In a conversation at the Faculty Club John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) that Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord who is on sabbatical in Europe) is "one of us:"
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon - American History - "that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I hear," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -" (note to Line 894)
In his essay Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions (1880) R. L. Stevenson says that H. D. Thoreau was not altogether one of us:
There is something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities.
In the preceding paragraph R. L. Stevenson quotes the words of R. W. Emerson who said that it was much easier for Thoreau to say NO than YES:
So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier," says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say NO than YES; and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say NO, but surely it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say YES where it is possible.
Professor Nattochdag's nickname, Netochka hints at Dostoevski's novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). On the other hand, net is Russian for "no" (a word so much easier for Thoreau to say than "yes"). In VN's novel Priglashenie na kazn' ("Invitation to a Beheading," 1935) Cincinnatus’ mother mentions netki (nonnons), a toy that was once popular:
- А вы не шутите, - сказала Цецилия Ц., - бывают, знаете, удивительные уловки. Вот я помню: когда была ребёнком, в моде были, - ах, не только у ребят, но и у взрослых, - такие штуки, назывались "нетки", - и к ним полагалось, значит, особое зеркало, мало что кривое - абсолютно искажённое, ничего нельзя понять, провалы, путаница, всё скользит в глазах, но его кривизна была неспроста, а как раз так пригнана... Или, скорее, к его кривизне были так подобраны... Нет, постойте, я плохо объясняю. Одним словом, у вас было такое вот дикое зеркало и целая коллекция разных неток, то есть абсолютно нелепых предметов: всякие такие бесформенные, пёстрые, в дырках, в пятнах, рябые, шишковатые штуки, вроде каких-то ископаемых, - но зеркало, которое обыкновенные предметы абсолютно искажало, теперь, значит, получало настоящую пищу, то есть, когда вы такой непонятный и уродливый предмет ставили так, что он отражался в непонятном и уродливом зеркале, получалось замечательно; нет на нет давало да, все восстанавливалось, все было хорошо, - и вот из бесформенной пестряди получался в зеркале чудный стройный образ: цветы, корабль, фигура, какой-нибудь пейзаж. Можно было - на заказ - даже собственный портрет, то есть вам давали какую-то кошмарную кашу, а это и были вы, но ключ от вас был у зеркала. Ах, я помню, как было весело и немного жутко - вдруг ничего не получится! - брать в руку вот такую новую непонятную нетку и приближать к зеркалу, и видеть в нем, как твоя рука совершенно разлагается, но зато как бессмысленная нетка складывается в прелестную картину, ясную, ясную...
“You oughtn’t joke like that,” said Cecilia C. “There are, you know, all sorts of marvelous gimmicks. I remember, for instance when I was a child, there were objects called ‘nonnons’ that were popular, and not only among children, but among adults too, and, you see, a special mirror came with them, not just crooked, but completely distorted. You couldn’t make out anything of it, it was all gaps and jumble, and made no sense to the eye—yet the crookedness was no ordinary one, but calculated in just such a way as to… Or rather, to match its crookedness they had made … No, wait a minute, I am explaining badly. Well, you would have a crazy mirror like that and a whole collection of different ‘nonnons,’ absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things, like some kind of fossils—but the mirror, which completely distorted ordinary objects, now, you see, got real food, that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, a marvelous thing happened; minus by minus equaled plus, everything was restored, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image; flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape. You could have your own portrait custom made, that is, you received some nightmarish jumble, and this thing was you, only the key to you was held by the mirror. Oh, I remember what fun it was, and how it was a little frightening—what if suddenly nothing should come out?—to pick up a new, incomprehensible ‘nonnon’ and bring it near the mirror, and see your hand get all scrambled, and and at the same time see the meaningless ‘nonnon’ turn into a charming picture, so very, very clear …” (chapter XII)
Net na net davalo da (minus by minus equalled plus). Da is Russian for "yes." In his Commentary Kinbote mentions the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434).
After line 274 there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
The capital of Kinbote's Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. In his poem The Giaour (1813) Byron says:
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)
According to Thoreau, there is no remedy for love but to love more. R. W. Emerson said: "Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation."
In his Cornell lecture on R. L. Stevenson VN points out that in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) there are really three personalities: Jekyll, Hyde and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin’s personality. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). In his epigram on Count Vorontsov (the governor general of New Russia, the poet's boss in Odessa) Pushkin mentions nadezhda (hope):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is a hope
That he will be a full one 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 will be full again.
Btw., in Nikolai Gogol (1944) VN mentions a quotation from Thoreau in Stalin’s latest speech:
It would be of course ridiculous to suppose that Gogol spent ten years merely in trying to write something that would please the Church. What he was really trying to do was to write something that would please both Gogol the artist and Gogol the monk. He was obsessed by the thought that great Italian painters had done this again and again: a cool cloister, roses climbing a wall, a gaunt man wearing a skull-cap, the radiant fresh colors of the fresco he is working upon—these formed the professional setting which Gogol craved. Transmuted into literature, the completed Dead Souls was to form three connected images: Crime, Punishment, and Redemption. The attainment of this object was absolutely impossible not only because Gogol’s unique genius was sure to play havoc with any conventional scheme if given a free hand, but because he had forced the main role, that of the sinner, upon a person—if Chichikov can be called a person—who was most ridiculously unfit for that part and who moreover moved in a world where such things as saving one’s soul simply did not happen. A sympathetically pictured priest in the midst of the Gogolian characters of the first volume would have been as utterly impossible as a gauloiserie in Pascal or a quotation from Thoreau in Stalin’s latest speech. (Chapter IV, 8)
According to Kinbote, Shade listed Gogol and Dostoevski among Russian humorists:
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." (note to Line 172)
Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). According to Kinbote, the terrible name of the leader of the Shadows cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar. Stalin brings to mind Polonski's poem Prishli i stali teni nochi (The shadows of the night came and stood guard at my doors," 1844) that Gogol wrote down in his notebook. At the end of his poem Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1862) Polonski mentions nochnye teni (the nocturnal shadows):
Я шёл и не слыхал, как пели соловьи,
И не видал, как звёзды загорались,
И слушал я шаги — шаги, не знаю чьи,
За мной в лесной глуши неясно повторялись.
Я думал — эхо, зверь, колышется тростник;
Я верить не хотел, дрожа и замирая,
Что по моим следам, на шаг не отставая,
Идёт не человек, не зверь, а мой двойник.
То я бежать хотел, пугливо озираясь,
То самого себя, как мальчика, стыдил...
Вдруг злость меня взяла — и, страшно задыхаясь,
Я сам пошел к нему навстречу и спросил:
— Что ты пророчишь мне или зачем пугаешь?
Ты призрак иль обман фантазии больной?
— Ах!— отвечал двойник,— ты видеть мне мешаешь
И не даёшь внимать гармонии ночной;
Ты хочешь отравить меня своим сомненьем,
Меня — живой родник поэзии твоей!..
И, не сводя с меня испуганных очей,
Двойник мой на меня глядел с таким смятеньем,
Как будто я к нему среди ночных теней —
Я, а не он ко мне явился привиденьем.
In Polonski’s poem the Double tells to the poet: “you prevent me from seeing and do not let me listen to the nocturnal harmony (vnimat’ garmonii nochnoy). The last day of Shade’s life 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)
Polonski translated into Russian Bourdillon’s poem “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes:”
Ночь смотрит тысячами глаз,
А день глядит одним;
Но солнца нет — и по земле
Тьма стелется, как дым.
Ум смотрит тысячами глаз,
Любовь глядит одним;
Но нет любви — и гаснет жизнь,
И дни плывут, как дым.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
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,” 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski.