In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.

The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.

Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more.

Notes to Ada

by Vivian Darkbloom

p.9. All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.

p.9. Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.

p.9. granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.

p.9. Tofana: allusion to ‘aqua tofana’ (see any good dictionary).

p.10. sur-royally: fully antlered, with terminal prongs.

p.10. Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.

p.10. Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.

p.11. Mr Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 361 and 396, in company of the author of ‘The Waistline’ and ‘Agonic Lines’.

p.11. Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.

p.11. Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.

p.13. Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.

p.13. mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.

p.13. c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.

p.13. lieu de naissance: birthplace.

p.13. pour ainsi dire: so to say.

p.13. Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.

p.13. ‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.

p.13. Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.

p.16. Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).

p.16. Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).

p.17. en connaissance de cause: knowing what it was all about (Fr.).

p.18. Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.

p.18. Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.

p.19. interesting condition: family way.

p.19. Lolita, Texas: this town exists, or, rather, existed, for it has been renamed, I believe, after the appearance of the notorious novel.

p.20. penyuar: Russ., peignoir.

p.20. beau milieu: right in the middle.

p.20. Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.

p.20. braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.

p.23. entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).

p.24. Yukonets: inhabitant of Yukon (Russ.).

p.25. lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.

p.25. my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.

p.25. ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’

p.27. Nuss: German for ‘nut’.

p.28. Khristosik: little Christ (Russ.).

p.28. rukuliruyushchiy: Russ., from Fr. roucoulant, cooing.

p.29. horsepittle: ‘hospital’, borrowed from a passage in Dickens’ Bleak House. Poor Joe’s pun, not a poor Joycean one.

p.30. aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).

p.30. Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.

p.31. pour attraper le client: to fool the customer.

p.34. Je parie, etc.: I bet you do not recognize me, Sir.

p.35. tour du jardin: a stroll in the garden.

p.36. Lady Amherst: confused in the child’s mind with the learned lady after whom a popular pheasant is named.

p.36. with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.

p.37. pollice verso: Lat., thumbs down.

p.39. Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from ‘sumerki’ (‘dusk’ in Russian).

p.42. lovely Spanish poem: really two poems — Jorge Guillén’s Descanso en jardin and his El otono: isla).

p.44. Monsieur a quinze ans, etc.: You are fifteen, Sir, I believe, and I am nineteen, I know.... You, Sir, have known town girls no doubt; as to me, I’m a virgin, or almost one. Moreover...

p.44. rien qu’une petite fois: just once.

p.45. mais va donc jouer avec lui: come on, go and play with him.

p.45. se morfondre: mope.

p.45. au fond: actually.

p.45. Je l’ignore: I don’t know.

p.45. cache-cache: hide-and-seek.

p.46. infusion de tilleul: lime tea.

p.48. Les amours du Dr Mertvago: play on ‘Zhivago’ (‘zhiv’ means in Russian ‘alive’ and ‘mertv’ dead).

p.48. grand chêne: big oak.

p.49. quelle idée: the idea!

p.50. Les malheurs de Swann: cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann.

p.53. monologue intérieur: the so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for instance, Anna’s last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets of Moscow).

p.56. Mr Fowlie: see Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1946).

p.56. soi-disant: would-be.

p.56. les robes vertes, etc.: the green and washed-out frocks of the little girls.

p.56. angel moy: Russ., ‘my angel’.

p.57. en vain. etc.: In vain, one gains in play

The Oka river and Palm Bay...

p.57. bambin angélique: angelic little lad.

p.59. groote: Dutch, ‘great’.

p.59. un machin etc.: a thing as long as this that almost wounded the child in the buttock.

p.60. pensive reeds: Pascal’s metaphor of man, un roseau pensant.

p.61. horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’), p.62.

p.61. buvard: blotting pad.

p.62. Kamargsky: La Camargue, a marshy region in S. France combined with Komar, ‘mosquito’, in Russian and moustique in French.

p.63. sa petite collation du matin: light breakfast.

p.64. tartine au miel: bread-and-butter with honey.

p.64. Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).

p.65. mais ne te etc.: now don’t fidget like that when you put on your skirt! A well-bred little girl...

p.65. très en beauté: looking very pretty.

p.66. calèche: victoria.

p.66. pecheneg: a savage.

p.67. grande fille: girl who has reached puberty.

p.69. La Rivière de Diamants: Maupassant and his ‘La Parure’ (p.73) did not exist on Antiterra.

p.70. copie etc.: copying in their garret.