In his Commentary to Shade's poem 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) says that exile becomes a bad habit:
Line 998: Some neighbor's gardener
Some neighbor's! The poet had seen my gardener many times, and this vagueness I can only assign to his desire (noticeable elsewhere in his handling of names, etc.) to give a certain poetical patina, the bloom of remoteness, to familiar figures and things - although it is just possible he might have mistaken him in the broken light for a stranger working for a stranger. This gifted gardener I discovered by chance one idle spring day, when I was slowly wending my way home after a maddening and embarrassing experience at the college indoor swimming pool. He stood at the top of a green ladder attending to the sick branch of a grateful tree in one of the most famous avenues in Appalachia. His red flannel shirt lay on the grass. We conversed, a little shyly, he above, I below. I was pleasantly surprised at his being able to refer all his patients to their proper habitats. It was spring, and we were alone in that admirable colonnade of trees which visitors from England have photographed from end to end. I can enumerate here only a few kinds of those trees: Jove's stout oak and two others: the thunder-cloven from Britain, the knotty-entrailed from a Mediterranean island; a weatherfending line (now lime), a phoenix (now date palm), a pine and a cedar (Cedrus), all insular; a Venetian sycamore tree (Acer); two willows, the green, likewise from Venice, the hoar-leaved from Denmark; a midsummer elm, its barky fingers enringed with ivy; a midsummer mulberry, its shade inviting to tarry; and a clown's sad cypress from Illyria.
He had worked for two years as a male nurse in a hospital for Negroes in Maryland. He was hard up. He wanted to study landscaping, botany and French ("to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas"). I promised him some financial assistance. He started to work at my place the very next day. He was awfully nice and pathetic, and all that, but a little too talkative and completely impotent which I found discouraging. Otherwise he was a strong strapping fellow, and I hugely enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of watching him buoyantly struggle with earth and turf or delicately manipulate bulbs, or lay out the flagged path which may or may not be a nice surprise for my landlord, when he safely returns from England (where I hope no bloodthirsty maniacs are stalking him!). How I longed to have him (my gardener, not my landlord) wear a great big turban, and shalwars, and an ankle bracelet. I would certainly have him attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king - or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit). You will chide me, my modest man, for writing so much about you in this note, but I feel I must pay you this tribute. After all, you saved my life. You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood - (Superstitiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.)
In his Razgovory N. K. Zagryazhskoy ("The Talks of N. K. Zagryazhski," 1835) Pushkin (a poet who, like Dumas, had African blood) quotes the words of Natalia Kirillovna Zagryazhski (1747-1837, a lady-in-waiting of Catherine II) "Orlov was a regicide at heart, it was like a bad habit:"
Orloff était régicide dans l'âme, c'était comme une mauvaise habitude. Я встретилась с ним в Дрездене, в загородном саду. Он сел подле меня на лавочке. Мы разговорились о Павле I. «Что за урод? Как это его терпят?» — «Ах, батюшка, да что же ты прикажешь делать? ведь не задушить же его?» — «А почему же нет, матушка?» — «Как! и ты согласился бы, чтобы дочь твоя Анна Алексеевна вмешалась в это дело?» — «Не только согласился бы, а был бы очень тому рад». Вот каков был человек!
One of the murderers of Peter III (the husband of Catherine II, father of Paul I), brother of Grigoriy Orlov (a favorite of Catherine II, one of the five Orlov brothers who helped Catherine II to ascend the throne), Alexey Orlov (whom Natalia Zagryazhski met in Dresden in the late 1790s) suggested that the tsar Paul I (who corresponds to Uran the Last, Emperor of Zembla, an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top and who was dispatched one night by a group of his sister's united favorites) should be strangled. The surname Orlov comes from oryol (eagle). Shade's parents were ornithologists. At the beginning (and, presumably, at the end) of his poem Shade calls himself "the shadow of the waxwing." According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), kinbote means in Zemblan "a king's destroyer:"
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. (note to Line 894)
At the beginning of VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastain's half-brother V. mentions Olga Olegovna Orlova, an old Russian lady who happened to show him in Paris the diary she had kept in the past:
Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December 1899, in the former capital of my country. An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. So uneventful had those years been (apparently) that the collecting of daily details (which is always a poor method of self-preservation) barely surpassed a short description of the day's weather; and it is curious to note in this respect that the personal diaries of sovereigns – no matter what troubles beset their realms – are mainly concerned with the same subject. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I am able to state that the morning of Sebastian's birth was a fine windless one, with twelve degrees (Réaumur) below zero… this is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova – an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold. (Chapter One)
Olga Olegovna Orlova brings to mind Oleg Orlov (in VN's novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974, a Soviet spy who accompanies Vadim Vadimovich in his incognito trip to Leningrad) and Oleg Gusev (in Pale Fire, Charles Xavier Vseslav's playmate and first lover who was killed at fifteen in a toboggan accident). The surname Gusev comes from gus' (goose). Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov. The characters in Chekhov’s Rasskaz neizvestnogo cheloveka (“The Story of an Unknown Man,” 1893) include Orlov. In Chekhov’s story Dama s sobachkoy (“The Lady with the Lapdog,” 1899) Gurov, as he speaks to his daughter, a schoolgirl, uses the phrase tri gradusa (three degrees):
— Теперь три градуса тепла, а между тем идет снег, — говорил Гуров дочери. — Но ведь это тепло только на поверхности земли, в верхних же слоях атмосферы совсем другая температура.
