Forenote

Apart from fleeting glimpses, Van in 1901 appears not to have seen Lucette for almost nine years, since she fled, distraught, from the 1892 débauche à trois with him and Ada in his Manhattan flat.

Alerted by Greg in Pt. 3 Ch. 2 to her being in Paris, “at the Alphonse Four” (456), as Cordula has also confirmed (458), Van comes straight from his couple of couplings with Cordula to Lucette’s hotel. Finding she is not there, he crosses a side street to Ovenman’s bar. Suddenly he beholds her standing at the bar, and ogles her in minute, lingering, exultant detail. After a drink, they have lunch back at her hotel, continue to catch up on what Van has missed in Lucette’s recent past, as she also offers breezy new plans, dismissed at once by Van, for their future together. She drinks too much, Van escorts her back to her room, where he kisses her on the mouth and she asks for more. But Van breaks off, telling her that will do. To her “Why, Van? Why, why, why?” he answers: “You know perfectly well why. I love her, not you, and I simply refuse to complicate matters by entering into yet another incestuous relationship.” She retorts that he has gone far enough with her on more than one occasion and has been unfaithful to Ada “with a thousand girls.” Van meanly turns “her poor words into a pretext for marching away.” Lucette calls out in whispered cry “I apollo, I love you,” but Van walks on, “waving both arms in the air without looking back, quite forgivingly, though, and was gone” (467).

There seems a new weight to this first meeting in almost a decade, starting with Van’s extraordinarily painstaking description of his first sustained sight of Lucette in all that time. The last time they were alone together, when she visited him at Kingston, bringing the letter from Ada that would end his and Ada’s separation, she had tried to arouse his jealousy with her account of her romps with Ada and to stir his desire with her new adult poise. Now she is in her mid-twenties, and jaded with her life, with the emptiness it has for her without Van, but although she offers herself and her whole future directly to him, Van gives her one kiss but rejects her offers and walks away from her once more. The next day, he will be in London.

Notes

459.01-02: Bourbonian-chinned . . . “Alphonse Cinq”: Since the Bourbon (or Bourbonian) chin has not been particularly remarked on, this seems to combine references to the celebrated Bourbon nose, the elongated nose characteristic of members of the Bourbon royal dynasty, and the infamous Habsburg jaw, the enlarged lower jaw projecting beyond the rest of the face, a result of inbreeding in another European royal dynasty.

“The House of Bourbon is one of the greatest of the formerly sovereign dynasties of Europe. It provided reigning kings of France from 1589 to 1792 and from 1814 to 1830, after which another Bourbon reigned as king of the French until 1845; kings or queens of Spain from 1700 to 1808, from 1814 to 1868, and from 1874 to 1931; dukes of Parma . . . kings of Naples and of Sicily . . . ” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 3:79). The last two kings of Spain before the Spanish Republic of 1931-1939 were Alfonso XII (1857-1885, reigned 1874-1885) and Alfonso XIII (1886-1941, reigned 1886-1931), whose full name in Spanish is Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena.

The Bourbon nose is a long (from top to bottom, not protuberant from face outward) nose, usually somewhat narrow at the bridge, and the tip hanging down fleshily between the nostrils (see for instance the portraits of Carlos IV, or of El cardenal don Luis María de Bourbón y Vallabriga (1800), or Doña María Josefa de Bourbón (1800) by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1828). The “popular notion” is “that the ‘Bourbon nose’ (larger and more prominent than the normal aquiline) betokens a ‘Bourbon temperament’ or enormous appetite for sexual intercourse” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 3:79).

The House of Habsburg “was one of the most prominent and important dynasties in European history. . . . The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs from 1440 until their extinction in the male line in 1740, and, as the Habsburg-Lorraines, from 1765 until its dissolution in 1806. The house also produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Lombardy-Venetia and Galicia-Lodomeria, with their respective colonies. . . . The Habsburg dynasty achieved its highest position when Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. . . . Charles formally became the sole monarch of Spain upon the death of his imprisoned mother Queen Joan in 1555. // After the abdication of Charles V in 1556, the Habsburg dynasty split into the branch of the Austrian (or German) Habsburgs, led by Ferdinand, and the branch of the Spanish Habsburgs, initially led by Charles's son Philip. . . . The Habsburgs sought to consolidate their power by frequent consanguineous marriages, resulting in a cumulatively deleterious effect on their gene pool. . . . The gene pool eventually became so small that the last of the Spanish line, Charles II, who was severely disabled from birth (perhaps by genetic disorders), possessed a genome comparable to that of a child born to a brother and sister, as did his father, probably because of 'remote inbreeding'. . . . The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 led to the War of the Spanish Succession, and that of Emperor Charles VI in 1740 to the War of the Austrian Succession. The former was won by House of Bourbon, putting an end to Habsburg rule in Spain,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habsburg, accessed October 8, 2024. 

For more detail on the inbreeding that culminated in Charles II of Spain: “In 1700, the last descendant of the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty, Charles II, died without an heir, despite having been married twice. His death opened the door for dynastic succession. Charles was disfigured and mentally and physically disabled: among many other features, he had an extreme version of the so-called ‘Habsburg jaw’ or ‘Habsburg lip,’ also known as mandibular prognathism, where the lower jaw outgrows the upper. This trait was shared by many of Charles’[s] relatives and ancestors, as family portraits show. Historians have speculated that the Spanish Habsburgs’ preference for consanguineous marriages caused the dynastic downfall and finally extinction. . . . Several years ago, this hypothesis was subjected to a test (Alvarez et al, 2009). . . . Charles’s pedigree was constructed going back 16 generations and including over 300 individuals, and the inbreeding coefficient computed. . . . Indeed, relatedness through multiple ancestors contributed to Charles’s inbreeding coefficient of 0.254, exceeding the coefficient expected in parent-child or brother-sister unions (0.25).” Principles of Evolutionary Medicine, 2nd ed. Peter Gluckman, Alan Beedle, Tatjana Buklijas, Felicia Low, and Mark Hanson, Oxford: OUP 2009, 2016, p. 186; Alvarez G, Ceballos FC, and Quinteiro C, 2009, “The role of inbreeding in the extinction of a European royal dynasty,” PLoS ONE 4: e5174. The much higher inbreeding coefficient of Van and Ada Veen could explain their joint sterility.

After all this, what “Alphonse Cinq’s” Bourbonian chin might look like remains unclear. Perhaps a round-bulbed chin lower than the main line of the jaw, rather than the continuous line of an evenly-angled or square-shaped jaw?

459.02: his blazer days: Seems to feign a set phrase, but “blazer days” appears not to exist as an idiom. Presumably, Van’s school days at Riverlane? Ada wears a “black hockey blazer” borrowed from Brownhill schoolmate Vanda Broom on the first day of Van’s Ardis the First (37.18-19, 398.22-23).

459.02-465.17: “Alphonse Cinq” . . .  Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil . . . “Hullo, Alph,” . . . His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal: There seems a strange countdown here: from the concierge “Alphonse Cinq” of the Hotel Alphonse Four (named at 456.02, 458.05), the scene of the first paragraph and the second half of this chapter, to Lucette’s mention of the “Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil” (463.34), to Van’s casual “Hello, Alph” (465.11) to the prince who could be expected to (and does: 554.27-28) become Alphonse the Second, to the identification of “His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal” (465.17). Amusing, but why is it here? It faintly recalls the wry alphabetical countdown of the four Goldsworth girls in Pale Fire: “Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14)” (PF 83).

See below, 465.17-18n, for a possible if unlikely answer.
                 
MOTIF: Alphonse

459.03: the Récamier room: Italian recamera means “retiring room” (W2), and recamier as a color (W3) is “a moderate pink to strong yellowish pink,” which could describe the room’s color scheme. But the color was named after the famous Parisian saloniste, Juliette Récamier, and presumably so was the room.

“Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier (. . . 3 December 1777 – 11 May 1849), known as Juliette . . . , was a French socialite whose salon drew people from the leading literary and political circles of early 19th-century Paris. An icon of neoclassicism, Récamier cultivated a public persona as a great beauty, and her fame quickly spread across Europe. She befriended many intellectuals, sat for the finest artists of the age. . . . At the age of fifteen, she was married on 24 April 1793 to Jacques-Rose Récamier (1751–1830), a banker nearly thirty years her senior. . . A rumour arose that her husband was, in fact, her natural father who married her to make her his heir. . . . The marriage was never consummated, and Récamier remained a virgin until at least the age of forty. . . . Chateaubriand was a constant visitor of her salon and, in a manner, master of the house. . . . From the earliest days of the French Consulate to almost the end of the July Monarchy, Récamier's salon in Paris was one of the chief resorts of literary and political society that followed what was fashionable,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliette_R%C3%A9camier, accessed October 7, 2024.
                 
Alexey Sklyarenko has very plausibly suggested in an unpublished typescript of December 2001 that “Récamier room” also contains a complex allusion to a 1920 story in verse, “Naden’ka” by Boris Sadovskoy (born Sadovsky, 1881-1952) that reflects the true story of the suicide of poetess Nadezhda L’vova (1891-1913) because of her unhappy love for the poet Valery Bryusov (1873-1924). The heroine of the poem, Naden’ka Orlova, spends the night with her lover, Ioann Asketov, the “king of poets,” in the apartment of a “blowsy” Madame Tyorkin, who calls herself Recamier. The next day Naden’ka shoots herself, as the real L'vova had done with a revolver Bryusov had given her. Sklyarenko notes that within the poem Asketov’s real name is Ivan Otshvyrenkov, a name that “could be translated ‘Juan Fling’ (otshvyryvat’ means to fling away, throw off, cast aside)”—and therefore anticipates Don Juan’s Last Fling.
                 
Sklyarenko also observes that Nabokov’s friend, the poet and prose writer Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), wrote about the suicide of another woman, Nina Petrovskaya (1879-1928), also caused by Bryusov, in his Necropolis (1939), in the essays “Bryusov” and “The End of Renata.” "Renata" was the name Bryusov had given to a character modelled on Petrovskaya in his novel Ognennïy angel (“The Fiery Angel,” 1907). Additional material from Sklyarenko email to BB, December 8, 2024 and Sklyarenko Nabokv-L post, "michman Tobakoff & pava in Ada," May 11, 2014. 

MOTIF: Chateaubriand

459.03-04: Vivian Vale’s golden veils: Four days later the gold bikini-clad “Miss Condor” aboard the Tobakoff mentions to Van “a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale—the cootoriay—voozavay entendue?” (482.34-483.01), and later that evening “Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit” (486.29-30) in a shipboard display window. Both the bikini and the swimsuit appear likely to have been items featured in this latest show of Vale’s designs.
                 
Cf. “Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain” (181.08-11); “Tartary, behind her Golden Veil” (580.12).
                 
MOTIF: V

459.04: flick of coattail: In view of the “Sapsucker” three lines later—a genus of woodpeckers (459.07-08 and n)—perhaps “flick of” here has a hint of “flicker,” another genus (Colaptes) of woodpecker?

459.05: swing-gate: In A1, VN has marked as a difficulty for translators. A fine detail of a hotel concierge’s desk.

495.07-10: carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks . . . The Gitanilla, Salzman, . . . The Gitanilla: Recalls the scene where Van encounters Cordula alone for the first time in a bookshop, just hours after first meeting her, and asks her, “Are you a virgin?” (164-65), a scene recalled in more detail at Kingston, when Lucette declares that “ ‘if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.’ What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, . . . The Gitanilla” (371.11-16).

459.07-08: Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): A playful allusion to the most successful of paperback lines, Penguin, founded in England in 1935, with its stylized Penguin logo on the spine and usually also on front and back cover, and its affiliated avian imprints, Puffin, Pelican, Peregrine, and King Penguin. All of Nabokov’s novels and some of his other books have been issued, often more than once, as Penguins (as Ada would be, in 1970, the first version to appear with the Notes by Vivian Darkbloom). Penguin had picked up on the name of the pioneering German paperback imprint, Albatross, founded in 1932, and Bantam books, founded in the US in 1945, followed in turn from Penguin.
                 
Mason 167 comments on the books rotating on the carrousel: “no doubt pornographic selections, considering the suggestive brand name and the ‘wee striped woodpecker on every spine.’”

459.07-08: Sapsucker . . . that wee striped woodpecker: Any of several small North American woodpeckers of the genus Sphyrapicus: the Red-naped Sapsucker, S. nuchalis, the Red-breasted Sapsucker, S. ruber, Williamson’s Sapsucker, S. thyroideus, and the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, S. varius. All have black-and-white stripes on the side of their head, and also down the side of the body. The most distinctively striped are the Red-naped Sapsucker and the Red-breasted Sapsucker, with black-and-white stripes also on the tail feathers. Is Nabokov recalling the old joke, “What’s black and white and red (read) all over?” “A newspaper”—or a popular paperback?

459.08-10: The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla: As in the bookshop where Van accosts Cordula (see 495.07-10n above), The Gitanilla (the Antiterran Lolita, see 27.33-28.03n, 77.02-06n and 77.02-05n, 361.11-12n)appears first and last in the line-up, or the slow revolve, and other books on the stand in each case include Antiterran versions of other literary bestsellers (in the earlier case, Mertvago Forever, in our world Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago; in this case, Salzman, perhaps, on Earth, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea). 
                 
MOTIF: book list; gitanilla; Lolita

459.08: Salzman: Zimmer 2010: 1024 proposes (on a prompt by Ludger Tolksdorf) a possible reference to the title story of the collection of thirteen stories, The Magic Barrel (1958), by American writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1959. Pinye Salzman is a marriage broker to the hero of “The Magic Barrel,” the rabbinical student Leo Finkle. On the bookstand “the number one  bestseller” (476.06) Salzman follows (in three copies) The Gitanilla, the Antiterran stand-in for Lolita, also published in the U.S. in 1958 and nominated for, and a finalist in, the National Book Award for 1959, losing out to The Magic Barrel.

459.09: Invitation to a Climax: Combines Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938, translated by DN with VN, 1959) and Lolita, which seems to promise mounting sexual explicitness and takes us to Lake Climax. Pekka Tammi 1985: 345 notes that the title “suggests both Invitation to a Beheading  (the first of the series of VN’s translated novels to come out after the success attained by Lolita) and the various puns on ‘climax’ within the text of Lolita itself (e.g. ‘Lake Climax’ [105]). In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading  VN actually pokes fun at those ‘evil-minded’ readers who wish to see in the early Russian novel some specific analogies with Lolita  (cf. 7-8).”

Nabokov’s suggestion to French translators in A1: “Invitation au spasme.”

459.09: Squirt: In Nabokov’s own copy of Ada, he glosses as “ejaculation.”

Cf. also the day of Lucette’s first introduction to sex, in August 1884: “Lucette had abandoned her skipping rope to squat on the brink of the brook and float a fetus-sized rubber doll. Every now and then she squeezed out of it a fascinating squirt of water through a little hole that Ada had had the bad taste to perforate for her in the slippery orange-red toy. With the sudden impatience of inanimate things, the doll managed to get swept away by the current. . . . ” (143.02-08). Cf. also the pause between Percy de Prey’s two attacks on Van by the brook at Ada’s 1888 birthday picnic: “Van washed his hands in a lower shelf-pool of the brook and recognized, with amused embarrassment, the transparent, tubular thing, not unlike a sea-squirt, that had got caught in its downstream course in a fringe of forget-me-nots, good name, too” (275.23-26).

459.09: The Go-go Gang: The term go-go seems to have been deployed first in 1964: OED, 1972 supplement: “a. Fashionable, ‘swinging,’ ‘fabulous,’ unrestrained. . . . b. spec. Of a dancer or a dance, the music, etc., at a discothèque, strip club, etc.: full of verve, excitement, and movement (often deliberately erotic)”; OED Online, adj., 1a: “Originally: designating or relating to a type of nightclub or discotheque in which dancers are employed, esp. to dance in a sexually provocative or erotic way. Later more generally: designating or relating to sexually provocative or erotic dancing, or the clothing worn by such dancers, or (now somewhat dated) to disco dancing or dancers.” OED Online, n.: “Originally: a go-go nightclub, discotheque, etc. (see sense A.1a) (now disused).”

“Go-go gang” is Nabokov’s own punning coinage, combining the usual sense of the noun “gang” with the verb “gang,” obsolete except in Scottish, meaning “go” (W2). He probably has in mind what he thinks of as the herd mentality in popular fashions in the 1960s. Cf. his 1968 answer to the question: “There are constant references in your novels to popular movies and pulp fiction. You seem to delight in the atmosphere of such popular culture. Do you enjoy the originals and how do these relate to your own use of them?”:“No, I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go-gangs, I loathe jungle music. . . . I don’t think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide” (SO 117).
                 
Pléiade 2020: 1487 suggests, with little warrant, the novel On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969).

459.09-10: The Threshold of Pain: Zimmer 2010: 1025 suggests a hint at Nabokov’s own novel Pnin, whose sad hero is often in emotional and sometimes physical pain (or even “pain and panic”) and whose title is pointedly only one letter away from “pain”; thinking of past injustices, Pnin at one point expostulates: “The history of man is the history of pain!'' (Pnin 168). Pnin, published 1957, was a finalist in the U.S. National Book Award in 1958. Alternatively in this Sapsucker paperback there could be a suggestion of sado-masochistic sex.

459.10: The Chimes of Chose: The memoirs of Van’s Chose (Cambridge) friend, Jack Chose (516.08): “a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still [in 1905, four years later] clung to the ‘best seller’ trellis—mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks” (515.18-22). 

459.11-13: a Wall Street, very “patrician” colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K. L. Sween, who wrote verse . . . and Milton Eliot: Three years later Van will encounter in Demon’s home, the last time he sees his father, “solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith . . . ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’” (505.33-506.12). T. S. Eliot, easily glimpsed here, was a banker in Lloyd’s in the City, London’s banking district, from 1917 to 1925; see 5.19-20 and n. The surname “Sween” here echoes Eliot’s character Sweeney (in the poems “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” 1918, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (1918), “Sweeney Erect” (1919), The Waste Land  (1922), and the uncompleted verse drama Sweeney Agonistes, written 1924-1927 and published as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Drama,1932). “Milton Eliot” echoes in part T.S. Eliot’s borrowing that last title from Milton’s Samson Agonistes (published 1671).
                 
“Kithar Sween” looks like an anagram. Nabokov notes in Pale Fire (193) and elsewhere (DBDV 241, 360) that “T.S. Eliot” is almost a palindrome and certainly an anagram of “toilets.” “Kithar Sween” could be unscrambled as “a stink where?”—the answer being “toilets / T.S. Eliot.” But there may be a more satisfying explanation for Kithar Sween’s provocatively peculiar name.

459.11: very “patrician” colleague: T. S. Eliot was born (in 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri) to a Boston Brahmin family. The paternal ancestors of the Eliot family had emigrated to Massachusetts  in the seventeenth century from East Coker, Somerset, whose name T. S. Eliot uses as the title of one (1940) of his Four Quartets, all four being published together in 1943. Among the socially prominent members of the family was Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926), long-time president of Harvard University (from 1869 to 1909) and credited with raising the university into one of the world’s best.  Nabokov’s son Dmitri, while at Harvard, was briefly (1951-52) resident at Eliot House, opened in 1931 and named in honor of Charles W. Eliot. “Before Harvard opted to use a lottery system to assign residences to upperclassmen (beginning with the class of 1999), Eliot was known as a ‘prep’ house, providing accommodation to the university's social elite, and being known as ‘more Harvard than Harvard’. Describing Eliot House in the late 1950s and early 1960s, author Alston Chase wrote, "[A]lthough most Harvard houses in those days reflected the values of Boston Brahmin society  . . .  Eliot was more extreme.’” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_House, accessed October 7, 2024).


459.12-13: the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot: T.S. Eliot was a student in 1906 at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and as mentioned in 459.11-12n drew on John Milton for ironic effect in the title of his Sweeney Agonistes. But the real barb lies in Eliot’s famously criticising the older poet, in his 1936 essay “A Note on the Verse of John Milton.” Although he opened by conceding “While it must be admitted that Milton is a very great poet indeed, it is something of a puzzle to decide in what his greatness consists. On analysis, the marks against him appear both more numerous and more significant than the marks to his credit.” He opined that Milton’s was “not serious poetry,” that “Milton does not infuse new life into the word,” that “Milton may be said never to have seen anything.”

Nabokov did not often comment on or allude to Milton, but after reading a sample of the work of young Cornell writer and future experimental novelist Steve Katz (1935-2019), he advised him: “You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose. . . . You cannot begin all over with the Canterbury Tales, in comic-strip English. . . . Suggestion: read: Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth” (Boyd 1991: 316-17). In EO 3.502,

Nabokov remarks on an excerpt from Milton’s L’Allegro (c.1640): “Cadential verse for him, as for Coleridge and Keats, was a great and fertile temptation. This extract from a resplendent masterpiece (l. 112 [‘Basks at the fire his hairy strength’] is one of the best in English poetry) is not very abundantly scudded, but extra modulation is achieved by means of the contractions so characteristic of Milton’s style.”

Milton Eliot’s real-estate dealings, though not his first name, rate a mention in Ada’s opening chapter: Daniel Veen had known Marina Durmanov’s family “when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman” (5.18-20). For VN’s distaste for Eliot’s anti-Semitism, see 5.19-20n.

The “still older real-estate magnate” may be a hit at the poem “Gerontion” (1920), whose title means “little old man” and whose thoughts of a “dry brain” by the elderly speaker include the anti-Semitic lines:

My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp. (ll. 7-9)

The pastiches and parodies of Eliot (including “Gerontion”) in Lolita, the earthly original of The Gitanilla, make Van’s being distracted by Kithar Sween and Milton Eliot, and hoping not to be noticed by them, especially apposite at this moment.

Cf. the political leader “Abraham Milton,” 18.04-05.

