Another Possible Source for PF: WILLIAM MORRIS

"The last stanza sounds a bit like the isle of Zembla."

 

Zembla is a peninsula, not island:

 

The Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness), divides it into two parts, the flourishing eastern region of Onhava and other townships, such as Aros and Grindelwod, and the much narrower western strip with its quaint fishing hamlets and pleasant beach resorts. The two coasts are connected by two asphalted highways; the older one shirks difficulties by running first along the eastern slopes northward to Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla, and only then turning west at the northmost point of the peninsula; the newer one, an elaborate, twisting, marvelously graded road, traverses the range westward from just north of Onhava to Bregberg, and is termed in tourist booklets a "scenic drive." Several trails cross the mountains at various points and lead to passes none of which exceeds an altitude of five thousand feet; a few peaks rise some two thousand feet higher and retain their snow in midsummer; and from one of them, the highest and hardest, Mt. Glitterntin, one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east, beyond the Gulf of Surprise, a dim iridescence which some say is Russia. (note to Line 149)

 

Like Professor Pardon, Mary Ross seems to be confusing Kinbote with some refugee from Nova Zembla!

 

Bera = bear = bare. In Chapter Five (XI-XXI) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Tatiana dreams a wondrous dream in which a large bear ("the shaggy footman") follows her in the woods. In Tatiana's dream (that turns out to be prophetic) Onegin stabs Lenski with a long knife. In his famous monologue in Shakespeare's play Hamlet (who imitates madness) repeats the word "bear" three times and mentions "a bare bodkin:"

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. (3.1)

 

The capital of Zembla, Onhava suggests “heaven.” In his sonnet Shakespeare Matthew Arnold mentions the Heaven of Heavens that Shakespeare made his dwelling-place:

 

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

 

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his base

To the foil'd searching of mortality;

 

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,

Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,

Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!

 

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

 

Describing Shade's murder by Gradus, Kinbote quotes a line from Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy (1853):

 

His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)

 

"The inviolable shade" seems to hint not only at Shade (the author of the poem that Kinbote holds in his left hand) but also at Viola, Sebastian's twin sister in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. At the end of VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian's half-brother V.) says that, despite Sebastian's death, the hero remains:



The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) - but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Chapter 20)



Similarly, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus can be someone whom neither of them knows. In fact, they seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin's personality. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote's Commentary). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." In Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy the line quoted by Kinbote is preceded by the line "Still nursing the unconquerable hope:"



Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade-
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark tingles, to the nightingales!

 

In Canto Two of his poem Shade says that his daughter always nursed a small mad hope and mentions his book on Pope:



I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

I'd finished recently my book on Pope. (ll. 383-384)



The title of Shade's book on Pope, Supremely Blest, can be traced back to Pope's Essay on Man (Epistle Two, VI):

 

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king;
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his Muse.

 

In Chapter Eight of EO Pushkin speaks of his Muse and mentions the humble tents of wandering tribes that she visited in the wild depths of sad Moldavia:


И, позабыв столицы дальной
И блеск и шумные пиры,
В глуши Молдавии печальной
Она смиренные шатры
Племён бродящих посещала,
И между ими одичала,
И позабыла речь богов
Для скудных, странных языков,
Для песен степи ей любезной:


And having forgotten the far capital's
glitter and noisy feasts
in the wild depth of sad Moldavia,
the humble tents
of wandering tribes she visited,
and among them grew savage,
and forgot the speech of the gods
for scant, strange tongues,
for songs of the steppe dear to her. (V: 1-9)


The wandering tribes mentioned by Pushkin are the gypsies. Pushkin is the author of Tsygany ("The Gypsies," 1824), a romantic poem whose hero has fled
the city and (like the scholar in Matthew Arnold's poem) lives with the gypsies.


The title of Shade's book on Pope, Supremely Blest, also brings to mind the beginning of one of the next stanzas in Chapter Eight of EO:


Блажен, кто с молоду был молод,
Блажен, кто во-время созрел;
Кто постепенно жизни холод
С летами вытерпеть умел:

Blest who was youthful in his youth;
blest who matured at the right time;
who gradually the chill of life
with years was able to withstand: (Eight: X: 1-4)


"Gradually" (postepenno) in Line 3 brings to mind Gradus (Shade's murderer). In his note to Line 1000 Kinbote uses this word:

Gradually I regained my usual composure. I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was that? What was that dim distance music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory. I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem as one has for a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal. The spot still hurts, it must hurt, but with strange gratitude we kiss those heavy wet eyelids and caress that polluted flesh.

