Describing his escape from Zembla, 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 the Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains:
The Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness), divides it into two parts, the flourishing eastern region of Onhava and other townships, such as Aros and Grindelwod, and the much narrower western strip with its quaint fishing hamlets and pleasant beach resorts. The two coasts are connected by two asphalted highways; the older one shirks difficulties by running first along the eastern slopes northward to Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla, and only then turning west at the northmost point of the peninsula; the newer one, an elaborate, twisting, marvelously graded road, traverses the range westward from just north of Onhava to Bregberg, and is termed in tourist booklets a "scenic drive." Several trails cross the mountains at various points and lead to passes none of which exceeds an altitude of five thousand feet; a few peaks rise some two thousand feet higher and retain their snow in midsummer; and from one of them, the highest and hardest, Mt. Glitterntin, one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east, beyond the Gulf of Surprise, a dim iridescence which some say is Russia. (note to Line 149)
In music, the range, or chromatic range, of a musical instrument is the distance from the lowest to the highest pitch it can play. The gata bera (also known as the wedding drum), the yak bera and the dandu bera are traditional Sri Lankan musical instruments. All of them are drums. When he climbs the mountains of the Bera Range, the king keeps repeating the lines of Goethe's Erlkönig both in Zemblan and German as a chance accompaniment of drumming fatigue and anxiety:
Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind
This line, and indeed the whole passage (line 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. One cannot sufficiently admire the ingenious way in which Shade manages to transfer something of the broken rhythm of the ballad (a trisyllabic meter at heart) into his iambic verse:
662 Who rídes so láte in the níght and the wind
663 …………………………………………………………………..
664 .... Ít is the fáther with his child
Goethe's two lines opening the poem come out most exactly and beautifully, with the bonus of an unexpected rhyme (also in French: vent - enfant), in my own language:
Ret wóren ok spoz on nátt ut vétt?
Éto est vótchez ut míd ik détt.
Another fabulous ruler, the last king of Zembla, kept repeating these haunting lines to himself both in Zemblan and German, as a chance accompaniment of drumming fatigue and anxiety, while he climbed through the bracken belt of the dark mountains he had to traverse in his bid for freedom.
Goethe's poem was set to music by Schubert. In his poem V tot vecher ne gudel strel’chatyi les organa… (“The organ’s gothic forest kept quiet that night…” 1917) Mandelshtam mentions Schubert:
Du, Doppelgänger, du, bleicher Geselle!..
В тот вечер не гудел стрельчатый лес органа.
Нам пели Шуберта — родная колыбель!
Шумела мельница, и в песнях урагана
Смеялся музыки голубоглазый хмель!
Старинной песни мир — коричневый, зелёный,
Но только вечно-молодой,
Где соловьиных лип рокочущие кроны
С безумной яростью качает царь лесной.
И сила страшная ночного возвращенья —
Та песня дикая, как чёрное вино:
Это двойник — пустое привиденье —
Бессмысленно глядит в холодное окно!
The organ’s gothic arches kept quiet that night.
They sang to us from Schubert—dear cozy cradle!
The mill rasped, the hurricane sang
with boozy blue-eyed laughter.
The world of ancient song: green and brown
but only ever-young,
where with insane fury the forest-king
rocks the rumbling tops of nightingale-filled lindens.
And the terrible power of nighttime return,
that wild song, like black wine:
That's the double—empty apparition—
who looks, senseless, into my cold window.
(transl. Piper Wheeler)
The epigraph to Mandelshtam's poem is from Heine’s poem “Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen..." ("The night is quiet, the streets are calm...") that was also set to music by Schubert. Starinnoy pesni mir – korichnevyi, zelyonyi (the old song’s brown and green world) brings to mind “the man in green” and “the man in brown,” as Kinbote calls Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus a lift to Kinbote's house) and Gradus (Shade’s murderer):
Our pursuer made for the nearest stairs - and soon found himself among the bewitched hush of Rare Books. The room was beautiful and had no doors; in fact, some moments passed before he could discover the draped entrance he himself had just used. The awful perplexities of his quest blending with the renewal of impossible pangs in his belly, he dashed back - ran three steps down and nine steps up, and burst into a circular room where a bald-headed suntanned professor in a Hawaiian shirt sat at a round table reading with an ironic expression on his face a Russian book. He paid no attention to Gradus who traversed the room, stepped over a fat little white dog without awakening it, clattered down a helical staircase and found himself in Vault P. Here, a well-lit, pipe-lined, white-washed passage led hint to the sudden paradise of a water closet for plumbers or lost scholars where, cursing, he hurriedly transferred his automatic from its precarious dangle-pouch to his coat and relieved himself of another portion of the liquid hell inside him. He started to climb up again, and noticed in the temple light of the stacks an employee, a slim Hindu boy, with a call card in his hand. I had never spoken to that lad but had felt more than once his blue-brown gaze upon me, and no doubt my academic pseudonym was familiar to him but some sensitive cell in him, some chord of intuition, reacted to the harshness of the killer's interrogation and, as if protecting me from a cloudy danger, he smiled and said: "I do not know him, sir."
