Describing the forty days after Queen Blenda’s death, 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 a volume of Historia Zemblica and the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior) in the history book:
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all the time, had him attend table-turning séances with an experienced American medium, séances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly struggled at all. The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower. This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. For other needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to mend a broken viola d’amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father’s ample chair, his legs over its arms, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order.
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.
He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young – little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.
On the third night a great stomping and ringing of arms came from the inner stairs, and there burst in the Prime Councilor, three Representatives of the People, and the chief of a new bodyguard. Amusingly, it was the Representatives of the People whom the idea of having for queen the granddaughter of a fiddler infuriated the most. That was the end of Charles Xavier's chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus). With their white suitcases and obsolete musical instruments the two ladies wandered back to the annex of the Palace. There followed a sweet twang of relief - and then the door of the anteroom slid open with a merry crash and the whole heap of putti tumbled in. (note to Line 80)
Zemblan for ancient warrior, bogtur hints at bogatyr', a stock character in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a Western European knight-errant. In his Epigram (1817) on Karamzin (the author of the twelve-volume History of the Russian State) Pushkin asks Karamzin to finish for us Ilya the Bogatyr:
«Послушайте: я сказку вам начну
Про Игоря и про его жену,
Про Новгород и Царство Золотое,
А может быть про Грозного царя...»
— И, бабушка, затеяла пустое!
Докончи нам «Илью-богатыря».
"Listen, I'll begin for you a fairy tale
about Igor and his wife,
about Novgorod and the Golden Kingdom,
and perhaps about Ivan the Terrible..."
-- Eh, grandmother, you started a useless business!
Finish for us "Ilya the Bogatyr."
By Ilya the Bogatyr' Pushkin means Karamzin's poem Ilya Muromets ("Ilya of Murom," 1794) that was never completed. Karamzin's poem is subtitled Bogatyrskaya skazka (a heroic fairy tale) and has an epigraph from La Fontaine:
Le monde est vieux, dit on: je
le crois; cependant
Il le faul arnuser encore comme
un enfant.
La Fontaine
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and mentions Lafontaine:
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous. Espied on a pine's bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant. That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song. (ll. 235-244)
The poet's daughter, Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. In Karamzin's sentimental tale Bednaya Liza ("Poor Liza," 1792) the heroine, spurned by a frivolous nobleman graced with the comedy name of Erast, drowns herself in a moonlit pond. In "pederast" there is Erast. A homosexual, Kinbote loves little boys.
In another Epigram (1818) on Karamzin Pushkin mentions prelesti knuta (the charms of a whip):
В его «Истории» изящность, простота
Доказывают нам, без всякого пристрастья,
Необходимость самовластья
И прелести кнута.
In his "History" the elegance, simplicity
prove to us, without any bias,
the necessity of autocracy
and the charms of a whip.
Describing the Zemblan Revolution, Kinbote mentions a wild letter from Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) in which there happened to be one sentimental sentence:
When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police, translated into crude Zemblan by a Hindu member of the Extremist party, and then read aloud to the royal captive in a would-be ironic voice by the preposterous commandant of the palace. There happened to be in that letter one - only one, thank God - sentimental sentence: "I want you to know that no matter how much you hurt me, you cannot hurt my love," and this sentence (if we re-English it from the Zemblan) came out as: "I desire you and love when you flog me." He interrupted the commandant, calling him a buffoon and a rogue, and insulting everybody around so dreadfully that the Extremists had to decide fast whether to shoot him at once or let him have the original of the letter. (note to Lines 433-434)
Queen Disa and Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Her husband, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadezhda means "hope" and lastochka means "swallow." In Shakespeare’s history play Richard III Richmond says that true hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings. (Act V, scene 2)
In a letter of June 11, 1831, to Vyazemski Pushkin asks Vyazemski if Sofia Karamzin (the historian's daughter) reigns on the saddle and quotes King Richard's famous words at the end of Shakespeare’s play (5.4):
Что Софья Николаевна? царствует на седле? A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!
In a classical Russian translation “My kingdom for a horse!” (King Richard’s words) is pol-tsarstva za konya (half of my kingdom for a horse). In his epigram on Count Vorontsov (the Governor of New Russia and Pushkin's boss in Odessa) Pushkin calls Vorontsov polu-milord, polu-kupets, polu-mudrets, polu-nevezhda, polu-podlets (half-milord, half-merchant, half-sage, half-ignoramus, half-blackguard) and says that there is a hope that he will be full at last. There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum) Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again.
“A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” is the epigraph to Vyazemski's poem Progulka v stepi ("A Ride in the Steppe," 1831). In 1888 Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for his story Step’ (“The Steppe”). Queen Disa’s favorite lady-in-waiting, Fleur de Fyler brings to mind Fleur-de-Lys, a character in V. Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831) whose name hints at fleur-de-lis (a stylized lily often used as a heraldic symbol). Chekhov’s story Tysyacha odna strast’, ili Strashnaya noch’ (“A Thousand and One Passions, or The Terrible Night,” 1880), a parody of Gothic story, is dedicated to Victor Hugo. Shade's poem consists of 999 lines and 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 Alexander Blok. Blok is the author of Sirin i Alkonost, ptitsy radosti i pechali (“Sirin and Alkonost, the Birds of Joy and Sorrow,” 1899), a poem inspired by a painting of Viktor Vasnetsov. Sirin was VN’s Russian nom de plume. Bogatyri ("The Bogatyrs," 1898) is a painting by Vasnetsov.
Btw., bogtur also makes one think of Buy-tur Vsevolod (Wild Bull Vsevolod), Igor's brother in Slovo o polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign"). In 1180-96 Vsevolod Svyatoslavovich (1155-96) was the Prince of Kursk. One is tempted to assume that Vsevolod Botkin's patronymic is Svyatoslavovich.
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and Charles Xavier Vseslav's coronation bring to mind the lines in Blok's poem O net, ne raskolduesh’ serdtsa ty… (“Oh no! You cannot disenchant my heart...” 1912):
И тень моя пройдёт перед тобою
В девятый день, и в день сороковой -
Неузнанной, красивой, неживою.
Такой ведь ты искала? - Да, такой.
And suddenly you’ll see my shade appear
Before you on the ninth and fortieth day:
Unrecognized, handsome and drear,
The kind of shade you looked for, by the way!
In the third stanza of his poem Khudozhnik ("The Artist," 1913) Blok mentions siriny rayskie (the paradisical sirins):
С моря ли вихрь? Или сирины райские
В листьях поют? Или время стоит?
Или осыпали яблони майские
Снежный свой цвет? Или ангел летит?