THE NAKED TRUTH, OR THE READER’S SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION INADA’S QUELQUECHOSEUNIVERSITY
Assistance to drowning persons is in the hands of those persons themselves.
Having completed his prep-school education inAmerica, Van Veen, Ada’s protagonist, goes up to ChoseUniversity in England (1.27).There he studies psychiatry and, in his spare time, performs in a variety showwith a difficult circus stunt. Under the stage name Mascodagama, Van dances on his hands. Among the reporters who write about Mascodagama’s performance in the Chose and London theaters is “a female Sorbonne correspondent”(1.30).Sorbonne being the famous University in Paris, many of her readers would probably pronounce the name of Van’s University the way the French pronounce their word for ‘thing.’
Depending on the context, the French word chose can have sexual connotations. In Ada, Van translates the French stock phrase laforcedeschoses (the power of things) as “the fever of intercourse” (2.7). Another interesting use of la chose can be found in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel Gospoda Golovlyovy (“The Golovlyovs,” 1875-80). Anninka, the niece of Iudushka (“little Judas”) Golovlyov, is a provincial actress, who leads a dream-like existence. She “undressed in La belle Hélène, appeared drunk in La Prichole, sang all kind of shameless things in the scenes from La grande duchesse de Gerolsteinand even regretted that it wasn’t accepted to act on stage “la chose” and “l’amour,” imagining how seductively she would have jerked her waist and how splendidly she would have twirled the tail of her dress.” (“The Little Niece”) The reader of Shchedrin’s novel is supposed to know this; still, men in theaudience devour with their eyes the curve of Anninka’s naked body hoping that she would explain to them what exactly “la chose” is.
Like Shchedrin’s Anninka, Marina Durmanova, Van’s and Ada’s mother, is an actress devoid of talent. Her success in the mediocre performance, in which Demon Veen, the father of Van and Ada, sees her,she probablyowes to the fact that, in onescene, she undresses behind a semi-transparent screen and then reappears on stage half-naked (1.2). Between the two scenes with her participation, Marina makes love (losing her virginity) to Demon in the theater’s back room. She acts “l’amour” off-stage, as it were, and shows to at least one man in the audience what “la chose” is. It seems to me that Nabokov’s reader can – if not enjoy with Demon and Marina their love-making – then at least derive erotic pleasure from finding out what exactly “la chose” means.
The two Russian words for choseare veshch’ andshtuka. The latter word is an anagram of shutka (Russian for ‘joke’), and its diminutive form, shtuchka, occurs not only in Ada, but also in “The Golovlyovs” (where acharacter uses it in the sense “harlot”) and in Ilf and Petrov’s “The Golden Calf” (1931). In all three novels shtuchka meansdifferent things, but each time has more or less distinctsexual connotations. When her first attempt to seduce Van has failed, Lucette, Van’s and Ada’s half-sister, says to him (2.5): “I imitated all her [Ada’s] shtuchki (little stunts). I’m a better actress than she but that’s not enough, I know.” A wonderful imitatrix, Lucette can mimic all of her “vaginal” (the word Lucette must have learned from Ada and uses, instead of “uterine,”during the samemeeting with Van) sister’s feminine tricks, but Ada has one all-important shtuchka, which Lucette, even though she also possesses it, can not quite imitate.
In a conversation with Balaganov, Ostap Bender, the hero of “The Twelve Chairs” (1927) and “The Golden Calf,” mentions a Charleston U moey devochki est’ odna malen’kaya shtuchka (“My girl has one little thing”) said to be popular in Rio de Janeiro, the city of Ostap’s dreams (“The Golden Calf,” chapter II: “The Thirty Sons of Lieutenant Shmidt”). The nature of shtuchka in the Charleston name is not specified, so we can only guess what that is. I must have a dirty imagination, but I can not help thinking of the Russian word that can be composed with Lucette’s six letters – L, I, K, R, O, T – during one of the Flavita (Russian Scrabble) games at Ardis (2.5). I seek excuse in the fact that Nabokov, too, seems to have thought of this word, as indicated by several covert allusions to Ilf and Petrov’s novels in Ada.
The name Balaganov comes from balagan, which means, among other things, “low farce.” If Van’s college tutor(a decrepit and dour homosexual, with no sense of humor whatever) had spoken Russian, he would have used this word when hescolds Van forcombining his university studies with the circus(that is, low farce) and asks him to give up the latter (1.30). For the tango that Vandances on his hands in his last tour he is given a partner, a Crimean girl who sings the tango tune in Russian:
Podznoynym nebom Argentiny,
Pod strastnyi govor mandoliny
’Neath sultry sky of Argentina,
To the hot hum of mandolina.
As had been noticed before(D. B. Johnson,“Ada’s ‘Lasttango’ inDance, SongFilm,”Cycnos, V. 24, #1, 2007), it is the same tango (“’Neath sultry sky of Argentina, / Where women look as if they were painted by an artist”) that Ostap Bender dances solo in “The Golden Calf” (chapter XX: “The Commodore is Dancing a Tango”). Pod sladkiy lepet mandoliny (“To a mandolin’s sweet babble”), as Bender puts it, the Roman Catholic priests Kushakovsky and Moroshek vainly tried to make a good Catholic of their compatriot, Adam Kozlevich, the driver of the “Antelope Gnu” car (“The Golden Calf,” chapter XVII: “The Prodigal Son Returns Home”).
Van’s stage name, Mascodagama, is an obvious play on Vasco da Gama, the name of the Portuguese navigator (c1460-1524), and evokes an episode in Ilf and Petrov’s “The Twelve Chairs,” when Bender and Vorobyaninov visit the Columbus Theatre and watch its vanguard stage version of Gogol’s classical play “The Marriage” (chapter XXX: “At the Columbus Theater”). The hero’s valet Stepan gives some cues in it standing on his hands, while the heroine is walking along a thin wire tensioned above the audience, showing to people in the stalls her dirty soles (cf. the reversed situation in Ada, 1.30: “During their dance, all Van saw of her [‘Rita,’ Van’s partner, who bears an odd resemblance to Lucette as she is to look ten years later] were her silver slippers nimbly turning and marching in rhythm with the soles of his hands”). The director of this hilarious performance is a certain Nik. Sestrin, whosesurname comes from sestra, Russian for “sister.”
If granted the possibility to see Nik. Sestrin’s production, the poor dead author would have hardly recognized his own play. Similarly, the performance, in which Marina plays the heroine, has little in common with the original Russian romance (presumably, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), on which it is based. Demon Veen, who “deflowers” Marina during this performance, soon marries her twin sister Aqua (1.2). But later la force de choses makes him resume his affair with Marina, while poor Aqua goes madand has to spend most of her time in various sanatoria. Having escaped from one of them, she manages to reach Demon’s country house – only to find Marina’s (Aqua thinks it is hers) talc powder in a glass container marked Quelques Fleurs on Demon’s mistress’ bedside table (1.3).
The commercial name of the talc powder evokes the title of Baudelaire’s famous book, Les fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil,” 1857), but alsohints at the widely-used French phrase quelque chose (something). Like the word chose, it occurs several times in Shchedrin’s bookGospoda Tashkenttsy (“Gentlemen of Tashkent,” 1873). A still beautiful woman in her early thirties tells her sixteen-year-old son (who treats his mother as if she were his sister, rukuliruya, cooing,in her earde si jolies choses; cf. “arukuliruyushchiy month” that Marina spends with Demon at Kitezh: 1.3)about her first meetingwith her late husband, the boy’s father.It happened at a ball,they danced, and herpartner, a military boor,couldn’t take his eyes off her breast barely concealed byher very open dress (“Gentlemen of Tashkent ofthe Prep-School Age. The First Parallel”). The son tries to excuse his father’s behavior with the question: est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose de plus beau qu’un joli sein de femme (is there something more beautiful than a woman’s pretty breast)?
It seems to me that, by the time Van first comes to Ardis, Ada is not as innocent as Van thinks her to be. She already knows that there is a “metal more attractive”for male sensuality than a woman’s bosom andgradually allows Van to approach it ever nearer, until, on the Night of the Burning Barn, they finally become lovers (1.19). Van’s sentimental education starts when, during an excursion to the roof of Ardis Hall, Ada’s skirt is wrenched up by a bracket or something and Van (who,although not a virgin anymore, never saw a woman’s nakedness by daylight) is surprised to learn that the girl’s pubis is darkly flossed (1.9). Next morning, when Ada is washing her face and arms, Van gets the first glimpse of her bud-breasts. Although Ada shuts the door of the washing-room with her foot, she seems not too displeased at being viewed by Van. Several days later, on the way home from the picnic in the forest (where Van for the first time shows his ability to walk on his hands), Van, sitting in a calèche beside Mlle Larivière, Lucette’s governess, holds Ada in his lap (1.13). It is his first physical contact with Ada, who, on the occasion of her twelfth birthday, wears her lolita (an ample skirt dubbed thus after the little gypsy in Osberg’s novel La Gitanilla), with nothing beneath it. Four years later, returning from the same picnic site and now holding on his knees Lucette clad in chaste shorts, Van remembers with a pang of pleasure Ada’s indulgent skirt, “so swoony-balloony as the Chose young things said” (1.39).
At the same picnic when Van walks on his hands, MlleLarivière reads a short story of her composition, La rivière de diamants (“The Diamond Necklace”),that she later publishes under the pen-name Guillaume de Monparnasse(1.31).While her name links Lucette’s governess with a character in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary(1856), the doctor who attempts to rescue the dying heroine,her nom de plumeconnects her toMontparnasse, an incidental character in Hugo’s novelLes Miserables (1863), and hints atGuy de Maupassant,the author of La Parure (1884). Maupassant (who, according to Vivian Darkbloom, the author of Notes to Ada, doesn’t exist on Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) is mentioned in “The Twelve Chairs” (whose heroes hunt for the diamonds concealed in the upholstery of a Gambs chair). Speaking to Varfolomey Korobeynikov, the keeper of archives in Stargorod,Ostap Bender tries to bring him back to the purpose of his, Ostap’s, visit: “Closer to the body [blizhe k telu, a pun on blizhe k delu, “closer tobusiness”], as Maupassantsays” (chapter XI: “The Alphabet ‘A Mirror of Life’”).
Van next finds himself extremely close to Ada’s body when they climb the Tree of Knowledge growing in the ArdisPark and, after Ada’s foot slips, nearly fall from it (1.15). When they regain balance, Van’s head is between Ada’s legs and, before she starts to strangle him with her knees, Ada allows Van to “snatch a kiss.” Since it meets no objections on the part of Mlle Larivière, who ignores underwear herself, Ada wears no panties. Van comments onthe negligence of her attire, calling it a form of hysteria. It seems though that the absence of underwear is a conscious strategy on Ada’s part, rather than hysteria, one of her little stunts, in fact, with which she tries to seduce Van. Van never realizes this, just as he never realizes that Ada has bribed Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, to set the barn on fire, in the hope that most of the Ardis Hall inhabitants will go to admire the fire,leaving the house for almost the whole night and allowing her to offer Van the forbidden fruit at last(see my essay in Russian “Will the Grandma Get the Xmas Card, or Why didAda’s Baronial Barn Burn?” in Zembla, and my post to Nabokv-Lof 03.07.2008, with the subject “Burning Barn in Ada”).
An indirect evidence of Ada’s participation in the arsonis the absence of kerosene in the “Benten” lampduring a Flavita game played by Van, Ada and Lucette soon after the Night of the Burning Barn (1.36).By a coincidence, the game begins withAda’s seven lettersforming the word KEROSIN (Russian for ‘kerosene’). The setof Flavita (anagram of alfavit, Russian for ‘alphabet’) was given to Marina’s children by Baron Klim Avidov (another anagram of ‘Vladimir Nabokov’), one of Marina’sformer lovers. “It was… the same kindly but touchy Avidov… who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.”