Gradus returned to the Main Desk.
"Too bad," said the girl, "I just saw him leave."
"Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy," muttered Gradus, who sometimes at moments of stress used Russian ejaculations.
"You'll find him in the directory," she said pushing it towards him, and dismissing the sick man's existence to attend to the wants of Mr. Gerald Emerald who was taking out a fat bestseller in a cellophane jacket.
Moaning and shifting from one foot to the other, Gradus started leafing through the college directory but when he found the address, he was faced with the problem of getting there.
"Dulwich Road," he cried to the girl. "Near? Far? Very far, probably?"
"Are you by any chance Professor Pnin's new assistant?" asked Emerald.
"No," said the girl. "This man is looking for Dr. Kinbote, I think. You are looking for Dr. Kinbote, aren't you?"
"Yes, and I can't any more," said Gradus.
"I thought so," said the girl. "Doesn't he live somewhere near Mr. Shade, Gerry?"
"Oh, definitely," said Gerry, and turned to the killer: "I can drive you there if you like. It is on my way."
Did they talk in the car, these two characters, the man in green and the man in brown? Who can say? They did not. After all, the drive took only a few minutes (it took me, at the wheel of my powerful Kramler, four and a half).
"I think I'll drop you here," said Mr. Emerald. "It's that house up there."
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels. As he began hurriedly fumbling at the car door, unfastidious Emerald leaned, close to him, across him almost merging with him, to help him open it--and then, slamming it shut again, whizzed on to some tryst in the valley. My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer; he will appreciate them even more if I tell him that, according to the legend spread later by the police, Jack Grey had been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a lonesome trucker! One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library--or in Mr. Emerald's car. (note to Line 949)
Bera = bear = bare. The coat of arms of Berlin shows a black bear on a white shield. On top of the shield is a special crown, created by the amalgamation of the mural crown of a city with the so-called people's crown (Volkskrone), used in Germany to denote a republic. In his poem Vsyo kamennoe. V kamennyi prolyot ("Everything is made of stone. Into the arch of stone," 1923) Hodasevich compares Berlin to an ocarina (a kind of flute, its name comes from the Italian word for "little goose") and calls the German capital machekha rossiyskikh gorodov (the step-mother of Russian cities):
Всё каменное. В каменный пролет
Уходит ночь. В подъездах, у ворот –
Как изваянья – слипшиеся пары.
И тяжкий вздох. И тяжкий дух сигары.
Бренчит о камень ключ, гремит засов.
Ходи по камню до пяти часов,
Жди: резкий ветер дунет в окарино
По скважинам громоздкого Берлина –
И грубый день взойдет из-за домов
Над мачехой российских городов.
Hodasevich's poem and Mandelshtam's collection Kamen' ("Stone," 1915) remind one of the red-capped steinmann mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
He was still chuckling over the wench's discomfiture when he came to the tremendous stones amassed around a small lake which he had reached once or twice from the rocky Kronberg side many years ago. Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but; oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulderblades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on. But his heart was a conical ache poking him from below in the throat, and after a while he stopped again to take stock of conditions and decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks. He elected the second route and in due course reached the pass. (note to Line 149)
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)
In Shakespeare's Hamlet Claudius tells the Queen: "Gertrude, do not drink." According to Kinbote, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan (God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). In his famous monologue in Shakespeare's play Hamlet repeats the word "bear" three times and mentions "a bare bodkin." Hamlet tells Guildenstern (Hamlet's former fellow student at Wittenberg) that playing the recorder is as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops. GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.
The last day of Shade's life gently has passed in a sustained low hum of harmony:
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (ll. 963-976)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart twice mentions harmony:
М о ц а р т
За твоё
Здоровье, друг, за искренний союз,
Связующий Моцарта и Сальери,
Двух сыновей гармонии.
(Пьёт.)
Mozart
To your health,
My friend, and to the loyal bond
that binds together Mozart and Salieri,
two sons of harmony.
(Scene II)
Моцарт
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! но нет; тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
Mozart
If all could feel like you the power of harmony!
But no: the world could not go on then. None
Would bother with the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art.
(ibid.)
A phrase used by Mozart, nikto b (none would) is Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse.