Vladimir Nabokov

shape & shade in Pale Fire

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 3 May, 2021

At the beginning of his Commentary Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade:

 

The image in these opening lines evidently refers to a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly slower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space. We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint. When in the last year of Shade's life I had the fortune of being his neighbor in the idyllic hills of New Wye (see Foreword), I often saw those particular birds most convivially feeding on the chalk-blue berries of junipers growing at the corner of his house. (See also lines 181-182.)

My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name "robin" to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!

Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved (born 1915), whose glorious misfortunes I discussed so often with my friend.

The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)

 

Shade’s poem “The Sacred Tree” (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) ends in the words “in shape:”

 

Line 49: shagbark

 

A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King's Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade's collection of short poems Hebe's Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting here (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):

 

THE SACRED TREE

The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,

A muscat grape,

Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,

In shape.

 

When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados.

 

The words “shade” and “shape” occur in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53:

 

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you, but one, can every shadow lend.

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you;

On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,

And you in Grecian tires are painted new.

Speak of the spring and foison of the year:

The one doth shadow of your beauty show,

The other as your bounty doth appear;

And you in every blessèd shape we know.

In all external grace you have some part,

But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

 

At the beginning of Canto Four of his poem Shade says that he will spy on beauty as none has spied on it yet, repeating the word “none” (used by Shakespeare twice in the last line of his sonnet) four times:

 

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has

Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as

None has cried out. Now I shall try what none

Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. (ll. 835-838)

 

“Millions of strange shadows” in Sonnet 53 bring to mind “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain” (the first line of Shade’s poem) and “a million photographers” mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary:

 

"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.

God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)

 

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,” 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski (who uses the word gradus, "degree," twice in a letter of Oct. 31, 1838, to his brother Mikhail). On the other hand, “Double, double toil and trouble” is a line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act IV, scene 1):

 

FIRST WITCH

Round about the cauldron go,

In the poisoned entrails throw.

Toad, that under cold stone

Days and nights has thirty-one

Sweltered venom sleeping got,

Boil thou first i' th' charmèd pot.

 

ALL

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

 

SECOND WITCH

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake.

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 

ALL

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

 

THIRD WITCH

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witches' mummy, maw and gulf

Of the ravined salt-sea shark,

Root of hemlock digged i' th' dark,

Liver of blaspheming Jew,

Gall of goat and slips of yew

Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,

Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

Finger of birth-strangled babe

Ditch-delivered by a drab,

Make the gruel thick and slab.

Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

For the ingredients of our cauldron.

 

ALL

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

 

SECOND WITCH

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

 

“A baboon’s blood” brings to mind “some uniformed baboon” mentioned by Shade in Canto Three of his poem:

 

But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call
When morning finds us marching to the wall
Under the stage direction of some goon
Political, some uniformed baboon?
We'll think of matters only known to us--
Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;
Listen to the distant cocks crow, and discern
Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;
And while our royal hands are being tied,
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles, and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it. (ll. 597-608)

 

Telling about Conmal (the King's uncle and Zemblan translator of Shakespeare), Kinbote mentions Conmal’s frogged uniform that he exchanged for a scholar's dressing gown:

 

English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)

 

The painted cave of Altamira is mentioned in VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947):

 

THINKING of that farcical interview, he wondered how long it would be till the next attempt. He still believed that so long as he kept lying low nothing harmful could happen. Oddly enough, at the end of the month his usual cheque arrived although for the time being the University had ceased to exist, at least on the outside. Behind the scenes there was an endless sequence of sessions, a turmoil of administrative activity, a regrouping of forces, but he declined either to attend these meetings or to receive the various delegations and special messengers that Azureus and Alexander kept sending to his house. He argued that, when the Council of Elders had exhausted its power of seduction, he would be left alone since the Government, while not daring to arrest him and being reluctant to grant him the luxury of exile, would still keep hoping with forlorn obstinacy that finally he might relent. The drab colour the future took matched well the grey world of his widowhood, and had there been no friends to worry about and no child to hold against his cheek and heart, he might have devoted the twilight to some quiet research: for example he had always wished to know more about the Aurignacian Age and those portraits of singular beings (perhaps Neanderthal half-men—direct ancestors of Paduk and his likes—used by Aurignacians as slaves) that a Spanish nobleman and his little daughter had discovered in the painted cave of Altamira. Or he might take up some dim problem of Victorian telepathy (the cases reported by clergymen, nervous ladies, retired colonels who had seen service in India) such as the remarkable dream a Mrs. Storie had of her brother’s death. And in our turn we shall follow the brother as he walks along the railway line on a very dark night: having gone sixteen miles, he felt a little tired (as who would not); he sat down to take off his boots and dozed off to the chirp of the crickets, and then a train lumbered by. Seventy-six sheep trucks (in a curious “count-sheep-sleep” parody) passed without touching him, but then some projection came in contact with the back of his head killing him instantly. And we might also probe the “illusions hypnagogiques” (only illusion?) of dear Miss Bidder who once had a nightmare from which a most distinct demon survived after she woke so that she sat up to inspect its hand which was clutching the bedrail but it faded into the ornaments over the mantelpiece. Silly, but I can’t help it, he thought as he got out of his armchair and crossed the room to rearrange the leering folds of his brown dressing gown which, as it sprawled across the divan, showed at one end a very distinct medieval face. (Chapter 12)

 

The characters in Bend Sinister include Krug’s friend Ember, the Shakespeare scholar and translator. The dictator of Padukgrad, Paduk (Krug’s former schoolmate) is nicknamed “the Toad.” At the beginning of Macbeth (Act I, scene 1) the Second Witch mentions “paddock” (arch., frog, toad):

 

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

 

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

 

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

 

First Witch

Where the place?

 

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

 

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

 

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

 

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

 

Third Witch

Anon.

 

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Exeunt

 

In his Sonet (“A Sonnet,” 1830) Pushkin mentions tvorets Makbeta (the author of Macbeth) who loved a sonnet’s play:

 

Scorn not the sonnet, critic.

Wordsworth

 

Суровый Дант не презирал сонета;
В нём жар любви Петрарка изливал;
Игру его любил творец Макбета;
Им скорбну мысль Камоэнс облекал.

И в наши дни пленяет он поэта:
Вордсворт его орудием избрал,
Когда вдали от суетного света
Природы он рисует идеал.

Под сенью гор Тавриды отдаленной
Певец Литвы в размер его стесненный
Свои мечты мгновенно заключал.

У нас ещё его не знали девы,
Как для него уж Дельвиг забывал
Гекзаметра священные напевы.

 

Scorn not the sonnet, critic.

Wordsworth

 

Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;

Into it Petrarch poured out the ardor of love;

Its play the creator of Macbeth loved;

With it Camoes clothed his sorrowful thought.

 

Even in our days it captivates the poet:

Wordsworth chose it as an instrument,

When far from the vain world

He depicts nature's ideal.

 

Under the shadow of the mountains of distant Tavrida

The singer of Lithuania in its constrained measure

His dreams he in an instant enclosed.

 

Here the maidens did not yet know it,

When for it even Delvig forgot

The sacred melodies of the hexameter.

(tr. Ober)

 

Paduk also brings to mind Padu li ya, streloy pronzyonnyi (Whether I fall, struck by an arrow), a line in Lenski's last poem (Eugene Onegin, Six: XXI: 9-14):

 

Паду ли я, стрелой пронзенный,
Иль мимо пролетит она,
Всё благо: бдения и сна
Приходит час определенный;
Благословен и день забот,
Благословен и тьмы приход!

 

Whether I fall, or death wings by,

All is well: our moments fly,

Sleep and waking have their hour,

Blessed the day of toil and care,

Blessed the tomb’s darkness there.

 

Pushkin compares Lenski reading aloud his verses to drunken Delvig:

 

Домой приехав, пистолеты
Он осмотрел, потом вложил
Опять их в ящик и, раздетый,
При свечке, Шиллера открыл;
Но мысль одна его объемлет;
В нем сердце грустное не дремлет:
С неизъяснимою красой
Он видит Ольгу пред собой.
Владимир книгу закрывает,
Берет перо; его стихи,
Полны любовной чепухи,
Звучат и льются. Их читает
Он вслух, в лирическом жару,
Как Дельвиг пьяный на пиру.

 

On coming home his pistols he inspected,

then back into their case

he put them, and, undressed,

by candle opened Schiller;

but there's one thought infolding him;

the sad heart in him does not slumber:

Olga, in beauty

ineffable, he sees before him.

Vladimir shuts the book,

takes up his pen; his verses —

full of love's nonsense — sound

and flow. Aloud

he reads them in a lyric fever,

like drunken D[elvig] at a feast. (Six: XX)

 

In his poem K portretu Delviga (“To the Portrait of Delvig,” 1819) Pushkin mentions Neron i Tit (Nero and Titus):

 

Се самый Дельвиг тот, что нам всегда твердил,
Что, коль судьбой ему даны б Нерон и Тит,
То не в Нерона меч, но в Тита сей вонзил —
Нерон же без него правдиву смерть узрит.

 

This is that very Delvig who always told us

that, if fate would give him Nero and Titus,

he would have thrust his sword not in Nero, but in Titus –

for Nero without him will see the rightful death.

 

In Bend Sinister Paduk is compared to Roman emperors Titus and Nero:

 

Truganini, the last Tasmanian, died in 1877, but the last Kruganini could not remember how this was linked up with the fact that the edible Galilean fishes in the first century A.D. would be principally chromids and barbels although in Raphael’s representation of the miraculous draught we find among nondescript piscine forms of the young painter’s fancy two specimens which obviously belong to the skate family, never found in fresh water. Speaking of Roman venationes (shows with wild beasts) of the same epoch, we note that the stage, on which ridiculously picturesque rocks (the later ornaments of “romantic” landscapes) and an indifferent forest were represented, was made to rise out of the crypts below the urine-soaked arena with Orpheus on it among real lions and bears with gilded claws; but this Orpheus was acted by a criminal and the scene ended with a bear killing him, while Titus or Nero, or Paduk, looked on with that complete pleasure which “art” shot through with “human interest” is said to produce. (Chapter 12)

 

Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by Shakespeare (its title character is a renowned Roman general, not emperor).