459.16: gave him a Goal guinea: A gold guinea from Gaul (France) bearing the head of “Lord Goal, Viceroy of France” (329.17)?

MOTIF: gold dollars; Van’s tips and bribes

459.18: Agonic Lines: N1: “Webster 1960 p. 50 imaginary lines used in geography.” An echo of the title of Eliot’s fragments of a verse drama, Sweeney Agonistes (see 459.11-13n and 459.12-13n), and the agonized tone of many of the lines of the poet’s verse; an agonic line is (W2) “Physics An imaginary line on the earth’s surface passing through those points where a magnetic needle, if suspended freely, is in equilibrium in a true north and south plane; the line of no magnetic declination. There is one such line in the Western Hemisphere, and one in the Eastern.”

MOTIF: agony

459.18-19: affalés . . . dans des fauteuils: Darkbloom: “sprawling in their armchairs.”

459.18-19: with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders: Natural enough for men sprawling in armchairs; but perhaps also a reflection of the fact that sweeny (W2) means “In horses, an atrophy of the muscles of the shoulder.”

459.19-20: comparing cigars: Probably alludes to Eliot’s anti-Semitic poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920) (“But this or such was Bleistein’s way: . . . / Chicago Semite Viennese. // A lustreless protrusive eye / Stares from the protozoic slime. . . // . . . On the Rialto once. / The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs . . . ”).

459.20-461.09: rue des Jeunes Martyres . . . wreck of an artist for Ovenman: MOTIF: Toulouse

459.21: Ovenman’s: In Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster there appear beneath “Divan Japonais” the words “Ed. Fournier / directeur.” “Ovenman,” although an English word (W2: “One who tends an oven, as a kilnman, baker, or stover”) is a deliberately odd direct translation of “Fournier,” a common enough French surname, meaning “baker, owner of a public bake-house, ovenman.”

460.01-461.09: Upon entering . . . that wreck of an artist for Ovenman: As noted in 459.20-21n, this scene is described in terms of both Toulouse-Lautrec’s Divan Japonais poster and the wine merchants Barton & Guestier’s print advertisement using a photographic updating and visual echo of the poster, over the slogan “the wines you loved in Paris!” The advertisement ran in the New Yorker, in which VN was regularly published and which he closely read, at least as early as March 23, 1963 (and for instance, also November 20 and December 4, 1965, at a time when Nabokov was just getting the first flashes of Ada); he placed an undated clipping of the advertisement in A1 between pp. 460 and 461.

Lucette’s and Van’s poses and attire echo those of the models in the advertisement’s photograph, on a wall in the background of which is the Divan Japonais poster, which the models in turn echo in a modern-dress tableau, almost a photographic reconstruction of the poster. The inclusion of the poster emphasises the advertisement’s match between the young woman’s black dress, elaborate hat, white glove and pose and the attire and pose of the dancer Jane Avril (1868-1943), Toulouse-Lautrec’s model, while the man’s black jacket and hat, glasses, white shirt, and crooked furled black umbrella match, in updated styles, those of writer and man about town Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949), the painter’s male model, except that Dujardin holds a crooked cane, not an umbrella, up in front of his face. Avril looks forwards to the cabaret show, featuring singer Yvette Guilbert (1865-1944); the model in the advertisement looks straight ahead, and therefore as if in the direction of the three figures in the poster, while the man close behind her seems to have his head turned slightly to the right, and therefore also, from his position, toward the poster, where Dujardin has his head slightly turned to the left, as if ogling Avril. The yellow and black colors of the lithograph are echoed in the yellow wall and black clothing of the mise-en-scène of the photograph in the advertisement. This excellently witty example of advertising art deserves the admiration Van expresses, although not so much for the advertisement as for life’s matching advertising art, in Van’s own description of the scene of Lucette and himself exactly matching the models in the advertisement: “a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarly postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman” (461.06-09).

The date of the clipping of the advertisement which Nabokov placed in his own copy of the published work when he was annotating it for translators is not known, but it is likely that his appreciative eye noticed the advertisement early in its New Yorker run, before he began composing any part of Ada except the Texture of Time excursus, and that details of the advertisement conditioned motifs he would develop throughout the novel: (1) the yellow and black motif, associated with the death of Aqua, the Ardis library divan, Lucette’s “fabulous Japanese divan”(463.30) in her Alphonse Four suite, and Lucette’s death; (2) the “behind” motif (rear-entry sex) associated with Ada and Van, and Lucette and Van (see Boyd 1985/2001, especially 134-36, 139-44, and AdaOnline) (the male model in the Barton and Guestier photo stands very close behind the young woman); (3) the woman-in-picture motif (variously associated with Marina, Ada, Lucette, and others); (4) the cane motif (associated with Van’s jealous rage); (5) the picture hat motif (associated with unknown whores and virginal Lucette); (6) the photograph-and-memory motif (associated with Van and Ada, and with the ambiguity between profile and forward-facing views); (7) the Paris motif (associated especially with Lucette and the old name for Paris, Lutèce); and (8) the red hair motif, in Jane Avril in the poster and the young woman in the advertising photograph (associated with Dan and overwhelmingly with Lucette).

Van here goes to exacting lengths to describe Lucette in terms that render with great verbal precision the model as photographed for the advertisement. It seems likely that Nabokov created Lucette’s looks, especially as a young adult, with this photograph vividly in mind, and indeed that the photograph may have helped prompt the idea of her at first unrecognised centrality to the novel, and that its role as the basis for this scene also became a key means of moving her closer to the center of our imaginations. Some of this the author seems to indicate to the first serious researcher of Ada, Bobbie Ann Mason, who writes: “Nabokov notes that the picture Van imagines is ‘none other than a beautifully stylized and glorified version of the Toulouse crudity, namely a Barton and Guestier (‘the finest wines of France’) publicity photograph (which appeared frequently in the New Yorker in the late sixties). It is meticulously described by Van (460-1) and should be looked up by all admirers of Lucette’” (Mason 163). Mason seems not to have followed Nabokov’s clue to “look up” the advertisement, despite the understated urgency of his hint and the insistence of the novel’s description.

MOTIF: divan; divan japonais; woman in picture

460.02-04: he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent: Black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as in the Barton & Guestier photograph. Another instance of Van acting in terms of Demon’s example: cf. Demon, on the day when he will part Van and Ada, out on a Manhattan street with “his slim umbrella” (433.34).

460.02: fedora: W2: “Any low soft felt hat having the crown creased lengthwise; orig., one with a high roll on the side brim. U.S.”

460.04-10: which decent women did not frequent—at least, unescorted. . . . the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita: Cf. the woman at the bar at the Brownhill railway station tearoom which Van has entered with Ada and Cordula: “It was empty, save for a slender lady in black velvet, wearing a beautiful black velvet picture hat, who sat with her back to them at a ‘tonic bar’ and never once turned her head, but the thought brushed him that she was a cocotte from Toulouse” (169.24-27), and the woman in the restaurant in Kalugano on the day Van leaves Ardis forever, meets Cordula again, and challenges a stranger to a duel the next day: “At the far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black—tight bodice, wide skirt, long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat—was sucking a golden drink through a straw. In the mirror behind the bar, amid colored glints, he caught a blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty; he thought he might sample her later on, but when he glanced again she had gone” (307.15-22). Van was hardly in “his pubescence” on the first of these occasions, at 16 and already experienced with the “fubsy pig-pink whorelet” (33.17) at Riverlane and especially with Ada at Ardis.

MOTIF: picture hat; whore

460.05-08: as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!): The black-framed spectacles match those the man wears in the Barton & Guestier photograph (Dujardin in the poster wears a monocle). This seems the first mention of Van’s wearing glasses. Note in the Kalugano scene mentioned in the previous note the “blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty” (italics added).

460.07-461.03: the girl whose silhouette. . . . he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she too, was in regard to us and the bar). . . . all this in profile, we softly repeat. . . . Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness: Cf. the passage of Van’s examining and committing to memory Ada’s image in profile, which mingles with a formal photographic session in the summer of 1884 ordered by Marina and photographed by Kim Beauharnais (see 402) but not described during the course of Ardis the First: “He learned her face. Nose, cheek, chin—all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow) that a mawkish admirer might well have imagined the pale plume of a reed, that unthinking man—pascaltrezza—shaping her profile, while a more childish and sensual digit would have liked, and did like, to palpate that nose, cheek, chin. Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue. The fillet of black velvet binding her hair that day (the day of the mental picture) . . . ” (103.21-32, italics mostly added).

460.07-10: the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then . . . ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita: Blok’s “Neznakomka” (“Incognita,” “Unknown Woman,” “The Strange Lady,” 1906) is the most famous of a whole succession of poems in which an unknown woman, part inaccessible vision, part all-too-available whore, stirs the poet’s imagination; like Lucette and the figures in poster and photograph, she sits in a wine-soaked bar, wearing a hat with black plumes, as a man looks on. Proffer 277: “The ‘unknown lady’ is the first mystic, then whore-like heroine-muse of Alexander Blok’s ‘symbolist’ poetry, including the famous lyric ‘The Unknown Lady’ (1906) where she appears foggily and gauzily in a bar.” For the impact of “Neznakomka” on its first audience, see Avril Pyman, Alexander Blok: Selected Poems [Oxford: Pergamon, 1972], p. 218: “Blok saw the Stranger in the window of a station buffet where he was sitting alone, drinking red wine. . . . By Blok’s contemporaries she was taken for a prostitute, and Annenkov even tells us that Petersburg prostitutes took to dressing exactly like her, even to borrowing her name, so often did they hear tipsy students reciting Blok’s tipsy verses.”

VN comments as a teacher on Blok’s recurrent verse encounters with this unknown woman: “Blok started upon his quest in the symbolic guise of a knight errant; the object of his quest was the lovely stranger, la belle dame sans merci. In a way all his short lyrical poems form one long epic, a kind of Don Quixotic novel. The lovely lady was at first a denizen of sunsets—of those strangely gorgeous sunsets that glowed with special symbolic luxuriance over the fields and forests of Northern Russia in the years preceding the Revolution. Later on he saw her in a sequence of masks as a medieval Princess, as Hamlet’s Ophelia, as a tragic actress, as a girl met roaming in the long grasses, as a harlot, as Donna Anna of Don Juan – and so on” (forthcoming in Lectures on Russian Poetry, Prose, and Drama, ed. Stanislav Shvabrin and Brian Boyd, Princeton: Princeton University Press).

For the original and VN’s translation of the poem, see Verses and Versions, 322-25.

Babikov 2022: 772 notes that Nina Berberova, (1901-1993), a fellow émigré writer whom Nabokov knew and praised (see e.g. TWS 108-10), compared Blok’s “Incognita” to the women in Toulouse-Lautrec posters, in an article that also praised T. S. Eliot (“Velikiy vek,” Novïy zhurnal, 64, 1961,119-40).

