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 Arnor’s poem about a miragarl (mirage girl), for which a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give tri stana verbalala (three hundred camels) ut tri phantana (and three fountains):
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin.
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 arm, 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. (note to Line 80)
Verbalala seems to blend verblyud (Russ., camel) with balalaika. In the "Fragments from Onegin's Journey" Pushkin mentions verblyud (the camel) that lies in the cliff's shade:
Онегин едет в Астрахань и оттуда на Кавказ.
Он видит: Терек своенравный
Крутые роет берега;
Пред ним парит орел державный,
Стоит олень, склонив рога;
Верблюд лежит в тени утеса,
В лугах несется конь черкеса,
И вкруг кочующих шатров
Пасутся овцы калмыков,
Вдали — кавказские громады:
К ним путь открыт. Пробилась брань
За их естественную грань,
Чрез их опасные преграды;
Брега Арагвы и Куры
Узрели русские шатры.
Onegin fares to Astrahan [XI], and from there to the Caucasus:
[XII]
He sees the wayward Térek
eroding its steep banks;
before him soars a stately eagle,
a deer stands, with bent horns;
the camel lies in the cliff's shade;
in meadows courses the Circassian's steed,
and round nomadic tents
the sheep of Kalmuks graze.
Afar [loom] the Caucasian masses.
The way to them is clear. War penetrated
beyond their natural divide,
across their perilous barriers.
The banks of the Arágva and Kurá
saw Russian tents.
At the beginning of his poem Mtsyri (1840) Lermontov compares the Aragva and Kura to two sisters. Feur de Fyler has a sister Fifalda (whose name means in old English "butterfly"). In the "Fragments of Onegin's Journey" Pushkin says that he is fond now of the balalaika:
Иные нужны мне картины:
Люблю песчаный косогор,
Перед избушкой две рябины,
Калитку, сломанный забор,
На небе серенькие тучи,
Перед гумном соломы кучи
Да пруд под сенью ив густых,
Раздолье уток молодых;
Теперь мила мне балалайка
Да пьяный топот трепака
Перед порогом кабака.
Мой идеал теперь — хозяйка,
Мои желания — покой,
Да щей горшок, да сам большой.
[XVIII]
Needful to me are other pictures:
I like a sandy hillside slope,
before a small isba two rowans,
a wicket gate, a broken fence,
up in the sky gray clouds,
before the thrash barn heaps of straw,
and in the shelter of dense willows
a pond — the franchise of young ducks.
I'm fond now of the balalaika
and of the trepak's drunken stomping
before the threshold of the tavern;
now my ideal is a housewife,
my wishes, peace
and “pot of shchi but big myself.”
In the next stanza Pushkin mentions Fountain of Bahchisaray:
Порой дождливою намедни
Я, завернув на скотный двор...
Тьфу! прозаические бредни,
Фламандской школы пестрый сор!
Таков ли был я, расцветая?
Скажи, фонтан Бахчисарая?
Такие ль мысли мне на ум
Навел твой бесконечный шум,
Когда безмолвно пред тобою
Зарему я воображал...
Средь пышных, опустелых зал,
Спустя три года, вслед за мною,
Скитаясь в той же стороне,
Онегин вспомнил обо мне.
[XIX]
The other day, during a rainy spell,
as I had dropped into the cattle yard —
Fie! Prosy divagations,
the Flemish School's variegated dross!
Was I like that when I was blooming?
Say, Fountain of Bahchisaray!
Were such the thoughts that to my mind
your endless purl suggested
when silently in front of you
Zaréma I imagined?...
Midst the sumptuous deserted halls
after the lapse of three years, in my track
in the same region wandering, Onegin
remembered me.
According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Fleur de Fyler is “defiler of flowers.” In Chapter One (XXXI-XXXII) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin eulogizes female feet and wonders where they now trample vernant blooms:
Когда ж и где, в какой пустыне,
Безумец, их забудешь ты?
Ах, ножки, ножки! где вы ныне?
Где мнете вешние цветы?
Взлелеяны в восточной неге,
На северном, печальном снеге
Вы не оставили следов:
Любили мягких вы ковров
Роскошное прикосновенье.
Давно ль для вас я забывал
И жажду славы и похвал,
И край отцов, и заточенье?
Исчезло счастье юных лет,
Как на лугах ваш легкий след.
Дианы грудь, ланиты Флоры
Прелестны, милые друзья!
Однако ножка Терпсихоры
Прелестней чем-то для меня.
Она, пророчествуя взгляду
Неоцененную награду,
Влечет условною красой
Желаний своевольный рой.
Люблю ее, мой друг Эльвина,
Под длинной скатертью столов,
Весной на мураве лугов,
Зимой на чугуне камина,
На зеркальном паркете зал,
У моря на граните скал.
So when and where, in what desert, will you
forget them, madman? Little feet,
ah, little feet! Where are you now?
Where do you trample vernant blooms?
Brought up in Oriental mollitude,
on the Northern sad snow
you left no prints:
you liked the sumptuous contact
of yielding rugs.
Is it long since I would forget for you
the thirst for fame and praises,
the country of my fathers, and confinement?
The happiness of youthful years has vanished
as on the meadows your light trace.
Diana's bosom, Flora's cheeks, are charming,
dear friends! Nevertheless, for me
something about it makes more charming
the small foot of Terpsichore.
By prophesying to the gaze
an unpriced recompense,
with token beauty it attracts the willful
swarm of desires.
I like it, dear Elvina,
beneath the long napery of tables,
in springtime on the turf of meads,
in winter on the hearth's cast iron,
on mirrory parquet of halls,
by the sea on granite of rocks.
Moy drug Elvina (dear Elvina) brings to mind Elvina Krummholz, Gordon’s mother mentioned by Kinbote in his Index:
Krummholz, Gordon, b. 1944, a musical prodigy and an amusing pet; son of Joseph Lavender's famous sister, Elvina Krummholz, 408.
Krummholz is the German name of elfinwood (a type of stunted, deformed vegetation encountered in the subarctic and subalpine tree line landscapes). Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, Kinbote mentions matted elfinwood:
He sank down on the grass near a patch of matted elfinwood and inhaled the bright air. The panting dog lay down at his feet. Garh smiled for the first time. Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception. As soon as she had settled beside him, she bent over and pulled over and off her tousled head the thick gray sweater, revealing her naked back and blancmange breasts, and flooded her embarrassed companion with ail the acridity of ungroomed womanhood. She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a gesture and got up. He thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King started to walk up the turfy incline. (note to Line 149)
In Chapter Five (XXXII: 7) of EO Pushkin describes the dinner at Tatiana's nameday party and mentions the meat course and the blancmangér:
Конечно, не один Евгений
Смятенье Тани видеть мог;
Но целью взоров и суждений
В то время жирный был пирог
(К несчастию, пересоленный);
Да вот в бутылке засмоленной,
Между жарким и блан-манже,
Цимлянское несут уже;
За ним строй рюмок узких, длинных,
Подобно талии твоей,
Зизи, кристалл души моей,
Предмет стихов моих невинных,
Любви приманчивый фиал,
Ты, от кого я пьян бывал!
Of course, not only Eugene might have seen
Tanya's confusion; but the target
of looks and comments at the time
was a rich pie
(unfortunately, oversalted);
and here, in bottle sealed with pitch,
between the meat course and the blancmangér,
Tsimlyanski wine is brought already,
followed by an array of narrow, long
wineglasses, similar to your waist,
Zizí, crystal of my soul, object
of my innocent verse,
love's luring vial, you, of whom
drunken I used to be!
According to Kinbote, he is a strict vegetarian:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questionsmere fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hufey, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
Kinbote's tri stana (Zemblan for "three hundred") and Pushkin's stroy ryumok (an array of wineglasses) bring to mind tvoy stroynyi stan (your slender forms) mentioned by Pushkin in the second line of his poem Kogda v ob'yatiya moi ("When I embrace your slender forms," 1830):
Когда в объятия мои
Твой стройный стан я заключаю
И речи нежные любви
Тебе с восторгом расточаю,
Безмолвна, от стесненных рук
Освобождая стан свой гибкой,
Ты отвечаешь, милый друг,
Мне недоверчивой улыбкой;
Прилежно в памяти храня
Измен печальные преданья,
Ты без участья и вниманья
Уныло слушаешь меня...
Кляну коварные старанья
Преступной юности моей
И встреч условных ожиданья
В садах, в безмолвии ночей.
Кляну речей любовный шепот,
Стихов таинственный напев,
И ласки легковерных дев,
И слезы их, и поздний ропот.
When I embrace
your slender forms
And tender words
Of love and praises
Pour out to you
In exultation.
In silence from my tight embrace
You free yourself
And answer
With a mistrustful smile;
Your memory has promptly stored
Of all the stories of treacheries,
And you are sad and wearied
with all the words of promises and rapture...
I denounce all the cunning tricks
Of my wicked youth,
And expectations of the meetings
In silence of the nightly gardens,
Sweet talking in the silent darkness.
I denounce the seductive passion of my verses,
And fond caresses of frivolous girls,
Their tears and moaning
That always came too late.
Tri phantana (three fountains) make one think of Pushkin's poem Tri klyucha (“The Three Springs,” 1827):
В степи мирской, печальной и безбрежной,
Таинственно пробились три ключа:
Ключ юности, ключ быстрый и мятежный,
Кипит, бежит, сверкая и журча.
Кастальский ключ волною вдохновенья
В степи мирской изгнанников поит.
Последний ключ — холодный ключ забвенья,
Он слаще всех жар сердца утолит.
Three springs in life's unbroken joyless desert
Mysteriously issue from the sands:
The spring of youth, uneven and rebellious,
Bears swift its sparkling stream through sunny lands;
Life's exiles drink the wave of inspiration
That swells the limpid fount of Castaly;
But 'tis the deep, cold wellspring of oblivion
That slakes most sweetly thirst and ecstasy.
(tr. A. Yarmolinsky)
Volnoyu vdokhnoven'ya (with the wave of inspiration) in the poem's fifth line brings to mind gradus vdokhnoven'ya (the degree of inspiration), a phrase used by Dostoevski in a letter of Oct. 31, 1838, to his brother Mikhail:
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
October 31, 1838, was Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday. Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus's birthday. While Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) were born in 1915. 1898 + 17 = 1915.
The sandy wastes of time (ságaren werém) remind one of Vremya (Time), a monthly magazine published by Fyodor Dostoevski under the editorship of his brother Mikhail Dostoevski. Due to his status as a former convict, Fyodor himself was unable to be the official editor. The magazine began publication in March 1861. Dostoevski's novel Zapiski iz myortvogo doma ("The House of the Dead") was first published in Vremya. Three of E. A. Poe's short stories, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Devil in the Belfry, were given their first Russian language publication in Vremya. In the same issue, Dostoevsky anonymously published an autobiographical story, "St. Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose," that mimicked some elements of Poe's style. In his preface to Poe's stories, however, Dostoevski suggested that Poe's poetry lacked the idealistic purity and beauty he found in the poetry of German romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann.
Dostoevski (whom Shade lists among Russian humorists) is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). 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”).
Btw., in Pushkin's poem Telega zhizni ("The Cart of Life," 1823) Vremya (Time) is the coachman.
Кто мне ответит почему
жизнь нас не учит ничему?
Кто скажет, отчего мы мучимся
всю жизнь, но ничему не учимся?
Должно быть, это неспроста,
что мы не помним ни черта.
Должно быть, это не случайно,
что мы совсем необучаемы.
Как наша жизнь необычайна!