THE RED FLOWER OF EVIL IN NABOKOV’S ADA
Sounds have colors, colors have smells.
One of the patients in the Kingston Clinic where Dr Van Veen, Ada’s protagonist and narrator, works as a psychiatrist and researcher (2.6) is a certain M-r Arshin who suffers from acrophobia (pathological fear of heights). His name and disease remind one of V. M. Garshin (1855-88), the writer who committed a suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of an apartment building.
On the other hand, arshin (accented on the last syllable) is an old Russian measure equivalent to 28 inches. According to a Russian saying, a man needs only three arshins of land. Garshin’s younger contemporary, A. P. Chekhov (1860-1904), strongly disagrees with this. The hero and narrator of Chekhov’s story Gooseberries (1898), Ivan Ivanych Chimsha-Gimalaysky, says: “A man needs not three arshins of land, not a farm, but the whole earth [ves’ zemnoy shar], all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.”
Chekhov dedicated to the memory of the author of The Red Flower (1883) and Nadezhda Nikolaevna (1885) his story A Nervous Breakdown (1889). Its hero, a law student, suffers mental anguish after he was dragged by his friends on a tour of brothels. He is baffled by the attitude of his companions and the doctor whom he has to consult: “because I cannot speak of fallen women as unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am called mad, I am pitied!”
Unlike sensitive Vasilyev, Van Veen does not feel pity for whores or consider prostitution an evil. Van himself is a habitué of “floramors” – a hundred luxurious brothels built by David van Veen in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of the essay ‘Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.’ Trying to solace his first sexual torments, young Eric dreamt of establishing a chain of floramors all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ (2.3)
Ada is set on Earth’s twin planet Demonia, or Antiterra (Nabokov thus gives the reader the whole globe). The epithet callipygian means ‘having well-formed buttocks’ (cf. Callipygian Venus, an ancient Roman marble statue). There is in Russian arshin German Arsch (buttocks), the anagram of which, Schar (throng, multitude), is pronounced like Russian shar (sphere, globe).
Zemnoy shar (the globe) that, in the opinion of Chekhov’s character, should belong to everyone is mentioned by Tyutchev in the beginning of his poem The Dreams (1829):
Kak okean ob’yemlet shar zemnoy,
Zemnaya zhizn’ krugom ob’yata snami…
Just as the ocean embraces the Earth,
Our earthly life is embraced by dreams...
On the other hand, Tyutchev is the author of the famous lines in which arshin (rule one arshin in length) occurs:
Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’,
Arshinom obshchim ne izmerit’:
U ney osobennaya stat’ –
V Rossiyu mozhno tol’ko verit’.
The intellect cannot conceive Russia,
A common arshin cannot measure her.
She has a unique character.
One can only believe in Russia.
Like Tyutchev, Nabokov believed in Russia – but, it would seem, believed quia absurdum. This is reflected in the fact that, on Antiterra, Russia is situated in the Western, not Eastern, hemisphere, being a part of Abraham Milton’s Amerossia (while the territory “from Kurland to the Kurils” is occupied by Tartary, a totalitarian country ruled by the cruel khan Sosso: 1.3).
In my “Ada as a Triple Dream” (The Nabokovian #53) I attempted to show that, like Lermontov’s poem The Dream (1841), Ada is a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream) dreamt by three people: the author of the “Organized Dream” Eric Veen, Ada’s protagonist Van Veen and, finally, Nabokov himself. But Ada is also a great logogriph (a puzzle involving anagrams). As in Flavita (Russian Scrabble played in Ada by Van, Ada and Lucette), not just every word, every single letter (and even its outline, color and the way it was formerly called in the alphabet) is important in such a puzzle. Thus, the Cyrillic counterpart of Roman G (Garshin’s initial lost by Arshin) was called glagol’ (“gallows”)[1] in the old Russian alphabet and looks like Roman L turned upside down.
The Cyrillic counterpart of Roman L (Lermontov’s initial that reminds one of Ada’s L disaster, a mysterious catastrophe that happened on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th century: 1.3) looks somewhat like Roman V turned upside down. In the old Russian alphabet it was called lyudi (“people”). Interestingly, in the drafts of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1823-31), Tatiana’s famous letter to Onegin ends as follows:
Podumala, chto skazhut lyudi?
I podpisala T. L.
She wondered what people would say,
And signed T. L.
Tatiana Larin’s initials, with which she signed her letter to Onegin, should be read: tvyordo, lyudi (the letter T was called tvyordo, “hard,” in the old Russian alphabet; cf. Mr. T. T.,[2] Van’s patient in the Kingston Clinic who suffers from time-terror: 2.6). T and L happen to be the first letters of the two closing lines of one of the next stanzas of Pushkin’s novel in verse (Canto Three, XXXIII, 13-14):
Toski nochnoy i sledu net,
Litso tvoyo kak makov tsvet.
No trace at all of the night’s fret!
Your face is like a poppy flower.
Tatiana’s old nurse Filatievna compares the flushed face of her charge, who spent a sleepless night and just finished her letter, with a declaration of love, to Onegin, to a red poppy flower. But it is a poppy flower that incarnates all evil of the world in the eyes of the mad hero of Garshin’s story The Red Flower: “He knew that opium was made from poppies, and perhaps this knowledge, taking some fantastic, distorted form, had induced him to create this terrible and monstrous phantom. In his eyes the flower was the personification of all evil. It flourished on all innocent bloodshed (which was why it was so red), on all tears, and all human venom. It was a mysterious, awful being, the antithesis of God – Ahriman – who had taken a modest and innocent form.”
Ariman (Russian spelling of Ahriman, the Greek name of Angra Mainyu, the personification of evil in Zoroastrianism) is an anagram of Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother; officially, Van is the son of Marina’s mad twin sister Aqua; Van and Ada learn that they are full brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium they found in the attic of Ardis Hall: 1.1) and Armina (Demon Veen’s Côte d’Azur villa where Van was conceived and where elderly Marina lives: 1.2, 3.1). We first see Marina Durmanova (a young actress, whose family name comes from durman, the poisonous plant Datura stramonium, and “drug, narcotic”) when she plays on stage a lovelorn Russian maiden (Tatiana Larin who somehow got mixed with Lara Antipov, the heroine of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago):
“In the first of these [scenes] she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side-table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for nobody’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.” (1.2)
Marina looses her virginity during this performance, between the two scenes with her participation. She is “deflowered” by Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) and, several years later, marries Demon’s first cousin Daniel (Lucette’s father) nicknamed Red Veen because of his red hair (1.1). Uncle Dan’s nickname reminds one of Red Eugene (ryzhiy Zhenya, as G. V. Ivanov calls in The St. Petersburg Winters, 1928, his namesake, E. P. Ivanov, Aleksandr Blok’s best friend and dedicatee of several poems) and Red Vaska (Vas’ka krasnyi), the eponymous hero of a story (1900) by Gorky, the red-haired vyshibala (bouncer, the position Eric Veen overlooked in his Villa Venus project) in a brothel.
A professional art dealer who was not very happy in his married life, Daniel Veen dies an odd Boschean death: he believes that a devil combining the characters of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity (2.10). The author of the triptych The Garden of the Earthly Delights (1500-10), Hieronymus Bosch is important not only in Ada but also in Gorky’s unfinished novel The Life of Klim Samgin (1925-36). Looking at the motley crowd of smart courtesans and handsome men in the Bois de Boulogne, Samgin meditates, as if he were arguing with someone invisible: “It would take a genius twice as great as Bosch to transform such a reality into a nightmarish grotesque.”
The colorful and cruel Demonia, with her floramors, Kroliks (rabbits in human disguise) and the inhabitants’ amorous frolics, looks very much like a Boschean “nightmarish grotesque” into which Nabokov has transformed the contemporaneous reality. On the other hand, in my article “The Fair Invention in Nabokov’s Ada and Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin” (The Nabokovian #58) I suggest that, with his Ada, Nabokov replies to Gorky: “It would take a genius thrice as great as Bosch to transform the nightmarish grotesque of Russia under Lenin and Stalin into an idyllically serene Antiterra.”
As Ivan Samgin (Klim’s father) points out in Gorky’s novel, Klim is not a frequent name. Interestingly, Gorky’s hero has a namesake on Antiterra: Baron Klim Avidov, one of Marina’s former lovers who gave her children a set of Flavita (1.36). But while Flavita is an anagram of alfavit (Russian for “alphabet”), Klim, an anagram of milk, it is none other than Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Ada, who hides behind the anagram Baron Klim Avidov.
In Speak, Memory (Chapter Two, 1) Nabokov says that he presents a fine case of colored hearing. Like Rimbaud’s vowels (or the squares of the Flavita board; note that the little trough of Japanned wood each Flavita player has before him/her for sorting out his/her seven letters is called spektrik, “little spectrum”), Nabokov’s letters were differently colored. V, the initial of both Van Veen and Villa Venus, belongs to the red group. Moreover, V is the letter that corresponds to the red color in Nabokov’s English (kzspygv) and Russian (VYoEPSKZ) words for rainbow.
Russian B (pronounced like English V) and English B look alike. Just as its homograph, English B and its Russian counterpart (that precedes Russian В in the alphabet) belong to the red group. B is Bosch’s initial, but also that of Baudelaire, the author of “Les fleurs du mal” (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), and Blok, the author of “Nochnaya Fialka” (The Night Violet, 1906) and “Neznakomka” (Incognita, 1906).
The latter poem is particularly important in Ada. Van compares the lone red-haired woman in a picture hat, whom he believes to have seen several times in his life and who eventually turns out to be Lucette, to Blok’s Incognita (3.3). Now, the woman in Blok’s poem is a prostitute; the drunks (who cry out: “In vino veritas!”) have red eyes of rabbits; and capitalizing the first letter of the poem’s last word would change the closing line’s meaning to “I know: in Veen [instead of “wine”] is truth.”
Veen (pronounced rather like “feign”) means “peat bog” in Dutch. Russian word for “peat” is torf. Torfyanaya (or, as handmaid Blanche says, La Tourbière) is a village (in German, Dorf) near Ardis, the country estate of Daniel Veen where Van’s and Ada’s romance begins in the summer 1884 and is resumed four years later. Because place names are not admitted in Flavita, Lucette tries to object to the adjective TORFYaNUYu (“peaty,” feminine gender, accusative case) that Ada composed in the last round of the last game that the three young Veens ever played together (1.36). The two red squares (an unexpected glimpse of Moscow) through which this word went increased the sum of Ada’s points nine times.
While Ada is endowed with phenomenal luck in Flavita, Lucette has no luck at all. In the same game, in the round that preceded Ada’s coup, she does not know what to do with her seemingly promising letters REMNILK (because “Kremlin” does not exist in Russian) and has to compose KREMLI (which means, according to Van, Yukon prisons) going through Ada’s ORHIDEYa (“orchid”). Four years earlier she is a child of eight and simply does not know the Russian word for “clitoris” that her letters LIKROT form when Van rearranges them for his and Ada’s fun (2.5). Lucette quietly composes ROTIK (“little mouth”) and is left with her cheap initial. Interestingly, there is German rot (“red”) in rotik and rotik in erotika (“erotic”) that Ada will probably compose taking the advantage of Lucette’s word.
Like Lolita, the eponymous heroine of Nabokov’s novel (1955), Lucette is initiated into sex too early. She is still a child, and children are flowers of life. This aphorism is quoted by Ostap Bender, the rogue in Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs (Chapter 14: “The Alliance of the Sword and Plough”).[3] While chairs in the novel’s title remind one of the chairs mentioned by Vasilyev in Chekhov’s A Nervous Breakdown, their number brings to mind Blok’s poem The Twelve (1918) that ends in Christ appearing, in a little white crown of roses, with a blood-red banner in his hands, in front of the twelve Red Army soldiers.
Blok’s poem is set in snow-covered Revolutionary Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed in 1914, only to be renamed Leningrad ten years later). St. Petersburg being often called “the Northern Venice,” venets being Russian for “crown” and rosso, Italian for “red,” it seems to me that Venezia Rossa in the following passage that mentions Baron Klim Avidov hints at Blok’s and Nabokov’s home city: “It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) 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,[4] at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.” (1.36)