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) speaks of Charles Xavier’s chaste romance with Fleur de Fyler and mentions his new boy pages from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland:
It was warm in the evening sun. She wore on the second day of their ridiculous cohabitation nothing except a kind of buttonless and sleeveless pajama top. The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy) irritated him, and while pacing about and pondering his coronation speech, he would toss towards her, without looking, her shorts or a terrycloth robe. Sometimes, upon returning to the comfortable old chair he would find her in it contemplating sorrowfully the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior) in the history book. He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty sunbeam; but after a while she tried to cuddle up to him, and he had to push away her burrowing dark curly head with one hand while writing with the other or detach one by one her little pink claws from his sleeve or sash.
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur’s naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland. (note to Line 80)
Equal Troth is a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) included in his sonnet sequence The House of Life:
Not by one measure mayst thou mete our love;
For how should I be loved as I love thee?-
I, graceless, joyless, lacking absolutely
All gifts that with thy queenship best behove;-
Thou, throned in every heart's elect alcove,
And crowned with garlands culled from every tree,
Which for no head but thine, by Love's decree,
All beauties and all mysteries interwove.
But here thine eyes and lips yield soft rebuke:-
'Then only,' (say'st thou), 'could I love thee less,
When thou couldst doubt my love's equality.'
Peace, sweet! If not to sum but worth we look,
Thy heart's transcendence, not my heart's excess,
Then more a thousandfold thou lov'st than I.
Tuscany is a region in central Italy. The capital of Tuscany, Florence is the home city of Dante Alighieri (1365-1421). Pushkin's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830) begins with the line Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta (Stern Dante did not scorn the sonnet). Dante's guide in The Divine Comedy, Virgil "probably preferred a lad’s perineum" (as Humbert Humbert puts it in VN's novel Lolita, 1955). One of the most famous exiled poets, Dante spent his last years and died in Ravenna. At the end of his poem Ravenna from the cycle Ital'yanskie stikhi ("The Italian Verses," 1909) Alexander Blok mentions Dante's shade with the eagle profile that sings to him of the New Life:
Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.
Only at night, bending over the vallies
and counting the centuries to come,
Dante's shade with the eagle profile
Sings to me of the New Life.
Albanoland seems to hint at Albania, but Albanoland and Lang (the artist who made a portrait of Shade’s wife Sybil; lang is German for “long”) make one think of Alba Longa, an ancient city of Latium in central Italy, 19 km SE of Rome. The legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (the twins who were suckled by a she-wolf and fed by a woodpecker), had come from the royal dynasty of Alba Longa, which in Virgil’s Aeneid had been the bloodline of Aeneas, a son of Venus. In Gogol’s fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Annunciata is albanka (a girl from Albano, a suburb of Rome on the Alban Hills). At the beginning of Rome Gogol compares Annunciata’s black eyes to molniya (a lightning):
Попробуй взглянуть на молнию, когда, раскроивши чёрные как уголь тучи, нестерпимо затрепещет она целым потопом блеска. Таковы очи у альбанки Аннунциаты. Всё напоминает в ней те античные времена, когда оживлялся мрамор и блистали скульптурные резцы.
Molnii iskusstva (“The Flashes of Lightning of Art”) is a series of essays written by Blok after his journey in Italy. In one of his poems on Florence Blok mentions tsvety (the flowers in dismal bloom) and says that only v lyogkom chelnoke iskusstva (in the light boat of art) one can escape from the world’s boredom:
Под зноем флорентийской лени
Ещё беднее чувством ты:
Молчат церковные ступени,
Цветут нерадостно цветы.
Так береги остаток чувства,
Храни хоть творческую ложь:
Лишь в лёгком челноке искусства
От скуки мира уплывёшь.
According to G. Ivanov, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda" Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his fragment Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions sonetto colla coda (a tailed sonnet):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться на-смерть 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 (Вот умерший великий поэт! вот его сонет с хвостом).
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as “sonnet with the tail” (con la coda) when the idea cannot be expressed in fourteen lines and entails an appendix which can be longer than the sonnet itself:
В италиянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), когда мысль не вместилась и ведёт 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”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Blok. In fact, not only Line 1001, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can be regarded as a coda to Shade's poem.