PF's Hazel=FW's Kate

When I was a child, Russia enjoyed quite a vogue at the court of Zembla but that was a different Russia - a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations. We may add that Charles the Beloved could boast of some Russian blood. In medieval times two of his ancestors had married Novgorod princesses. Queen Yaruga (reigned 1799-1800) his great-great-granddam, was half Russian; and most historians believe that Yaruga's only child Igor was not the son of Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) but the fruit of her amours with the Russian adventurer Hodinski, her goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century. (note to Line 681)

Yaruga is an old Russian word for “ravine.” In Slovo o polku Igoreve (“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”) Wild Bull Vsevolod (Igor’s brother) mentions yarugy (the ravines):

Игорь ждетъ мила брата Всеволода. И рече ему Буй-Туръ Всеволодъ: "Одинъ братъ, одинъ свѣтъ свѣтлый - ты, Игорю! Оба есвѣ Святъславличя! Сѣдлай, брате, свои бързыи комони, а мои ти готови, осѣдлани у Курьска напереди. А мои ти куряни - свѣдоми къмети: подъ трубами повити, подъ шеломы възлелѣяны, конець копия въскръмлени; пути имь вѣдоми, яругы имъ знаеми, луци у нихъ напряжени, тули отворени, сабли изъострени. Сами скачють, акы сѣрыи влъци въ полѣ, ищучи себе чти, а князю славѣ".

Igor waits for his dear brother Vsevolod.

And Wild Bull Vsevolod [arrives and]
says to him:
"My one brother, one bright brightness,
you Igor!
We both are Svyatoslav's sons.
Saddle, brother, your swift steeds.
As to mine, they are ready,
saddled ahead, near Kursk;
as to my Kurskers, they are famous
knights –
swaddled under war-horns,
nursed under helmets,
fed from the point of the lance;
to them the trails are familiar,
to them the ravines are known,
the bows they have are strung tight,
the quivers, unclosed,
the sabers, sharpened;
themselves, like gray wolves,
they lope in the field,
seeking for themselves honor,
and for their prince glory."

(ll. 71-90, VN’s translation)

Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name seems to be Vsevolod Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name).

The Sisters (1904) is a short story by James Joyce (Joyce's first published work of fiction), the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. Queen Yaruga is the sister of Uran the Last:

Uran the Last, Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top; dispatched one night by a group of his sister's united favorites, 681. (Index)

In VN's Lolita (1955) Humbert mentions uranists with whom he sat in the Deux Magots and pastiches he composed in Paris:

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:

... Fräulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.

A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties - and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. (1.5)

A rainbow top (Uran's whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top) brings to mind "a living rainbow" in Lolita:

We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.

“I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.

We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.

“Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.”

“Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.”

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.

Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admitand, when we discovered there was in jurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbedseven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector. (2.18)

The idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in Finnegans Wake. Emerald brings to mind Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus a lift to Kinbote's house in New Wye).

A little earlier Lolita draws Humbert’s attention to the three nines changing into the next thousand in the odometer:

“If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him, Dad.”
“Did he ask where we were going?”
“Oh, he knows that” (mocking me).
“Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.”
“Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you - Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.”

It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we traveled on, unpursued. (2.18)

Shade’s almost finished poem consists of 999 lines. 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”). By tracking down and murdering Quilty (who resembles Humbert’s uncle Trapp and who abducts Lolita in Elphinstone), Humbert Humbert kills his own double. Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. In the Russian Lolita Vivian Darkbloom (Quilty's coauthor, the author of My Cue) becomes Vivian Damor-Blok. In Lolita Humbert mentions a Dostoevskian grin and quotes two lines from Canto III (CXVI: 5-6) of Byron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenlySuddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother’s husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day, every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss…” Well-read Humbert! (1.17)

Lolita is the daughter of Harold Haze and Charlotte Becker. A musical prodigy and an amusing pet, son of Elvina Krummholz (Joseph Lavender's famous sister), Gordon Krummholz brings to mind Catherine Gordon (Byron's mother). According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Botkin is one who makes bottekins (fancy footwear). When Byron was born, he suffered from lameness and a twisted foot. After May Gray (Byron's nurse) was fired, Byron was put in the care of a "trussmaker to the General hospital", a man named Lavender, in hopes that he could be cured; however, Lavender instead abused the boy and would occasionally use him as a servant. After Byron exposed Lavender as a fool, Gordon took her son to visit Doctor Matthew Baillie in London. They took up residence at Sloane Terrace during the summer of 1799, and there Byron started to receive treatment, such as specially designed boots.

Charlotte Becker was the maiden name of Fet's mother. The author of Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884), Afanasiy Fet married Maria Botkin in 1857. The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife whom Kinbote calls "Sybil Swallow") and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin).

"Hodinski/Hodyna" hints at Hodasevich (the author of "The Life of Vasiliy Travnikov," 1936, a clever hoax) and at the Hodynka stampede (mentioned by Balmont, a translator of Slovo, in his poem "Our Tsar," 1906). The ice-hole in which Queen Yaruga and Hodinski drowned suggests the festivities in Lazhechnikov's novel Ledyanoy dom ("The House of Ice," 1835).

Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday is July 5 (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). In Hodasevich's story July 6 is Vasiliy Travnikov’s birthday:

В то время второй уже год царствовал Павел I. Зная характер этого государя, можно вполне поверить семейному преданию Травниковых, согласно которому ходатайство увенчалось успехом лишь благодаря довольно странному обстоятельству. На докладе статс-секретаря государь собрался уже положить резолюцию отрицательную. Но тут случайно взгляд его упал на дату Васенькина рождения: 6 июля 1785 года. Император Петр III был убит 6 июля 1762-го. Заметив это совпадение, Павел с приметным удовольствием отменил повеление своей матери и повелел "выблядку без фамилии" впредь быть законным сыном дворянина Григория Травникова, прибавив, однако же, на словах: "В память в Бозе почившего родителя моего и не в пример прочим". (Chapter I)

The emperor Paul I (who corresponds to Uran the Last) notices the date of Vasenka’s birthday: July 6, 1785. The father of Paul I, the emperor Peter III was assassinated on July 6, 1762. This coincidence makes Paul I cancel his mother’s injunction and declare Vasenka (“a bastard without surname”) a legitimate son of the nobleman Grigoriy Travnikov. Btw., Travnikov (who as a child was attacked by the borzoy dogs) has a wooden foot.

According to Kinbote, on his deathbed Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) called his nephew, Charles Xavier Vseslav, "Karlik:"

To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fngers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla - partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39 - 40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongs-skugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)

Karlik is Russian for "dwarf." The main character in VN's story Kartofel'nyi el'f ("The Potato Elf," 1929), Fred Dobson is a circus dwarf. The characters in VN's story include the conjuror Shock (a rather unpleasant figure). In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions a conjuror whom he saw in his uncle’s castle:

We never discussed, John Shade and I, any of my personal misfortunes. Our close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them. My admiration for him was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence. Here he is, I would say to myself, that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him. He is looking from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant lake. I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle's castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air.

Upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) finds the Palace transformed into a circus:

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practice of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succumbed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, a phenomenally endowed young brute (whose family name, "knave's farm," is the most probably derivation of "Shakespeare"). Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught. At last she removed to the Riviera leaving him to amuse himself with a band of Eton-collared, sweet-voiced minions imported from England. (note to Line 433)

The action in The Potato Elf takes place in London and in rural England. Fred Dobson’s colleague, the famous Swiss dwarf Zimmermann, was dubbed “Prince Balthazar:”

Было ему двадцать лет от роду, весил он около десяти килограммов, а рост его превышал лишь на несколько сантиметров рост знаменитого швейцарского карлика Циммермана, по прозванию Принц Бальтазар. Как и коллега Циммерман, Фред был отлично сложен, и,-- если бы не морщинки на круглом лбу и вокруг прищуренных глаз, да еще этот общий немного жуткий вид напряженности, словно он крепился, чтобы не расти,-- карлик бы совсем походил на тихого восьмилетнего мальчика. Волосы его цвета влажной соломы были прилизаны и разделены ровной нитью пробора, который шёл как раз посредине головы, чтобы вступить в хитрый договор с макушкой. Ходил Фред легко, держался свободно и недурно танцевал, но первый же антрепренер, занявшийся им, счел нужным отяжелить смешным эпитетом понятие "эльфа", когда взглянул на толстый нос, завещанный карлику его полнокровным озорным отцом.

He was twenty, and weighed less than fifty pounds, being only a couple of inches taller than the famous Swiss dwarf, Zimmermann (dubbed “Prince Balthazar”). Like friend Zimmermann, Fred was extremely well built, and had there not been those wrinkles on his round forehead and at the corners of his narrowed eyes, as well as a rather eerie air of tension (as if he were resisting growth), our dwarf would have easily passed for a gentle eight-year-old boy. His hair, the hue of damp straw, was sleeked down and evenly parted by a line which ran up the exact middle of his head to conclude a cunning agreement with its crown. Fred walked lightly, had an easy demeanor, and danced rather well, but his very first manager deemed it wise to weight the notion of “elf” with a comic epithet upon noticing the fat nose inherited by the dwarf from his plethoric and naughty father. (1)

According to Kinbote, he nicknamed his black gardener “Balthasar, Prince of Loam:”

I am happy to report that soon after Easter my fears disappeared never to return. Into Alphina's or Betty's room another lodger moved, Balthasar, Prince of Loam, as I dubbed him, who with elemental regularity fell asleep at nine and by six in the morning was planting heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi). This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land. (note to Line 62)

In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor describes his first love and mentions a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope in his mistress’s bedroom:

По вечерам я провожал её домой. Эти прогулки мне когда-нибудь пригодятся. В её спальне был маленький портрет царской семьи, и пахло по-тургеневски гелиотропом. Я возвращался за-полночь, благо гувернёр уехал в Англию, -- и никогда я не забуду того чувства лёгкости, гордости, восторга и дикого ночного голода (особенно хотелось простокваши с чёрным хлебом), когда я шёл по нашей преданно и даже льстиво шелестевшей аллее к тёмному дому (только у матери -- свет) и слышал лай сторожевых псов.

Those walks will come in handy sometime. In her bedroom there was a little picture of the Tsar's family and a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope. I used to return long after midnight (my tutor, fortunately, had gone back to England), and I shall never forget that feeling of lightness, pride, rapture and wild night hunger (I particularly yearned for curds-and-whey with black bread) as I walked along our faithfully and even fawningly soughing avenue toward the dark house (only Mother had a light on) and heard the barking of the watchdogs. (Chapter Three)

Among the people who were executed with the family of the last Russian tsar was Dr Evgeniy Botkin. The “real” name of the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seems to be Vsevolod Botkin. In The Song of Igor's Campaign Wild Bull Vsevolod is Igor's brother. In lines 631-679 of Slovo Vseslav's fate is recalled.

Hodinski seems to have little in common with Garri Gudini ("Harry Houdini" in Russian spelling). The connection between them, if it exists at all, is very subtle.