“It’s three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,” said Gurov to his daughter. “The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in the atmosphere.” (chapter IV)
The name of Shade's muderer, Gradus means in Russian "degree." Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). 1915 − 1898 = 17. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday), written at the Mikhailovski Castle (where Paul I was assassinated on a March night of 1801), to his brother Dostoevski twice uses the word gradus (degree):
Философию не надо полагать простой математической задачей, где неизвестное - природа... Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Philosophy should not be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity… Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!..
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions Nova Zembla and the prisoner Dostoevski:
The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where “Nabokov’s River” is named after my ancestor. The memory of the leader of the expedition is preserved in quite a number of place names, one of them being Golovnin’s Lagoon, Seward Peninsula, W. Alaska, from where a butterfly, Parnassius phoebus golovinus (rating a big sic), has been described by Dr. Holland; but my great-grandfather has nothing to show except that very blue, almost indigo blue, even indignantly blue, little river winding between wet rocks; for he soon left the navy, n’ayant pas le pied marin (as says my cousin Sergey Sergeevich who informed me about him), and switched to the Moscow Guards. He married Anna Aleksandrovna Nazimov (sister of the Decembrist). I know nothing about his military career; whatever it was, he could not have competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787–1852), one of the heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin’s schoolmate and close friend. Careful, printers: two “chin” ’s and one “kin.” (Chapter Three, 1)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (Guards is an anagram of 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”). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. In fact, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderder Gradus seem to be 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 (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 October 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. Incidentally, Countess Elizaveta Vorontsov was the mistress of Peter III; in Odessa Pushkin was in love with Vorontsov's wife Eliza. Voron is Russian for "raven" and vorona means "crow" (cf. the korona-vorona-korova and crown-crow-cow series mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary).
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 (note to Line 17). Vinograd (1824) is a poem by Pushkin. "Vinogradus" brings to mind Orlovius, a character in VN’s novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934). The novel's narrator and main character, Hermann Karlovich kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. According to Orlovius (the insurance agent), the chief thing by him is optimismus:
Он одобрил принятое мной и тут же осуществлённое решение, которое к тому же он сам давно советовал мне принять. Неделю спустя я пригласил его к нам обедать. Заложил угол салфетки сбоку за воротник. Принимаясь за суп, выразил неудовольствие по поводу политических событий. Лида ветрено спросила его, будет ли война и с кем. Он посмотрел на нее поверх очков, медля ответом (таким приблизительно он просквозил в начале этой главы), и наконец ответил:
"Тяжело сказать, но мне кажется, что это исключено. Когда я молод был, я пришел на идею предположить только самое лучшее, – ("лучшее" у него вышло чрезвычайно грустно и жирно). – Я эту идею держу с тех пор. Главная вещь у меня – это оптимизмус".
"Что как раз необходимо при вашей профессии", – сказал я с улыбкой.
Он исподлобья посмотрел на меня и серьезно ответил:
"Но пессимизмус даёт нам клиентов".
A week later I asked him [Orlovius] to dinner. He tucked the corner of his napkin sideways into his collar. While tackling his soup, he expressed displeasure with the trend of political events. Lydia breezily inquired whether there would be any war and with whom? He looked at her over his spectacles, taking his time (such, more or less, was the glimpse you caught of him at the beginning of this chapter) and finally answered: “It is heavy to say, but I think war excluded. When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best” (he all but turned “best” into “pest,” so gross were his lip-consonants). “I hold this idea always. The chief thing by me is optimismus.”
“Which comes in very handy, seeing your profession,” said I with a smile.
He lowered at me and replied quite seriously:
“But it is pessimismus that gives clients to us.” (Chapter Three)
In Chekhov’s story Dom s mezoninom (“The House with the Mezzanine,” 1896) Belokurov talks of the disease of the century—pessimism:
Белокуров длинно, растягивая «э-э-э-э...», заговорил о болезни века — пессимизме. Говорил он уверенно и таким тоном, как будто я спорил с ним. Сотни верст пустынной, однообразной, выгоревшей степи не могут нагнать такого уныния, как один человек, когда он сидит, говорит и неизвестно, когда он уйдёт.
— Дело не в пессимизме и не в оптимизме, — сказал я раздраженно, — а в том, что у девяноста девяти из ста нет ума.
Belokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
'Pessimism or optimism have nothing to do with it,' I said, irritably. 'The point is, ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no brains.' (chapter II)