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) quotes the first two lines of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) in Zemblan translation:
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.
Zemblan for "father," votchez seems to be related to votchim, the obsolete form of otchim (Russ., stepfather). In VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev calls Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz’s stepfather) tvoy votchim (your stepfather):
Вечером он был приглашен к Чернышевским, но Александра Яковлевна в последнюю минуту его отменила: ее муж "лежал в гриппе" с очень высокой температурой. Зина ушла с кем-то в кинематограф, так что он встретился с нею только на следующий вечер. "Первый клин боком, - как сострил бы твой вотчим", - ответил он на ее вопрос о книге и (как писали в старину) передал ей вкратце разговор в редакции. Возмущение, нежность к нему, желание чем-нибудь тотчас помочь выразились у нее порывом возбужденной и предприимчивой энергии. "Ах, так! - воскликнула она. - Хорошо же. Я добуду денег для издания, вот что я сделаю". "Ужин ребенку и гробик отцу", - сказал он, и в другое время она бы обиделась на эту вольную шутку.
That night he was invited to the Chernyshevskis, but Alexandra Yakovlevna put him off at the last minute: her husband was “down with flu” and “ran a high temperature.” Zina had gone to the cinema with someone so that he only met her the next evening. “ ‘Kaput on the first try,’ as your stepfather would put it,” he said in reply to her question about the manuscript and (as they used to write in the old days) briefly recounted his conversation at the editorial office. Indignation, tenderness toward him, the urge to help him immediately, found expression with her in a burst of enterprising energy. “Oh, that’s how it is!” she exclaimed. “All right. I’ll get the money for publication, that’s what I’ll do.”
“For the baby a meal, for the father a coffin,” he said (transposing the words in a line of Nekrasov’s poem about the heroic wife who sells her body to get her husband his supper), and another time she would have taken offense at this bold joke. (Chapter Three)
The action in The Gift takes place in Berlin. In his poem Vsyo kamennoe. V kamennyi prolyot ("Everything is made of stone. Into the arch of stone," 1923) Hodasevich mentions noch' (night), rezkiy veter (the sharp wind), compares Berlin to an ocarina (a kind of flute, its name comes from the Italian for little goose) and calls the German capital machekha rossiyskikh gorodov (the stepmother 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.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet Claudius is Hamlet's uncle and stepfather. In Shakespeare's play the recorders are mentioned:
HAMLET Ay, but sir, 'While the grass grows,'--the proverb is something musty.
Re-enter Players with recorders
O, the recorders! let me see one. To withdraw with you:--why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil? GUILDENSTERN O, my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly.
HAMLET I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET 'Tis 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.
HAMLET Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. (3.2)
"The top of my compass" brings to mind a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony mentioned by Kinbote when he describes Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved):
Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before; and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf, "A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony." And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa's case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all. (note to Lines 433-434)
A compass rose in Russian is roza vetrov (vetrov is Gen. pl. of veter, "wind"). A compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony makes one think of ivory unicorns and ebony fauns mentioned by Shade at the end of Canto Three of his poem:
It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king;
Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high
Flying airplane to plummet from the sky
And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys,
Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is
My firm conviction - "Darling, shut the door.
Had a nice trip?" Splendid - but what is more
I have returned convinced that I can grope
My way to some - to some - "Yes, dear?" Faint hope. (ll. 816-834)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack. According to Kinbote, Shade's heart attack practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct .17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements. (note to Line 691)
Natt (Zemblan for “night”) and votchez (Zemblan for "father") combine to form Les Natchez (1826), a romance by Chateaubriand. In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stul’yev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) Lasker arrives in Vasyuki (as imagined by the Vasyuki chess enthusiasts) descending by parachute:
Вдруг на горизонте была усмотрена чёрная точка. Она быстро приближалась и росла, превратившись в большой изумрудный парашют. Как большая редька, висел на парашютном кольце человек с чемоданчиком.
– Это он! – закричал одноглазый. – Ура! Ура! Ура! Я узнаю великого философа-шахматиста, доктора Ласкера. Только он один во всем мире носит такие зелёные носочки.
Suddenly a black dot was noticed on the horizon. It approached rapidly, growing larger and larger until it finally turned into a large emerald parachute. A man with an attache case was hanging from the harness, like a huge radish.
"Here he is!" shouted one-eye. "Hooray, hooray, I recognize the great philosopher and chess player Dr. Lasker. He is the only person in the world who wears those green socks." (Chapter 34 “The Interplanetary Chess Tournament”)
The Chernyshevski couple in The Gift, Alexander Yakovlevich and Alexandra Yakovlevna, have the same name and patronymic as goluboy vorishka (the bashful chiseller) and his wife in The Twelve Chairs:
Завхоз 2-го дома Старсобеса был застенчивый ворюга. Всё существо его протестовало против краж, но не красть он не мог. Он крал, и ему было стыдно. Крал он постоянно, постоянно стыдился, и поэтому его хорошо бритые щёчки всегда горели румянцем смущения, стыдливости, застенчивости и конфуза. Завхоза звали Александром Яковлевичем, а жену его – Александрой Яковлевной. Он называл её Сашхен, она звала его Альхен. Свет не видывал ещё такого голубого воришки, как Александр Яковлевич.
The Assistant Warden of the Second Home of Stargorod Social Security Administration was a shy little thief. His whole being protested against stealing, yet it was impossible for him not to steal. He stole and was ashamed of himself. He stole constantly and was constantly ashamed of himself, which was why his smoothly shaven cheeks always burned with a blush of confusion, shame, bashfulness and embarrassment. The assistant warden's name was Alexander Yakovlevich, and his wife's name was Alexandra Yakovlevna. He used to call her Sashchen, and she used to call him Alchen. The world has never seen such a bashful chiseller as Alexander Yakovlevich. (Chapter VIII “The Bashful Chiseller”)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron."
Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull."
Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"
Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." (note to Line 172)