Gritz reminds one of luxurious Ritz hotels, but alsohints at Grets, the commercial name of a kerosene stoveof Mme Bour, a fortune-teller and Vorobyaninov’s former lover(“The Twelve Chairs,” chapter X: “A Locksmith, a Parrot and a Fortune-Teller”), and at the name of Mme Bour’s client, Mme Gritsatsuev, whomBendermarries in order toget access toone of her chairs.Ostap leaves his wife in the very first night of his married life, taking with him her chair and a few costly trifles, including atea-strainermade of a goldresembling metal(chapter XII: “The Sultry Woman, a Poet’s Dream”). In exchange for this zabavnaya veshch’ (“an amusing thing,” as Bender calls it in a conversation with Ellochka the cannibal, whose vocabulary consists of only thirty words) he later manages to receive another chair from Vorobyaninov’s former set (chapter XXII: “Ellochka the Cannibal”). For thenext chair Bender goes to Ellochka’s husband, who just parted with his wife and who is absolutely naked when Ostap meets him on the staircase before the locked door of his flooded apartment (chapter XXIII: “The Conversation with a Naked Engineer”).
Before moving to his bride’splace, Benderlives with Vorobyaninov in “Sorbonne”[sic!], acheap hotel in Stargorod.Here a conflicttakes place between themand the priest FyodorVostrikov, yet another diamond hunter. Bender asks father Fyodor through the keyhole of a locked door: “How much is opium for the people [as Marx called religion]?” In reply, father Fyodor attempts to thrust the offender with a pencil pushed through the keyhole (one can imagine how Freudians would interpret the priest’s attack and how Nabokov would have laughed at their interpretation), but Ostap manages to snatch the pencil away. He scratches on its facet an insulting word and, through the same keyhole, returns the object to its owner.
Thename of the English touristknocked down by Avidov, Keyway, seems to point to this episode in Ilf and Petrov’s novel (note that Vorobyaninov suggeststo Bender that they beat up father Fyodor, but Bender rejects this suggestion). The letter that Keyway thinks Avidov has dropped from his name is D.In the Russian alphabet, it is preceded byГ,the gallows-like Cyrillic counterpart of the Latin G thatlooks like the Latin L(Lucette’s initial,with which she is left after modestly composingROTIK,“little mouth,”in the Flavita game) turned upside down.Λ, the Cyrillic counterpart of the LatinL,resembles thelegs of someone standing with his/her legs apart,or the LatinV turned upside down (in Nabokov’s novels not only characters, but also letters of the alphabetperform acrobatic tricks).TheRussian phrase V ROTIK (“into the little mouth”) sounds like Vrotic, one of the anagrammatic aliases of King Victor, an incidental character in Ada.Another pseudonymthat the Antiterran Kingof the British Commonwealth useswhen visiting floramors (luxurious brothels), Mr. Ritcov, echoes ‘Rita,’the stage name of Van’s tango partner (cf. also King Wing, the stage name of a Chinese acrobat, Demon’s wrestling master who taught Van to walk on his hands).
The obese King Victorseems to beamale negative of the English Queen Victoria (1819-1901);on the other hand,his name may hint at comte de Saint-Victor (1825-81), a French critic, andVictor Hugo (1802-85), a French writer.Besides the ruffian nick-named Montparnasse, there is in Hugo’sLes Miserables a secret philanthropic society “Friends of the ABC” (a pun on abaissé, French for “abused;” cf.“The Union of Sword and Plough,” the secret societythat Ostap Bender creates in Stargorod,officially,to support homeless children, “those flowers of life”).One of the main characters ofHugo’sNotre Dame de Paris (1831) is a gypsy dancerEsmeralda, a virgin who is hanged at the end of the novel. (Note that, inRussian transliteration, the name Hugo begins with the gallows-like Cyrillic G; on the other hand, the frontal view of the Notre Dame cathedral resembles the Latin letter H, Hugo’s initial, which in turn looks like the Cyrillic counterpart of the Latin N, Nabokov’s initial.)Finally, the hero of Hugo’sL’homme qui rit (“The Man who Laughs,” 1869) is Gwynplaine, whose mouth was surgically disfigured when he was a childto makehis face look like a grinning mask.