In a conversation at the Faculty Club 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 kinbote means in Zemblan "a king's destroyer" and longs to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that:
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)
In his poem Kiprenskomu ("To Kiprenski," 1827) Pushkin says: Sebya kak v zerkale ya vizhu, / No eto zerkalo mne l'stit (I see myself as in a mirror /
But this mirror flatters me):
Любимец моды легкокрылой,
Хоть не британец, не француз,
Ты вновь создал, волшебник милый,
Меня, питомца чистых муз,
- И я смеюся над могилой,
Ушед навек от смертных уз.
Себя как в зеркале я вижу,
Но это зеркало мне льстит.
Оно гласит, что не унижу
Пристрастья важных аонид.
Так Риму, Дрездену, Парижу
Известен впредь мой будет вид.
The darling of light-winged fashion,
Though not British, not French
You created again, dear wizard,
Me, a pet of pure muses, -
And I laugh at the grave
Gone forever from mortal bonds.
I see myself as in a mirror
But this mirror flatters me.
It says that I will not humiliate
The predilection of serious Aonian maids.
So Rome, Dresden, Paris
Will know henceforth my appearance.
Orest Kiprenski (1782-1836) is the author of Pushkin's portrait. Portret ("The Portrait," 1835) is a story by Gogol. 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.
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”).
Kiprenski's portrait of Pushkin was ordered by Delvig. At the end of his Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830) Pushkin mentions his friend Delvig:
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)
Stern Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in exile. In his Epitafiya mladentsu ("Epitaph for an Infant," 1828) Pushkin mentions izgnanie zemnoe (the earthly exile):
В сиянье, в радостном покое,
У трона вечного Творца,
С улыбкой он глядит в изгнание земное,
Благословляет мать и молит за отца.
In radiance, in joyful rest,
at the throne of the eternal Creator,
he looks with a smile into the earthly exile,
blesses his mother and prays for his father.
The child's parents were the Decembrist Sergey Volkonski and his wife Maria (born Raevski) who followed her husband into his Siberian exile. Pushkin was born in 1799, during the reign of 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). In his first great ode Vol'nost' ("To Liberty," 1817) Pushkin describes the assassination of Paul I on a March night of 1801. In his Razgovory N. K. Zagryazhskoy ("The Talks of N. K. Zagryazhski," 1835) Pushkin 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!
Natalia Zagryazhski (the aunt of Pushkin's mother-in-law) met Alexey Orlov (one of the murderers of Tsar Peter III) in the late 1790s, in Dresden. In the penultimate line of his poem To Kiprenski Pushkin mentions Rome, Dresden and Paris. In the epilogue of Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862) Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov moves to Dresden. Pavel Petrovich is the name and patronymic of Tsar Paul I. Turgenev (who died in 1883, in Paris) brings to mind the Zemblan king Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid:
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid. K's grandfather, d. 1900 at seventy-five, after a long dull reign; sponge-bag-capped, and with only one medal on his Jaegar jacket, he liked to bicycle in the park; stout and bald, his nose like a congested plum, his martial mustache bristing with obsolete passion, garbed in a dressing gown of green silk, and carrying a flambeau in his raised hand, he used to meet, every night, during a short period in the middle-Eighties, his hooded mistress, Iris Acht (q. v.) midway between palace and theater in the secret passage later to be rediscovered by his grandson, 130. (Index)
Acht is German for "eight." In his poem Ya rodilsya v Moskve ("I was born in Moscow," 1923) Hodasevich says that his homeland is in the eight slim volumes of Pushkin's works and mentions izgnanie (exile):
Я родился в Москве. Я дыма
Над польской кровлей не видал,
И ладанки с землей родимой
Мне мой отец не завещал.
России – пасынок, а Польше –
Не знаю сам, кто Польше я.
Но: восемь томиков, не больше, –
И в них вся родина моя.
Вам – под ярмо ль подставить выю
Иль жить в изгнании, в тоске.
А я с собой свою Россию
В дорожном уношу мешке.
Вам нужен прах отчизны грубый,
А я где б ни был – шепчут мне
Арапские святые губы
О небывалой стороне.
In the last stanza of his poem Pered zerkalom ("In Front of the Mirror," 1925), with the epigraph from Dante's Divine Comedy, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (Midway upon the journey of our life), Hodasevich mentions parizhskiy cherdak (the Paris attic):
Да, меня не пантера прыжками
На парижский чердак загнала.
И Виргилия нет за плечами, —
Только есть одиночество — в раме
Говорящего правду стекла.
Yes, it was not a panther that
drove me with leaps to this Paris attic.
And Virgil is not at my shoulder.
There is only Loneliness — framed
In the looking glass, speaking the truth.
Describing Gradus' visit to Oswin Bretwit (the former Zemblan consul in Paris), Kinbote mentions the roofs of Paris:
But to return to the roofs of Paris. Courage was allied in Oswin Bretwit with integrity kindness, dignity, and what can be euphemistically called endearing naïveté. When Gradus telephoned from the airport, and to whet his appetite read to him Baron B.'s message (minus the Latin tag), Bretwit's only thought was for the treat in store for him. Gradus had declined to say over the telephone what exactly the "precious papers" were, but it so happened that the ex-consul had been hoping lately to retrieve a valuable stamp collection that his father had bequeathed years ago to a now defunct cousin. The cousin had dwelt in the same house as Baron B., and with all these complicated and entrancing matters uppermost in his mind, the ex-consul, while awaiting his visitor, kept wondering not if the person from Zembla was a dangerous fraud, but whether he would bring all the albums at once or would do it gradually so as to see what he might get for his pains. Bretwit hoped the business would be completed that very night since on the following morning he was to be hospitalized and possibly operated upon (he was, and died under the knife). (note to Line 286)
Sous les toits de Paris (“Under the Roofs of Paris,” 1930) is a French film directed by René Clair. The world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla, Odon is directing the making of a cinema picture in Paris:
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! (note to Line 171)
According to Kinbote, exile can become 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.)
The old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince makes one think of The Moorish Chief (1878), a painting by Eduard Charlemont, an Austrian painter (1848-1906). In his Eugene Onegin Commentary VN describes the events that led to Pushkin's fatal duel and mentions Vienna society that had found great fun in conferring on people various absurd certificates. A coterie of effeminate young men decided to renew the fad in St. Petersburg. A member of this giggling clique, Prince Pyotr Dolgoruki (nicknamed in society le bancal, "bowlegs"), cooked up an anonymous letter that Pushkin and his friends received on Nov. 4, 1836:
Les Grands-Croix, Commandeurs et Chevaliers du Sérénissime Ordre des Cocus, réunis en grand Chapitre sous la présidence du vénérable grand-Maître de l'Ordre, S. E. D. L. Narychkine, ont nommea l'unanimité Mr. Alexandre Pouchkine coadjuteur du grand Maitre de l'Ordre de Cocus et historiographe del Ordre.
Le sécrétaire perpetuel: C-te J. Borch".
The secretary is Count Joseph Borch: him and his wife, Lyubov, the monde dubbed a model couple because "she lived with the coachman, and he with the postilion." The venerable Grand Master is His Excellency Dmitri Lvovich Naryshkin, whose wife, Maria, had been the mistress of Tsar Alexander I for many years. It is surmised that this "certificate" should be construed in the sense that Pushkin had been cocufied by the tsar. This was not so. Although the potentate had had his eye on Natalia Pushkin even before she married, she is thought to have become his mistress for a brief spell only after our poet's death. (vol. III, pp. 48-49)
The venerable Grand Master brings to mind “the venerable Duke” (as Kinbote calls his uncle Conmal, the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare):
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
Pushkin died on Jan. 29, 1837, two days after his duel with d’Anthès. In his poem January 29th, 1837 Tyutchev calls d’Anthès tsareubiytsa (regicide), summons peace onto the Poet’s shade and says that Russia’s heart, like first love, will never forget Pushkin:
Из чьей руки свинец смертельный
Поэту сердце растерзал?
Кто сей божественный фиал
Разрушил, как сосуд скудельный?
Будь прав или виновен он
Пред нашей правдою земною,
Навек он высшею рукою
В «цареубийцы» заклеймен.
Но ты, в безвременную тьму
Вдруг поглощенная со света,
Мир, мир тебе, о тень поэта,
Мир светлый праху твоему!..
Назло людскому суесловью
Велик и свят был жребий твой!..
Ты был богов орган живой,
Но с кровью в жилах... знойной кровью.
И сею кровью благородной
Ты жажду чести утолил –
И осененный опочил
Хоругвью горести народной.
Вражду твою пусть Тот рассудит,
Кто слышит пролитую кровь...
Тебя ж, как первую любовь,
России сердце не забудет!..
Who fired the shot?
Who stilled the life which quivered
in the poet’s heart?
In whose hands was the fragile phial shivered?
Innocent or deserving blame,
in the eyes of earthly justice
and branded forever by heaven,
Regicide will be his name.
Into a dark, timeless deep
you were suddenly swept from existence.
Peace to you, the poet’s shade!
I wish you bright peace in your sleep.
In spite of vain discourse,
your lot has been divine and great.
You were the god’s mouthpiece,
but you lived. In your veins, warm blood coursed!
This noble blood has silenced jeers
staining honour’s name.
Now in the sacred shade you rest,
beneath the banner of our people’s tears.
Let Him pass judgement!
He can hear the flow of blood spilled.
You will be first love in a youthful breast:
in Russia’s heart eternally dear!
(transl. F. Jude)