Pléiade 2020: 1487 notes also the relevance of “L’Inconnue de la Seine,” the title of a Russian poem (1934) by VN (PP 82-85), inspired by the then-prominent theme of a young woman who had drowned herself for love in the Seine. For a detailed discussion of the poem, its source in a death mask (“supposedly of an anonymous young woman taken from the Seine. Widely reproduced, the mask was a popular item of décor in German and French households of the twenties and thirties,” p. 228), and the theme, throughout Nabokov’s works, of a young woman drowned for love, see D. Barton Johnson, “‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’ and Nabokov’s Naiads,” Comparative Literature 44:3, 224-48. Cf. also the story “Torpid Smoke” (1935): “a picture framer’s display, with purple heathscapes and the inevitable Inconnue de la Seine, so popular in the Reich” (SoVN 397).

460.10: Incognita: Cf. perhaps the “inkog” in “L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now” (300.03-08).

460.10-13: It was a queer feeling—as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time: Cf. the folds in time on Van’s metamorphic journeys to and from Ardis in Pt. 1 Ch. 5 (with its “chance crease in the texture of time,” 34.14-15) and Pt. 1 Ch. 25; in the repetition of the 1884 ride back from Ada’s birthday picnic in the 1888 picnic ride, Pt. 1 Ch. 38; in the discussions of Terra in Pt. 1 Ch. 3, Pt. 2 Ch. 2, and Pt. 5 Ch. 5; and in the women in the picture hat at a bar in Pt. 1 Ch. 27 and Pt. 1 Ch. 42 who specifically and pointedly prefigure this scene.

MOTIF: time

460.15-18: he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth: Accurately describes the position of the models in the Barton & Guestier advertisement photograph, the “lifted in profile almost up to his mouth” being even closer to the position of Dujardin in the Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

MOTIF: behind; cane

460.18-32: against the aureate backcloth . . . black dress . . . black soft corolla . . . black lashes . . . . the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it: MOTIF: black-yellow

460.18-19: against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar: In the advertisement, the backdrop to the woman and man is a pale yellow-painted or yellow-wallpapered wall whose color blends in with the pale yellow of the cabaret stage on the “aureate” poster itself. “Sakarama” seems to be an invented word, combining “cyclorama” and the “sake” of a “Japanese” (“japonais”) bar. Japanese painted screens are in fact called by?bu, but it is just possible that Nabokov knew the Japanese word sakasama, explained here by Akiko Nakata, in a note of October 13, 2003 to D. Barton Johnson that she shared with me: “in old (not modern) Japanese custom, a screen a dead person had used in life would be placed upside down at his or head during the wake; such a screen was called a sakasama screen (like ‘kita makura,’ a pillow to the north: lying with one’s head toward the north, considered ominous for living people) and ‘hidari mae,’ wearing left front of kimono over right.” Nabokov was certainly interested in reversals associated with death, as in The Gift 203: “while reading this Fyodor recalled his father saying that innate in every man is the feeling of something insuperably abnormal about the death penalty, something like the uncanny reversal of action in a looking glass that makes everyone left-handed : not for nothing is everything reversed for the executioner: the horse-collar is put on upside down when the robber Razin is taken to the scaffold; wine is poured for the headsman not with a natural turn of the wrist but backhandedly; and if, according to the Swabian code, an insulted actor was permitted to seek satisfaction by striking the shadow of the offender, in China, it was precisely an actor— a shadow—who fulfilled the duties of the executioner, all responsibility being as it were lifted from the world of men and transformed into the inside-out one of mirrors.”

French impressionist and post-impressionist painters (Toulouse-Lautrec is generally classed among the latter) were much influenced by Japanese art, especially by ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) prints by the likes of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753-1806).

460.20-24: having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose: As in the photograph in the Barton & Guestier advertisement, although the model’s hand is on wainscoting, not a counter.

460.24-25: With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat: Seems to describe the attention Dujardin pays to Avril in the poster, although Avril’s throat is not visible, as the model’s in the photograph is.

460.24-25: the pure proud line of that throat: Cf. “In both [Ada and Lucette], the long pure line of the throat, coming straight from Marina, tormented the senses with unknown, ineffable promises (not kept by the mother)” (104.11-14).

460.25-26: The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin): Just as in the photograph.

460.25-26: The glossy red lips are parted: In his mind’s eye, and with Lucette on his lap, Van conjures up Ada seated beside him on the ride back from the picnic on her sixteenth birthday: “He watched Ada’s bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture” (281.20-24).

460.26: fey: W2: “1. Fated or doomed to die; dying, also, enfeebled; delirious. Archaic & Scot. 2. Dead, Obs. . . . 3. Portending death; fatal; accursed; unlucky. Obs. 4. Having the air of one under a doom or spell; otherworldly; elfin; also, visionary.”

460.30-461.02: From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s “gem bulbs” plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow: A brilliant verbal rendering of precise details of the photograph, including the bulbs reflected in the wine bottles on the bar and highlighting the model’s convex copper fringe. Nabokov seems almost to be asking us to think that the woman in the photograph is Lucette, and that the artistic finesse of the photograph is greater than that of the poster, where Avril also has red hair and a wide-brimmed black hat but none of the rest of the details.

Cf. SM: “The little girls in neat socks and pumps whom we and other little boys used to meet at dancing lessons or at Christmas Tree parties had all the enchantments, all the sweets and stars of the tree preserved in their flame-dotted iris, and they teased us, they glanced back, they delightfully participated in our vaguely festive dreams, but they belonged, those nymphets, to another class of creatures than the adolescent belles and large-hatted vamps for whom we actually yearned” (203); and the young American woman young Nabokov privately dubs “Louise,” whom he sees at a skating rink in Berlin: “I can still see her tall figure in a navy-blue tailor-made suit. Her large velvet hat was transfixed by a dazzling pin” (206).

MOTIF: copper; picture hat; red hair

460.31: faille: W2: “A ribbed silk fabric of plain weave, having soft but fairly heavy filling yarns, used for women’s and children’s dresses, coats, and hats, and for men’s ties, etc.”.

461.01: convexes: MOTIF: convex

461.02: picture hat: W2: “A woman’s broad-brimmed hat, usually black and adorned with ostrich plumes, modelled on hats seen in famous pictures. See GAINSBOROUGH HAT, Illust.” In Pléiade 2020: 823, “chapeau Rubens.” Pléiade 2020: 1487 notes the Rubens painting The Straw Hat (1622-25), also known as Portrait of Susanna Lunden, and adds that Lucette wears not a straw hat but a “floppy hat of black faille.” Susanna Lunden’s wide-brimmed floppy hat is also not of straw, despite the popular misnomer.

Cf. “Marina’s portrait, a rather good oil by Tresham, hanging above her on the wall, showed her wearing the picture hat she had used for the rehearsal of a Hunting Scene ten years ago, romantically brimmed, with a rainbow wing and a great drooping plume of black-banded silver” (38.22-26); and the quotation in the next note.

461.02-03: Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness: Cf. “all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow)” (103.21-24).
461.05-07: must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarly postured lousy jade: Nabokov seems to be all but provoking his readers to seek out at least the poster, if not also the advertisement that incorporates and echoes it.

461.07-08: the similarly postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster: Darkbloom: “gueule etc.: simian facial angle.” A guenon is a monkey in the genus Cercopithecus, and the faces of some guenons in profile indeed remarkably resemble the outline of Jane Avril’s face in the Divan Japonais poster. In fact she looks even more simian in Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1892 painting, “Jane Avril in the entrance to the Moulin Rouge, putting on her gloves.” Perhaps Nabokov’s phrasing is prompted by memories of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and posters of La Goulue, the stage name of the can-can dancer and star of the Moulin Rouge, Louise Weber (1866-1929).

461.08: the vile poster: “Divan Japonais ( . . . 80 x 60 [cm.], 1892-93). Made to advertise the entertainments of this cabaret when it opened in the Spring of 1893” (Denys Sutton and G.M. Sugana, The complete paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 121).

461.09: wreck of an artist: A1: “Toulouse Lautrec.” See above, 459.20-21n and 460.01-461.09n. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec, accessed October 10, 2024: “Toulouse-Lautrec broke both his legs around the time of his adolescence and, possibly due to the rare condition pycnodysostosis, was very short as an adult due to his undersized legs. In addition to alcoholism, he developed an affinity for brothels and prostitutes that directed the subject matter for many of his works. . . . at the age of 36, Toulouse-Lautrec died from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis.”

Van in a sense also echoes Charles Swann in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, who recurrently sees attractive women in terms of painting: Odette in terms of Botticelli, Françoise in terms of Giotto. . . .

461.09: for Ovenman: See 459.21n.

461.10: Hullo there, Ed: The barman’s first name seems borrowed from the “Ed. Fournier” of the Divan Japonais poster. See 461.17 and n.

461.12: almost got le paquet: Donner le paquet, “to give a piece of one’s mind” to someone. Aleksey Sklyarenko, “Some Dreams of Alexander Blok as Enacted in Ada by Van Veen and Vice Versa,” Nabokovian 54 (Spring 2005), 18, suggests that, given the “Nezknakomka” (Incognita) context of this scene (see 460.07-10n) this detail of Lucette turning to say something angry to a man standing close behind her might owe something to Blok’s poem “Zhenshchina” (“Woman,” August 1914). The poem is from the woman’s point of view. Stanza 7:

No chuvstvuyu: on za plechami
But I feel: he is behind my shoulders
On podoshyol v upor . . .
He came close to me . . .
Uzhe ya gnevnymi rechami
I’m already preparing
Emu gotovlyus’ dat’ otpor . . .
To rebuff him with angry words . . .

461.13: ‘goggling’: Invented: ogling her through his goggles, his glasses.

461.15-16: lautréamontesque—I mean, lautrecaquesque—no, I can’t form the adjective: Van is trying to say “lautrec-esque” but instead slides into the nom de plume of French poet Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), real name Isidore-Lucien Ducasse. Lautrecaquesque almost contains casque, “helmet.”

461.17: Ed Barton: His first name derives from the “Ed.” of “Ed. Fournier” on the Divan Japonais poster, his surname from the “Barton & Guestier” of the advertisement (see above), and together they almost form an anagram of “bartend.”

461.17: Chambéryzette: From Chambery (W3): “a dry vermouth.” Pléiade 2020: 1488: an aperitif from Savoy, France, using white vermouth and strawberry liqueur, created early in the nineteenth century.

461.19-20: Moyo grustnoe schastie!: Darkbloom: “Russ., she addresses him as ‘my sad bliss.’” Sklyarenko “Horosho, L-shaped bathroom and L disaster in Ada,” Nabokovian, June 24, 2019, notes this phrase in Blok: “In his poem Pomnite den’ bezotradnyi i seryi... ("Do you remember the cheerless and gray day..." 1899) Blok mentions grustnoe schast’ye (the sad happiness): . . .

Pomnite schastie: davno otletelo
Grustnoe schast’e na bïstrïkh krïlakh . . .
Tol’ko i zhilo ono i gorelo
V Vashikh ochakh!

(Remember happiness: long ago flew away
Sad happiness on swift wings . . .
It lived and it burned only
In your eyes!)”