vino + Gradus + Troystvo = vinograd + ustroystvo
vino - Russ., wine
Gradus - Jakob Gradus (one of the three main characters in Pale Fire, Shade's murderer; gradus is Russian for "degree")
Troystvo - "The Threesome," a poem (1830) by Shevyryov
vinograd - Russ., grape; Vinograd ("The Grapes," 1824) is a poem by Pushkin
ustroystvo - Russ., device; arrangement; Ustroystvo byta pomeshchich'yikh krest'yan. Truden li vykup zemli? ("The Organization of the Everyday Life of the Peasants. Is the Buyout of Land Difficult?" 1859) is an article by Chernyshevski (the hero of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's book in VN's novel Dar)
A few moments before his death John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) that he will sample Kinbote's wine with pleasure:
Through the trees I distinguished John's white shirt and gray hair; he sat in his Nest (as he called it), the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note to lines 47-48. I could not keep from advancing a little nearer - oh, discreetly, almost on tiptoe; but then I noticed he was resting, not writing, and I openly walked up to his porch or perch. His elbow was on the table, his fist supported his temple, his wrinkles were all awry, his eyes moist and misty; he looked like an old tipsy witch. He lifted his free hand in greeting without changing his attitude, which although not unfamiliar to me struck me this time as more forlorn than pensive.
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)
The threesome in Shevyryov's poem Troystvo are Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. One of the chapters in Ilf and Petrov's novel Zolotoy telyonok ("The Golden Calf," 1931) is entitled "Homer, Milton and Panikovski" (Homer and Milton were blind; a character in Ilf and Petrov's novel, Panikovski simulates blindness). In a conversation with Kinbote Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
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)
The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. 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 Botkin (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 (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
According to Kinbote, Gradus contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
A Latin suffix that had adhered to vinograd, making it Vinogradus, brings to mind lividus (bluish, blue), a Latin word used by Fyodor in his imaginary dialogue with Koncheyev in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937):
"Тут я вас уловлю. Разве вы не читали у того же Писемского, как лакеи в передней во время бала перекидываются страшно грязным, истоптанным плисовым женским сапогом? Ага! Вообще, коли уж мы попали в этот второй ряд - - Что вы скажете, например, о Лескове?"
"Да что-ж... У него в слоге попадаются забавные англицизмы, вроде "это была дурная вещь" вместо "плохо дело". Но всякие там нарочитые "аболоны"... - нет, увольте, мне не смешно. А многословие... матушки! "Соборян" без урона можно было бы сократить до двух газетных подвалов. И я не знаю, что хуже, - его добродетельные британцы или добродетельные попы".
"Ну, а все-таки. Галилейский призрак, прохладный и тихий, в длинной одежде цвета зреющей сливы? Или пасть пса с синеватым, точно напомаженным, зевом? Или молния, ночью освещающая подробно комнату, - вплоть до магнезии, осевшей на серебряной ложке?"
"Отмечаю, что у него латинское чувство синевы: lividus. Лев Толстой, тот, был больше насчет лиловаго, - и какое блаженство пройтись с грачами по пашне босиком! Я, конечно, не должен был их покупать".
"Вы правы, жмут нестерпимо. Но мы перешли в первый ряд. Разве там вы не найдете слабостей? "Русалка" - - "
"Не трогайте Пушкина: это золотой фонд нашей литературы. А вон там, в Чеховской корзине, провиант на много лет вперед, да щенок, который делает "уюм, уюм, уюм", да бутылка крымского".
“Here I shall trap you. Aren’t there some good things in the same Pisemski? For example, those footmen in the vestibule, during a ball, who play catch with a lady’s velveteen boot, horribly muddy and worn. Aha! And since we are speaking of second-rank authors, what do you think of Leskov?”
“Well, let me see…. Amusing Anglicisms crop up in his style, such as ‘eto byla durnaya veshch’ [this was a bad thing] instead of simply ‘plokho delo.’ As to his contrived punning distortions—No, spare me, I don’t find them funny. And his verbosity—Good God! His ‘Soboryane’ could easily be condensed to two newspaper feuilletons. And I don’t know which is worse—his virtuous Britishers or his virtuous clerics.”
“And yet… how about his image of Jesus ‘the ghostly Galilean, cool and gentle, in a robe the color of ripening plum’? Or his description of a yawning dog’s mouth with ‘its bluish palate as if smeared with pomade’? Or that lightning of his that at night illumines the room in detail, even to the magnesium oxide left on a silver spoon?”
“Yes, I grant you he has a Latin feeling for blueness: lividus. Lyov Tolstoy, on the other hand, preferred violet shades and the bliss of stepping barefoot with the rooks upon the rich dark soil of plowed fields! Of course, I should never have bought them.”
“You’re right, they pinch unbearably. But we have moved up to the first rank. Don’t tell me you can’t find weak spots there too? In such stories as ‘The Blizzard’—
“Leave Pushkin alone: he is the gold reserve of our literature. And over there is Chekhov’s hamper, which contains enough food for years to come, and a whimpering puppy, and a bottle of Crimean wine.” (Chapter One)
In the last quatrain of his poem “The Nature of Electricity” Shade mentions forked lightning that plays above the livid plain:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Tri molnii ("Three Lightnings") is a poem by Shevyryov from his unfinished tragedy Romul (Romulus, 1830):
Три молнии громодержавный царь,
Отец богов, на казнь в деснице держит:
Он первою остерегает тварь
И сам ее по грозной воле вержет, -
Она легко слетает с облаков.
Вторая жжет и злой бедою блещет,-
И лишь совет двенадцати богов
Созвавши, он ее на землю мещет.
Но третьею карает, раздражен,-
И что сожжет, то к жизни не возводит:
Когда ж ее замыслит вергнуть он,
Сам в облако таинственно уходит,
Зовет к себе избраннейших богов,
Спокойно гнев их мудрости вверяет,
И, так решив, из темных облаков
На мир ее рушительно бросает.
Romulus is the legendary founder of Rome. Shevyryov is the author of Petrograd (1829), a poem about the quarrel between the Sea and the tsar Peter the First (the founder of St. Petersburg). Shevyryov's poem "Three Lightnings" brings to mind Molnii iskusstva ("The Lightnings of Art"), a collection of essays by Alexander Blok written after Blok's 1909 Italian journey. In Blok's poem Neznakomka ("The Stranger," 1906) tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits shout: "In vino veritas!" (in wine is truth).
In his Commentary Kinbote quotes the opening lines of Shade's poem 'Art:'
I remember one little poem from Night Rote (meaning "the nocturnal sound of the sea") that happened to be my first contact with the American poet Shade. A young lecturer on American Literature, a brilliant and charming boy from Boston, showed me that slim and lovely volume in Onhava, in my student days. The following lines opening this poem, which is entitled "Art," pleased me by their catchy lilt and jarred upon the religious sentiments instilled in me by our very "high" Zemblan church.
From mammoth hunts and Odysseys
And Oriental charms
To the Italian goddesses
With Flemish babes in arms. (note to Line 957)
The Odyssey is an epic poem by Homer. In Canto One of his poem Shade speaks of his childhood and mentions Chapman's Homer (a play on the title of a sonnet by Keats):
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
In one of his poems quoted in a review by Valentin Linyov (the ignorant critic) Koncheyev (Fyodor's rival poet in The Gift) mentions vinograd (ripening vines):
Он еще просмотрел еженедельный иллюстрированный журнальчик, выходивший в Варшаве, и нашел рецензию на тот же предмет, но совсем другого пошиба. Это была критика-буфф. Тамошний Валентин Линев, из номера в номер безформенно, забубенно и не вполне грамотно изливавший свои литературные впечатления, был славен тем, что не только не мог разобраться в отчетной книге, но по-видимому, никогда не дочитывал ее до конца. Бойко творя из-под автора, увлекаясь собственным пересказом, выхватывая отдельные фразы в подтверждение неправильных заключений, плохо понимая начальные страницы, а в следующих энергично пускаясь по ложному следу, он добирался до предпоследней главы в блаженном состоянии пассажира еще не знающего (а в его случае так и не узнающего), что сел не в тот поезд. Неизменно бывало, что, долистав вслепую длинный роман или коротенькую повесть (размер не играл роли), он навязывал книге собственное окончание, - обыкновенно как раз противоположное замыслу автора. Другими словами, если бы, скажем, Гоголь приходился ему современником, и Линев о нем писал, то он прочно остался бы при невинном убеждении, что Хлестаков - ревизор в самом деле. Когда же, как сейчас, он писал о стихах, то простодушно употреблял прием так называемых межцитатных мостиков . Его разбор кончеевской книги сводился к тому, что он за автора отвечал на какую-то подразумеваемую альбомную анкету (Ваш любимый цветок? Любимый герой? Какую добродетель вы больше всего цените?): "Поэт, - писал о Кончееве Линев, - любит (следовала цепочка цитат, искаженных насилием их сочетания и винительных падежей). Его пугает (опять обрубки стихов). Он находит утешение в - (та же игра); но с другой стороны - (три четверти стиха, обращенных посредством кавычек в плоское утверждение); иногда же ему кажется, что" - и тут Линев, ненароком выковырнул что-то более или менее целое:
Виноград созревал, изваянья в аллеях синели.
Небеса опирались на снежные плечи отчизны...
- и это было так, словно голос скрипки вдруг заглушил болтовню патриархального кретина.
He also looked through a little illustrated weekly published by Russian émigrés in Warsaw and found a review on the same subject, but of a completely different cut. It was a critique-bouffe. The local Valentin Linyov, who from issue to issue used to pour out his formless, reckless, and not altogether grammatical literary impressions, was famous not only for not being able to make sense of the book he reviewed but also for not having, apparently, read it to the end. Jauntily using the author as a springboard, carried away by his own paraphrase, extracting isolated phrases in support of his incorrect conclusions, misunderstanding the initial pages and thereafter energetically pursuing a false trail, he would make his way to the penultimate chapter in the blissful state of a passenger who still does not know (and in his case never finds out) that he has boarded the wrong train. It invariably happened that having leafed blindly through a long novel or a short story (size played no part in it) he would provide the book with his own ending—usually exactly opposite to the author’s intention. In other words, if, say, Gogol had been a contemporary and Linyov were writing about him, Linyov would remain firmly of the innocent conviction that Hlestakov was indeed the inspector-general. But when, as now, he wrote about poetry, he artlessly employed the device of so-called “inter-quotational footbridges.” His discussion of Koncheyev’s book boiled down to his answering for the author a kind of implied album questionnaire (Your favorite flower? Favorite hero? Which virtue do you prize most?): “The poet,” Linyov wrote of Koncheyev, “likes [there followed a string of quotations, forcibly distorted by their combination and the demands of the accusative case]. He dreads [more bleeding stumps of verse]. He finds solace in—[même jeu]; but on the other hand [three-quarters of a line turned by means of quotes into a flat statement]; at times it seems to him that”—and here Linyov inadvertently extricated something more or less whole:
Days of ripening vines! In the avenues, blue-shaded statues.
The fair heavens that lean on the motherland’s shoulders of snow.
—and it was as if the voice of a violin had suddenly drowned the hum of a patriarchal cretin. (Chapter Three)
Chapter Four of The Gift is Fyodor's book Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"). Stepan Shevyryov (1806-1864) was born in Saratov, Chernyshevski's home town where the author of Chto delat' ?("What to Do?") died in 1889. At the end of Griboedov's comedy in verse Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824) Famusov exclaims: "V derevnyu, v glush', v Saratov!" ("To the country, to the backwoods, to Saratov!"). Famusov wants to send his daughter Sofia to Saratov. The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin.
Chapter Four of The Gift begins and ends with an inverted sonnet. Shevyryov's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1831) ends with the lines:
И долго ли мне жить без двойника,
Как винограду падать без опоры?
And am I bound to live long without a double,
as the vines are bound to fall without support?
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. According to G. Ivanov, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda" Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his fragment Rim (Rome, 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана, придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: "Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!"
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.