succeeded to the throne as Pedro I in 1357, he had the murderers killed. The love of Pedro and Inês became a prize interlude in the Portuguese national epic, Os Lusíadas (1572), by Luis Camões (c. 1524-1580). But the hero of Os Lusíadas is Vasco da Gama, and the story, his finding a route around the southern tip of Africa to India; he recounts Portuguese history, including the Inês de Castro episode, to the local Sultan at Malindi, a stop on Africa’s eastern coast. Not only Van as Mascodagama but also the wider theme of explorers—Vinelander, Tobak (a reversed Jean Cabot)—as well as the explicit reference at the Alphonse Four to “Alphonse Cinq,” “Alphonse the First of Portugal,” and his son Alphonse, all suggest the relevance of the Lusíads and its hero to the name of the hotel, just before Van and Lucette sail across the Atlantic on the Admiral Tobakoff, named in honour of another sailor-explorer. Note again the head-words to this note: “somebody told me—yes, Tobak!—that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four.” 
           
MOTIF: Alphonse

456.03: I haven't asked about your father?: The question mark here seems an uncorrected textual error.

456.04: how is the guvernantka belletristka?: Darkbloom: “Russ., governess-novelist.” Mlle Larivière’s writing played a considerable role in the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday that Greg and Grace Erminin attend: she reads her story La Rivière de Diamants, and Van and Ada appraise it. When Greg visits a day or two later, Mlle Larivière is again present and playing her part as a writer. At the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday, “Greg, assuming with touching simplicity that Ada would notice and approve, showered Mlle Larivière with a thousand little attentions—helping her out of her mauve jacket . . . replenishing, replenishing Mlle Larivière’s wineglass and listening with a rapt grin to her diatribes against the English, whom she said she disliked even more than the Tartars, or the, well, Assyrians” (270.09-16).

456.05: Her last novel is called L’ami Luc: French, “Friend Luke.” In view of Larivière’s role as the Antiterran Maupassant, points to Maupassant’s second novel, Bel-Ami (1885; usually translated into English as “Bel-Ami,” which means “handsome friend”). We learn nothing more of this novel by Mlle Larivière, unlike her Les Enfants Maudits, which bizarrely and continually metamorphoses as if tracking Van and Ada’s relations and as it is endlessly adapted and travestied for the screen. But Maupassant’s original Bel-Ami is a novel of compound adulteries: the hero Georges Duroy has an affair with Mme de Marelle, the friend of Mme Forestier, to whom he owes his ascent within the newspaper that his friend Forestier has helped him start in; he unsuccessfully propositions Mme Forestier while she is still married, then marries her after Forestier’s death, only to start an affair with Mme Walter, wife of the newspaper’s owner; in order to secure his divorce he takes the police to catch his wife in flagrante in her own adulterous relationship; he then marries the daughter of the newspaper’s owner, and at his wedding to her is told by Mme de Marelle, his first mistress, that she forgives him for his marriage and that they can resume their affair. 
           
The disappearance of Bel and the substitution of Luc in the novel’s title seem suggestive, given that although Larivière’s first name is Ida, Lucette refers to her as Belle (first occurrence: “‘And Belle’ (Lucette’s name for her governess),” 91.02), although others (Marina, Ada, Van) will also refer to her by that name, as well as by “Ida”; and Lucette is decidedly Belle’s favorite. Although L’ami is a masculine word, as in Maupassant’s original, there seems a strong shadow of Lucette, a Lucette cut short, in the title of Belle’s new novel.

456.05-06: She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish: In the markup for translators in his own copy of Ada, A1, VN notes beside “Lebon”: “anagr.” The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy; Nabokov thought little of many of its choices, including Thomas Mann (1929), Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O’Neill (1936), T.S. Eliot (1948), William Faulkner (1949), John Steinbeck (1962), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1964). Mann, O’Neill, Eliot, and Faulkner are all singled out for scorn in Ada. Perhaps Nabokov also has in mind the famous Psychologie des Foules (1895), by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931): “In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: ‘impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others’” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind, accessed 17 April 2024). Of Maupassant, who died too early for a Nobel Prize, Nabokov remarked: “I still feel appalled and puzzled at seeing ‘genius’ applied to any important storyteller, such as Maupassant or Maugham. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James” (SO 146-47). 

