In a conversation at the faculty club Professor Hurley (a character in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells Professor Pardon (who cannot pronounce the name Pnin): "think of the French word for 'tire': punoo":
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"
"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."
Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a "sympathetic ruler" had probably perished in prison.
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die--they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon--American History--"that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I heard," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time--"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere--"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to--what's his name--oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, are young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
Shade's punoo is a play on pneu ('tire' in French). The Russian word for 'tire' is shina. In the last stanza of his poem Vesenniy lepet ne raznezhit... ("The hum of spring will not make tender," 1923) Hodasevich mentions a dream in which he, once entire, explodes and flies apart like the mud spattered by a tire to spheres of the alien worlds (kak gryaz', razbryzgannaya shinoy / po chuzhdym sferam bytiya):
Весенний лепет не разнежит
Сурово стиснутых стихов.
Я полюбил железный скрежет
Какофонических миров.
В зиянии разверстых гласных
Дышу легко и вольно я.
Мне чудится в толпе согласных —
Льдин взгроможденных толчея.
Мне мил — из оловянной тучи
Удар изломанной стрелы,
Люблю певучий и визгучий
Лязг электрической пилы.
И в этой жизни мне дороже
Всех гармонических красот —
Дрожь, пробежавшая по кожи,
Иль ужаса холодный пот,
Иль сон, где, некогда единый, —
Взрываясь, разлетаюсь я,
Как грязь, рaзбpызгaннaя шиной
По чуждым сферам бытия.
The hum of spring will not else loosen
My verses of the clenched words,
I’ve loved steel grating and diffusion,
Of sunk in cacophony worlds.
In the gaping of wide-open vowels
My breath is easy, fresh and free.
In throngs of consonants it grows —
The noise of piled-up ice, for me.
I’m glad when from the tinny clouds
A fork-like arrow strikes here;
The shrill whine of a saw around
Is all that I like else to hear.
And in this life they’re twice as dear
To me than harmony and fine —
The cold sweat of the deathly fear,
The tremor over skin of mine,
Or dreams in which I, once entire,
Explode and fly apart
Like the mud spattered by a tire,
To spheres of the alien worlds.
(tr. E. Bonver)
The Head of the English department at Wordsmith University, Professor Hurley is the author of Shade's obituary:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
In his obituary essay O Khodaseviche (On Hodasevich, 1939) VN mentions ziyanie glasnykh (the gulfs of adjacent vowels), an allusion to a line in Hodasevich's poem "The hum of spring will not make tender:"
Тут нет у меня намерения кого-либо задеть кадилом: кое-кто из поэтов здешнего поколения еще в пути и - как знать - дойдет до вершин искусства, коль не загубит себя в том второсортном Париже, который плывет с легким креном в зеркалах кабаков, не сливаясь никак с Парижем французским, неподвижным и непроницаемым. Ощущая как бы в пальцах свое разветвляющееся влияние на поэзию, создаваемую за рубежом, Ходасевич чувствовал и некоторую ответственность за нее: ее судьбой он бывал более раздражен, нежели опечален. Дешевая унылость казалась ему скорей пародией, нежели отголоском его "Европейской ночи", где горечь, гнев, ангелы, зияние гласных - все настоящее, единственное, ничем не связанное с теми дежурными настроениями, которые замутили стихи многих его полуучеников.
Here I have no intention of hitting bystanders with a swing of the thurible.* A few poets of the émigré generation are still on their way up and, who knows, may reach the summits of art — if only they do not fritter away life in a second-rate Paris of their own which sails by with a slight list in the mirrors of taverns without mingling in any way with the French Paris, a motionless and impenetrable town. Hodasevich seemed to have sensed in his very fingers the branching influence of the poetry he created in exile and therefore felt a certain responsibility for its destiny, a destiny which irritated him more than it saddened him. The glum notes of cheap verse struck him more as a parody than as the echo of his collection Evropeyskaya Noch' (European Night), where bitterness, anger, angels, the gulfs of adjacent vowels — everything, in short, was genuine, unique, and quite unrelated to the current moods which clouded the verse of many of those who were more or less his disciples.
*The metaphor is borrowed from a poem by Baratynski (1800-44) accusing critics of lauding Lermontov (1814-41) on the occasion of his death with the unique object of disparaging living poets. Incidentally, the dry little notice accorded to Baratynski in Pavlenkov's encyclopedia (St. Petersburg, 1913) ends with the marvelous misprint: «Complete Works, 1984».
"The gulfs of adjacent vowels" in the English version of VN's essay makes one think of Golfes d’ombre (Gulfs of shadow) in the second quatrain of Rimbaud's sonnet Voyelles ("Vowels," 1871):
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes.
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes d’ombre : E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles ;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;
U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux
O, suprême Clairon plein de strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges :
— O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses yeux !
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
which buzz around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
in anger or in the raptures of penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
the peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
silences crossed by [Worlds and by Angels]:
–O the Omega! the violet ray of [His] Eyes!
In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade says that he likes his name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' in Spanish. Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851) is a book by Vasiliy Botkin. Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter whose "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin) drowned in Lake Omega. In the last line of his sonnet Rimbaud mentions Omega (the last letter of the Greek alphabet).
In his essay on Hodasevich VN mentions a (Soviet) writer's affectionate attention toward a parachute:
Крупнейший поэт нашего времени, литературный потомок Пушкина по тютчевской линии, он останется гордостью русской поэзии, пока жива последняя память о ней. Его дар тем более разителен, что полностью развит в годы отупения нашей словесности, когда революция аккуратно разделила поэтов на штат штатных оптимистов и заштатных пессимистов, на тамошних здоровяков и здешних ипохондриков, причем получился разительный парадокс: внутри России действует внешний заказ, вне России - внутренний. Правительственная воля, беспрекословно требующая ласково-литературного внимания к трактору или парашюту, к красноармейцу или полярнику, т. е. некой внешности мира, значительно могущественнее, конечно, наставления здешнего, обращенного к миру внутреннему, едва ощутимого для слабых, презираемого сильными, побуждавшего в двадцатых годах к рифмованной тоске по ростральной колонне, а ныне дошедшего до религиозных забот, не всегда глубоких, не всегда искренних.
This poet, the greatest Russian poet ot our time, Pushkin's literary descendant in Tyutchev's line of succession, shall remain the pride of Russian poetry as long as its last memory lives. What makes his genius particularly striking is that it matured in the years of our literature's torpescence, when the Bolshevist era neatly divided poets into established optimists and demoted pessimists, endemic hearties and exiled hypochondriacs; a classification which, incidentally, leads to an instructive paradox: inside Russia the dictate acts from outside; outside Russia, it acts from within. The will of the government which implicitly demands a writer's affectionate attention toward a parachute, a farm tractor, a Red Army soldier, or the participant in some polar venture (i.e., toward this or that externality of the world) is naturally considerably more powerful than the injunction of exile, addressed to man's inner world. The latter precept is barely sensed by the weak and is scorned by the strong. In the nineteen twenties it induced nostalgic rhymes about St. Petersburg's rostral columns, and now, in the late thirties, it has evolved rhymed religious concerns, not always deep but always honest.
According to Kinbote, the disguised King arrived in America descending by parachute:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. (note to Line 691)
The Colonel’s name seems to hint at Montague, Romeo’s family name in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In Oskolki moskovskoy zhizni (“Fragments of Moscow Life”), the feuilleton of July 21, 1884, Chekhov compares the two Moscow chemists, Ferrein and Keller, to Capulet and Montague:
На Никольской, в этом центре самоварно-калачного благодушества, завелись свой Капулетти и свой Монтекки, настоящие, вулканические, жаждущие крови и мести… Как это ни странно, ни сверхъестественно, а верить надо, ибо фабула драмы засвидетельствована полицией. От новоиспеченных Капулетти и Монтекки пахнет карболкой, йодоформом и уксусной эссенцией, ибо оба они дрогисты, оба ядовитых дел мастера. Имя первому Феррейн, имя второму Келлер — имена настолько славные в брокаристом и альфонс-раллейном смысле, что обладатели их могут ехать без паспорта, куда угодно: везде их знают.
Shade is killed by Gradus on July 21, 1959. In his feuilleton Chekhov mentions nash mudreyshiy Lukin (our wisest Lukin), the journalist:
Какой-то врач списался с Францией, и результатом всего этого получилась газетная галиматья, поднятая с легкой руки нашего мудрейшего Лукина (зри «Новости»).
According to Kinbote, the maiden name of Shade’s mother was Caroline Lukin.
At Wordsmith University Professor Pnin (whose name Professor Pardon cannot pronounce) is the Head of the bloated Russian department:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
In Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) Lasker arrives in Vasyuki (as imagined by the local chess enthusiasts) descending by parachute:
Вдруг на горизонте была усмотрена чёрная точка. Она быстро приближалась и росла, превратившись в большой изумрудный парашют. Как большая редька, висел на парашютном кольце человек с чемоданчиком.
– Это он! – закричал одноглазый. – Ура! Ура! Ура! Я узнаю великого философа-шахматиста, доктора Ласкера. Только он один во всём мире носит такие зелёные носочки.
Suddenly a black dot was noticed on the horizon. It approached rapidly, growing larger and larger until it finally turned into a large emerald parachute. A man with an attache case was hanging from the harness, like a huge radish.
"Here he is!" shouted one-eye. "Hooray, hooray, I recognize the great philosopher and chess player Dr. Lasker. He is the only person in the world who wears those green socks." (Chapter 34 “The Interplanetary Chess Tournament”)
There is shina (a tire) in mashina (a car), a word used by G. Ivanov in his poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e... ("Half-pity. Half-disgust…" 1953)
Полу-жалость. Полу-отвращенье.
Полу-память. Полу-ощущенье,
Полу-неизвестно что,
Полы моего пальто:
Полы моего пальто? Так вот в чем дело!
Чуть меня машина не задела
И умчалась вдаль, забрызгав грязью.
Начал вытирать, запачкал руки:
Все ещё мне не привыкнуть к скуке,
Скуке мирового безобразья!
The poem's second half (“I was nearly hit by a car,” etc.) brings to mind a scene described by Kinbote in his Foreword to Shade’s poem:
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough, too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth--not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handful of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuna collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me.
In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, o without regret..." 1927) G. Ivanov (the author of an offensive article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review Chisla, “Numbers,” # 1, 1930) mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire). In the first three lines of Ivanov's poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e ("Half-pity. Half-disgust…") the "prefix" polu- (half-, semi-, demi-) occurs five times. In his epigram on Count Vorontsov (who called Pushkin “a weak imitator of Lord Byron”) Pushkin, too, repeats the prefix polu- five times:
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's a hope
Thet he will be a full one at last.
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’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again.
In his poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e ("Half-pity. Half-disgust…") G. Ivanov tries to blend the themes of two poems by Hodasevich, Vesenniy lepet ne raznezhit... ("The hum of spring will not make tender"), and Pereshagni, pereskochi ("Step over, jump over," 1922) that begins with four words beginning with pere- (over):
Перешагни, перескочи,
Перелети, пере- что хочешь —
Но вырвись: камнем из пращи,
Звездой, сорвавшейся в ночи…
Сам затерял — теперь ищи…
Бог знает, что себе бормочешь,
Ища пенсне или ключи.
Step over, jump over,
Fly over, whatever over-
But break away: like a stone from a sling,
Like a star broken loose in the night...
You're the one who lost it - now look for it...
God knows what you mumble to yourself,
Looking for your pince-nez or keys.
In Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez (1904) old Professor Coram (whose secretary was killed) and his young wife (the murderer) turn out to be Russian. In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints.