According to Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade's mad commentator who believes that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), on sunny, sad mornings he always feels in his bones that there is a chance yet of his not being excluded from Heaven:
The passage 797 (second part of line)-809, on the poet's sixty-fifth card, was composed between the sunset of July 18 and the dawn of July 19. That morning I had prayed in two different churches (on either side, as it were, of my Zemblan denomination, not represented in New Wye) and had strolled home in an elevated state of mind. There was no cloud in the wistful sky, and the very earth seemed to be sighing after our Lord Jesus Christ. On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart. As I was ascending with bowed head the gravel path to my poor rented house, I heard with absolute distinction, as if he were standing at my shoulder and speaking loudly, as to a slightly deaf man, Shade's voice say: "Come tonight, Charlie." I looked around me in awe and wonder: I was quite alone. I at once telephoned. The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day. I retelephoned two hours later; got, as usual, Sybil; insisted on talking to my friend (my "messages" were never transmitted), obtained him, and asked him as calmly as possible what he had been doing around noon when I had heard him like a big bird in my garden. He could not quite remember, said wait a minute, he had been playing golf with Paul (whoever that was), or at least watching Paul play with another colleague. I cried that I must see him in the evening and all at once, with no reason at all, burst into tears, flooding the telephone and gasping for breath, a paroxysm which had not happened to me since Bob left me on March 30. There was a flurry of confabulation between the Shades, and then John said: "Charles, listen. Let's go for a good ramble tonight, I'll meet you at eight." It was my second good ramble since July 6 (that unsatisfactory nature talk); the third one, on July 21, was to be exceedingly brief. (note to Line 802)
Julius Excluded from Heaven is a dialogue that was written in 1514, commonly attributed to the Dutch humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536). It involves Pope Julius II, who had recently died, trying to persuade Saint Peter to allow him to enter Heaven by using the same tactics he applied when alive. The dialogue is also supplemented by a "Genius" (his guardian angel) who makes wry comments about the pope and his deeds.
The name of Zembla's capital, Onhava (onhava-onhava means in Zemblan "far, far away") seems to hint at Heaven. VN's home city (the former capital of Russia), Saint Petersburg was named after Saint Peter. In 1914 Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd and in 1924, Leningrad. In his Commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (Shade's murderer) "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus:"
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was a member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages - not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
Leningrad (1930) is a poem by Mandelshtam. The poems in Mandelshtam’s collection Kamen’ (“Stone,” 1915) include Tennis (1913). An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, Julius Steinmann is a tennis ace. Stein is German for "stone." The name Peter means "stone." In the last stanza of his poem Evropa (“Europe,” 1914) also included in “Stone” Mandelshtam exclaims: Evropa tsezarey! (“Europe of the Caesars!”):
Как средиземный краб или звезда морская,
Был выброшен водой последний материк.
К широкой Азии, к Америке привык,
Слабеет океан, Европу омывая.
Изрезаны её живые берега,
И полуостровов воздушны изваянья;
Немного женственны заливов очертанья:
Бискайи, Генуи ленивая дуга.
Завоевателей исконная земля —
Европа в рубище Священного союза —
Пята Испании, Италии Медуза
И Польша нежная, где нету короля.
Европа цезарей! С тех пор, как в Бонапарта
Гусиное перо направил Меттерних, —
Впервые за сто лет и на глазах моих
Меняется твоя таинственная карта!
…Europe of the Caesars! Since the time when at Bonaparte
Metternich aimed his goose pen,
For the first time in a hundred years, and before my eyes,
Your mysterious map is changing.
Nicknamed the Warrior Pope or the Fearsome Pope, Julius II (head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States in 1503-13) chose his papal name not in honour of Pope Julius I but in emulation of Julius Caesar. In the first line of his poem Mandelshtam compares Europe (“the last continent”) to a Mediterranean crab or starfish. Gradus is a cross between bat and crab:
For almost a whole year after the King's escape the Extremists remained convinced that he and Odon had not left Zembla. The mistake can be only ascribed to the streak of stupidity that fatally runs through the most competent tyranny. Airborne machines and everything connected with them cast a veritable spell over the minds of our new rulers whom kind history had suddenly given a boxful of these zipping and zooming gadgets to play with. That an important fugitive would not perform by air the act of fleeing seemed to them inconceivable. Within minutes after the King and the actor had clattered down the backstairs of the Royal Theater, every wing in the sky and on the ground had been accounted for - such was the efficiency of the government. During the next weeks not one private or commercial plane was allowed to take off, and the inspection of transients became so rigorous and lengthy that international lines decided to cancel stopovers at Onhava. There were some casualties. A crimson balloon was enthusiastically shot down and the aeronaut (a well-known meteorologist) drowned in the Gulf of Surprise. A pilot from a Lapland base flying on a mission of mercy got lost in the fog and was so badly harassed by Zemblan fighters that he settled atop a mountain peak. Some excuse for all this could be found. The illusion of the King's presence in the wilds of Zembla was kept up by royalist plotters who decoyed entire regiments into searching the mountains and woods of our rugged peninsula. The government spent a ludicrous amount of energy on solemnly screening the hundreds of impostors packed in the country's jails. Most of them clowned their way back to freedom; a few, alas, fell. Then, in the spring of the following year, a stunning piece of news came from abroad. The Zemblan actor Odon was directing the making of a cinema picture in Paris!
It was now correctly conjectured that if Odon had fled, the King had fled too: At an extraordinary session of the Extremist government there was passed from hand to hand, in grim silence, a copy of a French newspaper with the headline: L'EN-ROI DE ZEMBLA EST-IL À PARIS? Vindictive exasperation rather than state strategy moved the secret organization of which Gradus was an obscure member to plot the destruction of the royal fugitive. Spiteful thugs! They may be compared to hoodlums who itch to torture the invulnerable gentleman whose testimony clapped them in prison for life. Such convicts have been known to go berserk at the thought that their elusive victim whose very testicles they crave to twist and tear with their talons, is sitting at a pergola feast on a sunny island or fondling some pretty young creature between his knees in serene security - and laughing at them! One supposes that no hell can be worse than the helpless rage they experience as the awareness of that implacable sweet mirth reaches them and suffuses them, slowly destroying their brutish brains. A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty. The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. Gradus had long been a member of all sorts of jejune leftist organizations. He had never killed, though coming rather close to it several times in his gray life. He insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards - but let us not forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out. Perhaps our man's foreign origin secretly prompted a nomination that would not cause any son of Zembla to incur the dishonor of actual regicide. We can well imagine the scene: the ghastly neon lights of the laboratory, in an annex of the Glass Works, where the Shadows happened to hold their meeting that night; the ace of spades lying on the tiled floor, the vodka gulped down out of test tubes; the many hands clapping Gradus on his round back, and the dark exultation of the man as he received those rather treacherous congratulations. We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem. (note to Line 171)
At the end of VN's story Signs and Symbols (1948) the boy's father has got to the crab apple when the telephone rings again:
The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring. He stood in the middle of the room, groping with his foot for one slipper that had come off, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Since she knew more English than he, she always attended to the calls.
”Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.
“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”
She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,” she said.
He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other people.
The telephone rang a second time.
The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.
They sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again. (3)
“What number,” “the wrong number” and “the incorrect number” seem to hint "I'm ill at these numbers," a phrase used by Hamlet in his letter to Ophelia:
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans: but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu.
'Thine evermore most dear lady, whilst
this machine is to him, HAMLET.' (Act II, scene 2)
We may doubt that the stars are fire, that the sun doth move, that truth is a liar, but we should not doubt VN's love. All three telephone calls at the end of Signs and Symbols are from VN himself (the sweet-voiced Sirin is a woman). When the telephone rings again, it is the reader who must respond. Similarly, it is up to the reader of Pale Fire to complete Shade’s almost finished poem. VN's bird-like voice (that Kinbote mistakes for Shade's voice) can be also heard in Pale Fire ("Come tonight, Charlie").
The poet’s murderer, Jakob Gradus is a son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga:
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 in 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. (note to Line 17)
In Potestas clavium. Vlast’ klyuchey (“Power of the Keys,” 1923) Lev Shestov quotes Martin Luther (1483-1546), a leader of the Protestant Reformation who mentions fidei summus gradus (the highest degree of faith) in De servo arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will,” 1525), Luther’s reply to Erasmus of Rotterdam (the author De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, 1524):
Лютер опытом своей жизни был приведён к такому признанию, которое для нашего уха звучит, как кощунственный парадокс: "Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo is Deus sit misericors et justus, qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide" (De servo arbitrio, Вейм. изд., т. XVIII, 633 стр.), т. е.: высшая степень веры - верить, что тот милосерд, кто столь немногих спасает и столь многих осуждает, что тот справедлив, кто, по своему решению, сделал нас преступными, так что, выражаясь словами Эразма, кажется, что он радуется мукам несчастных и скорей достоин ненависти, чем любви. Если бы своим разумом я мог бы понять, как такой Бог может быть справедливым и милосердным, не было бы нужды в вере. Я не могу здесь приводить дальнейших признаний Лютера, но тот, кто поймёт весь ужас человека, приведённого к таким признаниям, поймёт и смысл католического potestas clavium.
Luther's own experience forced him to that confession which resounds in our ears like a blasphemous paradox: Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur possem ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo si Deus sit misericors et justus qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide (De servo arbitrio, ed. Weimar, I, XVIII, p. 633). That is, "the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and damns so many men, that He is righteous who by His own will has necessarily made us guilty so that, according to Erasmus, it seems that He rejoices in the suffering of the miserable and is more worthy of being hated than loved. If I could understand with my reason how such a God can be righteous and merciful, faith would not be necessary." I cannot here quote other confessions of Luther's, but he who has understood the horror that a man forced to such confessions must have felt will also understand the meaning of Catholicism's potestas clavium. (Part One, 4)
Part Three of Potestas clavium consists of three essays the first of which is entitled Memento mori. In his Commentary Kinbote describes a clockwork toy that Shade kept as a kind of memento mori and mentions the key:
By a stroke of luck I have seen it! One evening in May or June I dropped in to remind my friend about a collection of pamphlets, by his grandfather, an eccentric clergyman, that he had once said was stored in the basement. I found him gloomily waiting for some people (members of his department, I believe, and their wives) who were coming for a formal dinner. He willingly took me down into the basement but after rummaging among piles of dusty books and magazines, said he would try to find them some other time. It was then that I saw it on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock. He, thinking I might think it had belonged to his dead daughter, hastily explained it was as old as he. The boy was a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow was now all bent and broken. He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a kind of memento mori--he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy. We were interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above; but never mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key. (note to Line 143)
At the end of his poem Shade mentions some neighbor's gardener (according to Kinbote, it was his black gardener) who goes by trundling an empty barrow up the lane:
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly--
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess--goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 996-999)
Shestov’s Potestas clavium has a Preface entitled Tysyacha i odna noch’ (“A Thousand and One Nights”). Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s almost finished 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. In Potestas Clavium Shestov speaks of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in Dostoevski’s novel Brat’ya Karamazovy (“Brothers Karamazov,” 1880):
Если бы Бог открыто возвестил с неба, что potestas clavium принадлежит Ему, а не людям, самые тихие возмутились бы. Лучшая иллюстрация тому - легенда о великом инквизиторе Достоевского. В этой легенде Достоевский с проницательностью, граничившей с ясновидением и совершенно непостижимой для его современников, раскрыл сокровеннейший смысл католических притязаний. Католичество верит не Богу, а себе самому. Если бы Христос вновь сошел на землю, великий инквизитор сжег бы Его, как он сжигал всех еретиков, т. е. всех тех, кто осмеливался думать, что полнота власти на земле и на небе не принадлежит всецело наместнику св. Петра, ибо credimus et confitemur unam Ecclesiam Romanam, extra quam neminem salvari. И он поступил бы правильно, т. е. последовательно: никто ведь не сомневается, что последовательность есть не только условие, но и сущность истины.
If God Himself announced from heaven that the potestas clavium belongs not to men but to Himself alone, even the gentlest would rebel. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky makes us see this in striking fashion. With a perceptiveness that bordered on clairvoyance and appeared completely incomprehensible to his contemporaries, Dostoevsky laid bare in this legend the secret of Catholicism's pretensions. Catholicism believes not in God but in itself. If Christ descended to earth a second time, the Grand Inquisitor would have him burned, as he dealt with all heretics, i.e., all those who dared believe that power over heaven and earth does not belong entirely to the successors of St. Peter, for credimus et confitemus unam Ecclesiam Romanam, extra quam neminem salvari [we believe and confess one Roman Church outside of which no man is saved]. And the Grand Inquisitor would have acted very justly, that is, logically. No one can doubt - can he? - that rigorous logic is not only the condition but the very essence of truth. (Part One, 4)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions Fra Karamazov (brother Ivan, the author of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”) mumbling his inept all is allowed:
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept (ll. 641-642).
In his book Gogol' i chyort ("Gogol and the Devil," 1906) Merezhkovski quotes Ivan's words vsyo pozvoleno (all is allowed):
До чего бы дошёл он, если бы не поскользнулся? Назвал ли бы себя, как всякий самозванец, самодержцем? А, может быть, в наши дни не удовольствовался бы и
царственным, никаким, вообще, человеческим именем, и уже прямо назвал бы себя "сверхчеловеком," "человекобогом?" Сказал бы то, что у Достоевского
чёрт советует сказать Ивану Карамазову: "Где станет Бог - там уже место Божие; где стану я, там сейчас же будет первое место - и всё позволено!" (Part One, II)
In his book Merezhkovski quotes Gogol's words Revizor bez kontsa ("The Inspector is not finished") and mentions russkiy Grad (the Russian City):
Нет, "Ревизор" не кончен, не сознан до конца самим Гоголем и не понят зрителями; узел завязки развязан условно, сценически, но не религиозно. Одна комедия кончена, начинается или должна бы начаться другая, несколько более смешная и страшная. Мы её так и не увидим на сцене: но и до сей поры разыгрывается она за сценою, в жизни. Это сознаёт отчасти Гоголь. "Ревизор без конца", - говорит он. Мы могли бы прибавить: Ревизор бесконечен. Это смех не какой-либо частный, временный, исторический, а именно - бесконечный смех русской совести над русским Градом. (Part One, III)
The phrase russkiy Grad (Russian City) used by Merezhkovski in the sense "Russian society" brings to mind O Grade Bozhyem, the Russian title of St. Augustine's book De Civitate Dei ("The City of God"). Merezhkovski is the author of Pavel. Avgustin ("St. Paul and St. Augustine," 1936). Asked by Kinbote what he had been doing around noon (when Kinbote had heard him like a big bird in his garden) Shade says that he had been playing golf with Paul (whoever that was), or at least watching Paul play with another colleague. In a theological disputation with Shade Kinbote quotes St. Augustine:
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is--even from a proud infidel's point of view!--to accept God's Presence--a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said--
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (note to Line 549)
In his essay Zemlya vo rtu ("The Earth in the Mouth," 1906) Merezhkovski calls Russia zemlya svyatykh rabov ("the land of saintly slaves"):
"Природа их такова, -- говорит Аристотель о варварах, -- что они не могут и не должны жить иначе, как в рабстве: quod in Servitute boni, in libertate mali sunt".
В свободе -- грешные, в рабстве -- святые.
Святые рабы. Святая Русь -- земля святых рабов.
In his book De Trinitate ("On the Trinity") St. Augustine says:
For when we aspire from this depth to that height, it is a step towards no small knowledge, if, before we can know what God is, we can already know what He is not. (8.2)