456.10: tight scarlet skirt: Scarlet is proverbially associated with adultery and prostitution, ever since St. John the Evangelist described his vision in Revelations 17: “1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: 2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. 3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. 4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 5 And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth. 6 And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” That tradition lay behind the scarlet “A” for “adulteress” that was branded on adulterous women in early Puritan New England, and hence the mark of Hester Prynne’s adultery in the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). Diana Makhaldiani notes (email, June 10, 2024) the alliteration on “scarlet skirt.” 

456.10-12: bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop: Note how this image of a female bending over dogs matches not “the wreathed dachshund” in Greg’s imagining his thoughts of his past flooding in like those of “a drowning man” (455.21-23), but the echo of those thoughts in Van’s later report on Lucette’s imagined last thoughts: “She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; . . . but she did see . . . a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath” (494.22-32). 
           
Stephen Blackwell suggests (email, May 4, 2024) that the “dackel” in Lucette’s imagined last thoughts, and in the scene of Greg’s visit and Ada’s wreathing the dackel in Pt. 1 Ch. 14 and bending over it (unmentioned in that chapter, but recalled by Van imagining Lucette’s last thoughts), may connect, since a dackel is a “sausage dog,” with the two poodlets outside a sausage shop that Cordula bends over here.  

MOTIF: -let

456.11-12: waiting-post: Nabokov’s coinage.

456.14-18: the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them: // The Veens speak only to Tobaks / But Tobaks speak only to dogs: In his marginal notes for translators VN writes in A1: “ . . . Cabots speak only to God.” Van’s lines are indeed a ridiculously appropriate reworking of the famous lines mocking the layers of snobbery among Boston’s elite families. The versicle, variously known as “A Boston Toast” or “On the Aristocracy of Harvard,” was composed by John Collins Bossidy (1860-1928) in 1910: 

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.

Once published, the verse rapidly went viral and still circulates widely in many versions adapted to many contexts. 
In Russian Van’s lines would rhyme: “s Tobakami . . . s sobakami.” “Tobak” is a reversal of the letters of “Cabot” (or at least of its Russian transliteration), and as Babikov 2022: 770 notes, the other rhyme word, “dog,” is a reversal of “God.” Did Van’s schoolmates speak Russian at Riverlane? 

“The Cabot family is one of the Boston Brahmin families, also known as the ‘first families of Boston’” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabot_family, accessed 18 April 2024). They descended from John Cabot, who emigrated from the island of Jersey to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1700 and set up a successful merchant dynasty. The Wikipedia entry notes: “In Latin, caput means ‘head’, and the Rev. George Balleine writes that in Jersey the ‘cabot’ is a small fish that seems all head.[2] In French, once a commonly spoken language in Jersey, ‘cabot’ means a dog.” John Cabot is unrelated, except in name, to the explorer Jean Cabot, born Giovanni Caboto (see 383.01n), whose name is evoked in the first mention of Cordula’s marriage to “Ivan G. Tobak. . . . her Ivan Giovanovich” (382.33-383.01), where Van also reports that Tobak’s ancestor was a sailor and explorer, “the famous or fameux Russian admiral . . . after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named” (383.07-09).
           
“The Lowell family is one of the Boston Brahmin families of New England, known for both intellectual and commercial achievements” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_family, accessed 18 April 2024). Among the “recent” distinguished literary Lowells were poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925) and poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whom VN met in 1952 (Boyd 1991: 216) and whose theory and practice of “imitation” rather than translation he parodies and challenges at Ada 3.04 (R.G. Stonelower) and 11.33 (see respective nn).
           
Boston snobbery has been noticed earlier in Ada, in conjunction with adultery or infidelity and duels: Demon challenges his rival for Marina, Baron d’Onsky, of Aardvark, Massa (Harvard, 14.19), who spends “two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston” (15.08-10) in the wake of the wound inflicted by Demon’s duelling sword; Demon introduces Van to Cordula at a party given “by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey—obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common” (163.12-14: Boston Common, of course); and Demon is excited by the prospect that Ada might marry someone who is the “scion . . . of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols” (437.28-30) and who worked “in the same Phoenix bank” as “young Tobak. . . . Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!” (436.11-14; see 436.11-14n and 436.13-14n).
          
MOTIF: explorer; snob; Tobak

456.20: since 1889: Odd, perhaps an error: Van’s earlier relationship with Cordula ended in September 1888.

456.21-23: at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago: The “much more elegant lady” is Lucette, whose hairdo and “high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar” (460.21-23), Van espies an hour or so later and describes in caressive detail in the next chapter. The earliest sign of Lucette’s being up with or even ahead of the fashion is her attire at Kingston, where she puts her fur coat on over her “gray tailor-made suit” (368.15) as “five uncouth scholars” let in to Van’s rooms stand “in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of the coming winter’s fashions” (385.24-26).

Accompanying Van, Lucette and Ada wear “very short and open evening gowns” (410.04) to the Ursus restaurant in 1892; in the following chapter, Pt. 3 Ch. 3, Lucette, not expecting to encounter Van, will appear in the long ample dress reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1890s; in Pt. 3 Ch.5, wanting to seduce Van, she will dress for dinner aboard the Tobakoff in another extremely short skirt, “accentuating . . . the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon stockings. Objectively speaking, her chic was keener than that of her ‘vaginal’ sister” (486.10-13).

456.27-28: “Let’s not squander,” he said, “the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. . . . ”: Julia Bader notes the “echo and triumphant reversal of the title of Proust’s masterpiece” (Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 132). She has in mind presumably the last volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu, Le Temps retrouvé (Time Retrieved). In Proust, Marcel’s desire seems endlessly and repeatedly deferred, unlike Van’s urgent arousal, so quickly satisfied and quickly repeated here.

456.31: cornuting: Cornute (W2): “To bestow horns upon; hence, fig., to make a cuckold of; to cuckold. Archaic.” Cf. EO VI: xxxix: 3-7, imagining Lenski’s future, had he not died in his duel with Onegin: in VN’s translation: 

The years would have elapsed: 
the fervor of the soul cooled down in him. 
He would have changed in many ways, 
have parted with the Muses, married, 
up in the country, happy and cornute.

456.33: My Tobachok adores me: Cf. the tango partner of Van’s Mascodagama routine, “‘Rita’ . . . a pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale. . . . He . . . one night asked her for an assignation. She indignantly refused, saying she adored her husband (the makeup fellow)” (185.23-31). Cordula pointedly does not say that she adores her husband, but only that he adores her.
           
MOTIF: adore;  Tobak

457.01: if I’d not been careful with him and others: Cordula will eventually divorce Tobak and marry one of the “others”: “Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce—Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband’s antlers (last call for that joke)” (558.22-24).

457.02-03: utterly sterile: As Van had discovered by 1892: see 393.29-394.06.

457.04-05: I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on: Mule (W2): “A hybrid between the horse and ass; esp., the offspring of a male ass and a mare, that produced by a stallion and a she-ass being usually called a hinny. . . . They are usually sterile, but the hinny sometimes foals.” After she makes love with Van the first time, in August 1888, Cordula pretends to scold herself: “‘Reckless Cordula,’ observed reckless Cordula cheerfully; ‘this will probably mean another abortion—encore un petit enfantôme, as my poor aunt’s maid used to wail every time it happened to her’” (321.16-19).

457.05: the Goals: The Antiterran representatives of the family de Gaulle (see 329.17-18n): cf. “robust Lord Goal, Viceroy of France, when enjoying his randonnies all over Canady, preferred the phenomenally discreet, and in fact rather creepy, infallibility of the VPL organization to such official facilities as sexually starved potentates have at their disposal for deceiving their wives” (329.17-21). Charles de Gaulle was not the only prominent member of the family; his son Philippe (1921-2024) was a French admiral and senator.

457.09: much too gay as dogs go: “Gay dog,” at the time Ada was written, meant “A ‘man about town,’ especially one who fancies himself with the ladies” (Brewer). 

457.11-12: Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash: Assbaa (W2): “[Ar. iṣba‘ finger, finger’s breadth] See measure, Table,” where the length is given as “1/16 foot. 0.79 in. 20 mm.” Perhaps drawing on the “ass” implicit in “mule” at 457.04, especially in view of “hobbyhorse” at 457.15, and “Astraddle . . . merry-go-round” (457.20-21).
           
MOTIF: paradise

457.14-23: “Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises—and not much else.” . . . Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice: Even a drab little Paris hotel would be likely to have a bidet. Van has never seen Cordula on a bidet before, although he had had her “astraddle” him the very first time they made love, in “some secluded spot” in Luga, on their way from the Kalugano Hospital to Manhattan: “he transferred Cordula to his lap and had her very comfortably [despite his recent wound], with such howls of enjoyment that she felt touched and flattered” (321.11-15).

Cf. Humbert with his young prostitute, Monique, in Paris: “She led me up the usual steep stairs, with the usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur who might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb to the abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for her petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age (eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of streetwalkers. They all answer ‘dix-huit’” (I.6, 21-22). Nabokov thoroughly disliked bidets: asked what he would abolish if he “ruled any modern industrial state absolutely,” he listed, inter alia: “I would banish the bidet from hotel rooms so as to make more room for a longer bathtub” (SO 150). Diana Makhaldiani (email, 24 July 2021) drew my attention to Katherine J. Wu, “The Bottom Line about Bidets,” Smithsonian Magazine, 20 May 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/bottom-line-bidets-180974916/ , which points out that bidets “predate the appearance of modern, rolled-up toilet paper” (patented in 1891). “Accordingly, the first bidet was agonizingly simple—little more than a souped up, sprayless wash basin over which one squatted as if straddling a horse (hence the name bidet, an homage to a small, stocky breed of horse), to rinse off their dirtied derrières. After gaining traction among the rich, the indulgent accessory trickled down to the working class, surviving several redesigns and the switch to indoor plumbing, which morphed them into miniature sinks.” Explaining their limited popularity in the US, Wu writes: “Many early 20th-century Americans may have viewed bidets as symbols of French indecency, linking them to taboo topics like menstruation and prostitution, Maria Teresa Hart wrote in the Atlantic in 2018. That association may have been partly born out of the devices’ presence in brothels, where women may have deployed them as an (ineffective) form of birth control. Though these stereotypes have largely faded in the decades since, the cultural inertia clung to stateside commodes.” “Le bidet is a small, stocky horse of the Breton breed and the shape of his back or his saddle has been applied to the utensil which is designed to be bestrode as in equestrian exercise” (A.D.K, “The bidet circuit,” Can. Med. Assoc. Journal, 12 September 1970, 449). 

Makhaldiani also drew my attention to the French idiom “A cheval sur mon bidet” (literally “on horseback on my bidet”), intercourse with the woman on top, the man underneath (Agnes Pierron, Dictionnaire du mots de sexe (Paris: Balland, 2010)). Van seems to deliberately confuse the rounds of intercourse with the rounds of Cordula’s washing herself off on the bidet. And the “on a hobbyhorse . . . merry-go-round” (and the other equine allusions, mule, foal, assbaa, astraddle, rode it) add to the confusion, given that “hobbyhorse” is an obsolete term for a prostitute (W2, sense 2) and (as in Tristram Shandy) an inveterate personal passion, like Van’s sex drive. Perhaps the circle of naked riders on more or less strange quadrupeds in the middle distance of the center panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (including horses, mules, and many creatures with horns or antlers, which are about to appear at 458.04) may come to mind.

The equine imagery surrounding Van’s copulation with Cordula and cuckolding of Tobak oddly anticipates Lucette’s description of her suite on the Tobakoff: “There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages” (477.08-12). 

MOTIF: whore

457.16: tout confort: French, “every comfort,” “all mod. cons.”

457.19-24: “It will take five minutes. Please!” . . . She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five: Cf. Van’s rapid recovery after ejaculation on the morning of the débauche à trois, as noticed by eager Ada: “‘Oh, what a good sight! Orchids. I’ve never seen a man make such a speedy recovery.’ ‘Hundreds of whores and scores of cuties more experienced than the future Mrs. Vinelander have told me that’” (420.19-22).

457.21: rectangular moue: Darkbloom: “little grimace.” The “rectangular” little grimace captures the icky expression well. 

457.23: brisk nub: Unusual terms in this context, but somehow appropriate.

457.25-26: Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau: An Antiterran version of Paris’s famous Bois de Boulogne, a wooded park to the west of the city center, about a half-hour walk from the proximity of the rue de Saïgon. As Babikov 2022: 771 notes, there is a real Bois de Belleau, near the Marne River to Paris’s northeast, the site of an intense World War I battle between the German and US armies lasting from 1 to 26 June 1918, which eventually stopped a German advance. But Nabokov probably has particularly in mind the poet Rémy Belleau, whose erotic verse Humbert quotes in Lolita: “I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I were to quote in my textbook Ronsard’s ‘la vermeillette fente’ or Remy Belleau’s ‘un petit mont feutré de mousse délicate, tracé sur le milieu d’un fillet escarlatte’” (I.11, 47). Appel glosses the Belleau lines: “Belleau (1528-1577), Ronsard’s colleague in the Pléiade group, also writes a ‘blason’ in praise of the external female genitalia; ‘the hillock velveted with delicate moss, / traced in the middle with a little scarlet thread [labia].’ For obvious reasons, the poem is rarely anthologized and is difficult to find. It appears in the Leyden reprint (1865) of the rare anthology Recueil de pieces choisies rassemblées par les soins du cosmopolite, duc d’Aiguillon, ed. (1735). The Cornell Library owns a copy, notes Nabokov” (Annotated Lolita, 359).

457.28-33: I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years—the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore: Van has turned the Manhattan apartment Cordula passed on to him over to the family of Jones, the 1888 footman at Ardis, by 1892 “a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore” (407.27), who in 1893 connived with Van to burn Kim Beauharnais’s blackmailing photographic files in Kalugano (446.01-02) and presumably has in consequence lost his police position and has had to lie low.  

457.33-458.01: I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day: A very belated wedding present, at least eight years old. Van’s “cornuting” Ivan Tobak, and proposing to do it again, as he offers Cordula her wedding present, seems to echo the former adultery, and the promise of its renewal, at the wedding at the end of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (see 456.05n). Now that the Jones family no longer need his flat, Van no longer wants it, given its association with his and Ada’s being discovered together there by Demon.

458.02-03: my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan: Cordula’s husband Ivan Tobak owns the liner, which is named after his ancestor. When he mentions to Lucette that Cordula has married Ivan G. Tobak, Van elaborates: “His ancestor . . . was the famous or fameux Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which” (383.07-10). The Tobago-Tobakoff pattern, with Vinelander, connects tobacco and wine, explorers and adulteries.

This seems sufficient, but Pléiade 2020: 1487 suggests that the Admiral Tobakoff also alludes to the Soviet passenger ship the Admiral Nakhimov, which may be possible but seems unlikely. Long after Ada, the Admiral Nakhimov came to worldwide attention when it sank, on 31 August 1986, with the loss of 423 lives, but it may have been well known enough already in the 1960s for Nabokov to be aware of it. Originally a German ship, the Berlin, it was transferred to the Soviet Union in post-World War II reparations, became a passenger ship in the Black Sea, and was used to transport Soviet soldiers to Cuba during the missile crisis of 1962. Between 1885 and 1951 a number of other Russian naval ships were also named after Admiral Pavel Nakhimov (1802-1855), prominent in the Crimean War. But naming ships after sailors is a regular practice in all navies.

Although the Admiral Tobakoff has become Van’s “favorite liner,” he has been on it only once before (483.30).

Cf. “a ‘luxury’ liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!)”: (178.02-03).

MOTIF: Tobak

458.03-04: Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new: MOTIF: antlers

458.05: Alphonse Four: MOTIF: Alphonse

458.06: And where’s the other?: Cordula’s seemingly discreet question about Ada (which implies, however, that she is aware of Van and Ada’s relationship) quietly and curiously echoes her exchange with Van just moments ago, where “other” all but equates with “lover”: “‘We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’ ‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile’” (456.33-457.03).

458.07: I think we’ll part here: Is it that Van does not want to acknowledge Cordula’s knowledge of Ada and him, or does he just not want to have to discuss the woman from whom he has been so painfully sundered? Compare with Van’s much less ambiguous sudden desire to leave Greg, with whom he had been prepared to drink a bottle of champagne, at Greg’s mention of the other men who loved Ada, Rack, Percy, Krolik, at 455.04-05.
       
Once before Van had obliquely avoided Cordula’s attempt to bring Ada into the conversation, the day he left Ardis, and, as he thought, Ada, for good: “She had not been aware that Ada took music lessons. How was Ada? ‘Lucette,’ he said, ‘Lucette takes or took piano lessons. Okay. Let’s dismiss Kalugano” (303.19-22).

458.07-08: It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along: Cordula had said she “must be home not later than eleven-thirty” (457.17), and she still has to reach her little mansion.

458.09: and I’m a very bad girl: Cf. Van, aboard the Tobakoff, to Lucette on her last night: “If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight” (488.13-14).

458.10-12: speaking to me . . . as you probably do to little whores: MOTIF: whore

458.13-14: finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph: Cf. Van, on his first morning aboard the Tobakoff, picking “up the passenger list (pleasingly surmounted by the same crest that adorned Cordula’s notepaper) in order to see if there was anybody to be avoided during the next days” (475.16-19); Lucette, the same day, on her last night ever, searching for paper for a suicide note: she “looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest” (492.27-28). 

Tobak’s “crest” of course calls to mind the “antlers” (458.04) to which Van has just added another tine. Johnson points out the extra irony: Cordula “who has just cuckolded her husband with Van, gives her lover a secret address on a card with her husband's crest. . . . The crest (here in the form of ‘horns’) is closely connected to the tradi­tional emblem of the cuckold” (Johnson 2000: 180). 

The “postal cryptograph” is presumably a secret address or alias (like Leopold Bloom’s poste restante pseudonym, “Mr Henry Flower,” in Ch. 5 of Joyce's Ulysses) that Cordula uses for her adulterous correspondence (rather less insipid than Bloom’s epistolary flirtation with coy Martha Clifford).
           
MOTIF: antlers

458.15: Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August: Her mother calls Cordula from there in August 1888: “‘My mother rang me up from Malorukino’ (their country estate at Malbrook, Mayne): ‘the local papers said you had fought a duel’” (318.33-319.01). Even while Van stays with Cordula at her apartment in Manhattan in the following weeks, “She dutifully visited her mother at their Malbrook castle two or three times a week” (322.02-03).

MOTIF: Malbrook

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