 

Alexey Sklyarenko

Bera rhymes with Vera (the name of VN's wife). Vera (Faith), Nadezhda (Hope) and Lyubov' (Love) are the three daughters of Sophia (Wisdom). The "real" name of Shade's wife Sybil and of Kinbote's wife, Queen Disa, seems to be Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). In his Commentary Kinbote tells about his and Shade's wives and mentions the Bishop of Yeslove and the Onhava cathedral:

 

John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.

He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434).

After line 274 there is a false start in the draft:

 

I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...

 

One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)

 

The Bishop of Yeslove and the Onhava cathedral seem to hint at a  line in Byron’s poem The Giaour (1813) :

 

Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)

 

Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 7/19, 1824. In a letter of June 24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin mentions Princess Vera (Vyazemski's wife) and says that Byron’s genius blednel (paled) with his youth:

 

По твоим письмам к княгине Вере вижу, что и тебе и кюхельбекерно и тошно; тебе грустно по Байроне, а я так рад его смерти, как высокому предмету для поэзии. Гений Байрона бледнел с его молодостию. В своих трагедиях, не выключая и Каина, он уже не тот пламенный демон, который создал «Гяура» и «Чильд-Гарольда». Первые две песни «Дон Жуана» выше следующих. Его поэзия видимо изменялась. Он весь создан был навыворот; постепенности в нём не было, он вдруг созрел и возмужал — пропел и замолчал; и первые звуки его уже ему не возвратились — после 4-ой песни Child Harold Байрона мы не слыхали, а писал какой-то другой поэт с высоким человеческим талантом.

 

According to Pushkin, in his tragedies Byron is not that fiery demon anymore who created The Giaour and Child Harold. “The first two Cantos of Don Juan are artistically superior to the next.” In Chapter Seven (XXII: 5) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions “the singer of the Giaour and Juan:”

 

Хотя мы знаем, что Евгений
Издавна чтенье разлюбил,
Однако ж несколько творений
Он из опалы исключил:
Певца Гяура и Жуана
Да с ним ещё два-три романа,
В которых отразился век
И современный человек
Изображён довольно верно
С его безнравственной душой,
Себялюбивой и сухой,
Мечтанью преданной безмерно,
С его озлобленным умом,
Кипящим в действии пустом.

 

Although we know that Eugene

had long ceased to like reading,

still, several works

he had exempted from disgrace:

the singer of the Giaour and Juan

and, with him, also two or three novels

in which the epoch is reflected

and modern man rather correctly represented

with his immoral soul, selfish and dry,

to dreaming measurelessly given,

with his embittered mind

boiling in empty action.

 

Canto Eleven of Byron’s Don Juan begins as follows:

 

When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"

       And proved it—'twas no matter what he said:

They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,

       Too subtle for the airiest human head;

And yet who can believe it! I would shatter

       Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,

Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,

And wear my head, denying that I wear it.

 

The stanza’s last line brings to mind the English title of VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (1935), Invitation to a Beheading. The epigraph to IB is from the invented French thinker Delalande:

 

Comme un fou se croit Dieu

nous nous croyons mortels.

Delalande. Discours sur les ombres

 

Describing the death of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski (a character in VN’s novel Dar, 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the main character and narrator in “The Gift”) quotes Delalande’s Discours sur les ombres:

 

Когда однажды французского мыслителя Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почему он не обнажает головы (ne se découvre pas), он отвечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая (qu’elle se découvre la première). В этом есть метафизическая негалантность, но смерть большего не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, благоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым восходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и склонённая боязнь к нему обращает молитву. Религия имеет такое же отношение к загробному состоянию человека, какое имеет математика к его состоянию земному: то и другое только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я знаю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связана с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестности, какой является дерево или холм. Выйти как-нибудь нужно, «но я отказываюсь видеть в двери больше, чем дыру, да то, что сделали столяр и плотник» (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная мысль, с которой давно свыкся человеческий разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть глупая иллюзия: мы никуда не идём, мы сидим дома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовсе не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия. В земном доме вместо окна – зеркало; дверь до поры до времени затворена; но воздух входит сквозь щели. «Наиболее доступный для наших домоседных чувств образ будущего постижения окрестности долженствующей раскрыться нам по распаде тела, это – освобождение духа из глазниц плоти и превращение наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зараз видящее все стороны света, или, иначе говоря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира при нашем внутреннем участии» (там же, стр. 64). Но все это только символы, символы, которые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгновение, как она приглядится к ним…

 

When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)

 

Poor Alexander Yakovlevich went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha. Similarly, Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda.

 

In the same letter of June 24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin mentions Count Vorontsov (the governor of New Russia who was Pushkin’s chief in Odessa):

 

Я ждал отъезда Трубецкого, чтоб написать тебе спустя рукава. Начну с того, что всего ближе касается до меня. Я поссорился с Воронцовым и завёл с ним полемическую переписку, которая кончилась с моей стороны просьбою в отставку.

 

In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of “The Gift,” Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski (a radical critic) repeated Vorontsov’s words about Pushkin:

 

Говоря, что Пушкин был «только слабым подражателем Байрона», Чернышевский чудовищно точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронцова: «Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона». Излюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что «у Пушкина недостаток прочного, глубокого образования» – дружеское аукание с замечанием того же Воронцова: «Нельзя быть истинным поэтом, не работая постоянно для расширения своих познаний, а их у него недостаточно». «Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евгения Онегина», – писал Надеждин, сравнивая Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетных узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Уваровым, министром народного просвещения, сказавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: «Писать стишки не значит еще проходить великое поприще».

 

When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”

 

The surname Nadezhdin comes from nadezhda (hope). In his famous epigram (1824) on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda:

 

Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.

 

Half-milord, half-merchant,

Half-sage, half-ignoramus,

Half-scoundrel, but there is hope

That he will be a full one at last.

 

There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin will be "full" again.

 

According to Fyodor, Lermontov came off luckier with the radical critics:

 

Счастливее оказался Лермонтов. Его проза исторгла у Белинского (имевшего слабость к завоеваниям техники) неожиданное и премилое сравнение Печорина с паровозом, сокрушающим неосторожно попадающихся под его колёса. В его стихах разночинцы почуяли то, что позже стало называться «надсоновщиной». В этом смысле Лермонтов – первый надсон русской литературы. Ритм, тон, бледный, слезами разбавленный стих гражданских мотивов до «Вы жертвою пали» включительно, все это пошло от таких лермонтовских строк, как: «Прощай, наш товарищ, недолго ты жил, певец с голубыми очами, лишь крест деревянный себе заслужил да вечную память меж нами». Очарование Лермонтова, даль его поэзии, райская её живописность и прозрачный привкус неба во влажном стихе – были, конечно, совершенно недоступны пониманию людей склада Чернышевского.

 

Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called “Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic” verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest” (the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:

 

Farewell, our dear comrade! Alas, upon earth

Not long did you dwell, blue-eyed singer!

A plain cross of wood you have earned, and with us

Your memory always shall linger….

 

Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist verse—these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp. (Chapter Four)

 

In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) Lermontov mentions nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) that lies in his soul, as in the ocean:

 

Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!

No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Who can, gloomy ocean,
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
 

The last word in Lermontov’s poem is nikto (nobody). Nik. T-o was I. Annenski’s penname. In his essay Problema Gamleta (“The Problem of Hamlet”) included in Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy ("The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909) Annenski mentions Pushkin's Mozart and says that Hamlet is not Salieri:


Видите ли: зависть художника не совсем то, что наша...

Для художника это - болезненное сознание своей ограниченности и желание делать творческую жизнь свою как можно полнее. Истинный художник и завистлив и жаден... я слышу возражение - пушкинский Моцарт. - Да! Но ведь Гамлет не Сальери. Моцарта же Пушкин, как известно, изменил: его короткая жизнь была отнюдь не жизнью праздного гуляки, а сплошным творческим горением. Труд его был громаден, не результат труда, а именно труд.


In Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):



Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.



If all could feel like you the power of harmony!
But no: the world could not go on then. None
Would bother with the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to spontaneous art. (Scene Two)


Nikto b is Botkin in reverse.

 

Alexey Sklyarenko