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) mentions Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube who married Sinyavin’s son Blue (Starover Blue’s father):
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet's entourage - for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag. (note to Line 627: The great Starover Blue)
Stella being Latin for "star" and lazur' being Russian for "azure," one is reminded of Pushkin's fragment Nado mnoy v lazuri yasnoy svetit zvyozdochka odna (1830):
Надо мной в лазури ясной
Светит звёздочка одна,
Справа — запад темно-красный,
Слева — бледная луна.
Over me in the clear azure
one star is shining,
to the right is the dark-red West,
to the left is the pale moon.
On the other hand, the surname Lazurchik makes one think of Krylov's fable Larchik ("A Little Box," 1808) that ends in the (now proverbial) line A Larchik prosto otkryvalsya (And the Little Box could be opened simply):
Случается нередко нам
И труд и мудрость видеть там,
Где стоит только догадаться,
За дело просто взяться.
К кому-то принесли от мастера Ларец.
Отделкой, чистотой Ларец в глаза кидался;
Ну, всякий Ларчиком прекрасным любовался.
Вот входит в комнату Механики мудрец.
Взглянув на Ларчик, он сказал: «Ларец с секретом,
Так; он и без замка;
А я берусь открыть; да, да, уверен в этом;
Не смейтесь так исподтишка!
Я отыщу секрет и Ларчик вам открою:
В Механике и я чего-нибудь да стою».
Вот за Ларец принялся он:
Вертит его со всех сторон
И голову свою ломает;
То гвоздик, то другой, то скобку пожимает.
Тут, глядя на него, иной
Качает головой;
Те шепчутся, а те смеются меж собой.
В ушах лишь только отдается:
«Не тут, не так, не там!» Механик пуще рвется.
Потел, потел; но, наконец, устал,
От Ларчика отстал
И, как открыть его, никак не догадался:
А Ларчик просто открывался.
Larchik is a diminutive of larets (box, casket, chest). Kiparisovyi larets (“The Cypress Box,” 1910) is the posthumous collection by Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909), a poet and essayist who wrote under the penname Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody"). In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
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. (Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (the "real" name of the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus) in reverse. 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). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, after 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 (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
In Griboedov’s play in verse Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824) Famusov calls the coffin larchik:
Петрушка, вечно ты с обновкой,
С разодранным локтем. Достань-ка календарь:
Читай не так, как пономарь;
А с чувством, с толком, с расстановкой.
Постой же. — На листе черкни на записном,
Противу будущей недели:
К Прасковье Федоровне в дом
Во вторник зван я на форели.
Куда как чуден создан свет!
Пофилософствуй, ум вскружится;
То бережешься, то обед:
Ешь три часа, а в три дни не сварится!
Отметь-ка, в тот же день... Нет, нет.
В четверг я зван на погребенье.
Ох, род людской! пришло в забвенье,
Что всякий сам туда же должен лезть,
В тот ларчик, где ни стать, ни сесть.
Но память по себе намерен кто оставить
Житьем похвальным, вот пример:
Покойник был почтенный камергер,
С ключом, и сыну ключ умел доставить;
Богат, и на богатой был женат;
Переженил детей, внучат;
Скончался; все о нем прискорбно поминают.
Кузьма Петрович! Мир ему! —
Что за тузы в Москве живут и умирают! —
Пиши в четверг, одно уж к одному,
А может в пятницу, а может и в субботу,
Я должен у вдовы, у докторши, крестить.
Она не родила, но по расчету
По моему: должна родить. —
Petrushka, again with your clothes something is wrong.
Look at yourself! Your sleeve is torn.
Now, take the calendar and try to make it best.
Read it expressively, don't mumble like obsessed !
No, wait, just take the pad and write: The next week column. Tuesday night -
A trout party. What a temptation ! -
It's Praskovya Fyodorovna's invitation.
Why is the world so strange ? - I ask myself the question.
And when I do, it makes my mind just reel:
A fast is followed by a hearty meal,
And then three days of indigestion.
Write, on that same day, no, Thursday morning
There is a burial ceremony.
The human race, they all forget
That some day all of them shall get
Into the box, so small and tight !
The one who'll leave blessed memory behind,
A noble chamberlain the late man was,
He had the key and let his son have one.
He took a wealthy woman, being a wealthy man
And married off his children, I suppose,
People are mourning now that he has passed away
Kuzma Petrovich! May he rest with peace!
There are bigwigs in Moscow, I should say!
Write down: Thursday, on top of this,
Or perhaps on Friday, or on Saturday,
I must attend a christening day.
The doctor's widow hasn't given birth as yet
Though she may, any day, by my calculations. (Act II, scene 1)
and Chatski calls himself starover:
Пускай меня отъявят старовером,
Но хуже для меня наш Север во сто крат
С тех пор, как отдал всё в обмен на новый лад, —
И нравы, и язык, и старину святую,
И величавую одежду на другую —
По шутовскому образцу:
Хвост сзади, спереди какой-то чудный выем,
Рассудку вопреки, наперекор стихиям,
Движенья связаны, и не краса лицу;
Смешные, бритые, седые подбородки!
Как платья, волосы, так и умы коротки!..
I may be called an old-believer, yet I think
Our North is worse a hundredfold
Since it adopted the new mode,
Having abandoned everything :
Our customs and our conditions,
The language, moral values and traditions,
And, in exchange of the grand gown,
Regardless of all trends
And common sense,
We put on this apparel of a clown:
A tail, a funny cut - oh, what a scene !
It's tight and doesn't match the face;
This funny, grey-haired shaven chin !
'Which covers thee discovers thee!'- there's a phrase.
(Act Three, scene 22; transl. A. Vagapov)
At the end of Griboedov's play (Act Four, scene 14) Famusov says that he will send his daughter Sofia to Saratov:
Брат, не финти, не дамся я в обман,
Хоть подеретесь, не поверю.
Ты, Филька, ты прямой чурбан,
В швейцары произвел ленивую тетерю,
Не знает ни про что, не чует ничего.
Где был? куда ты вышел?
Сеней не запер для чего?
И как не досмотрел? и как ты не дослышал?
В работу вас, на поселенье вас:
За грош продать меня готовы.
Ты, быстроглазая, всё от твоих проказ;
Вот он Кузнецкий мост, наряды и обновы;
Там выучилась ты любовников сводить,
Постой же, я тебя исправлю:
Изволь-ка в и́збу, марш, за птицами ходить;
Да и тебя, мой друг, я, дочка, не оставлю;
Еще дни два терпение возьми;
Не быть тебе в Москве, не жить тебе с людьми.
Подалее от этих хватов,
В деревню, к тетке, в глушь, в Саратов,
Там будешь горе горевать.
За пяльцами сидеть, за святцами зевать.
А вас, суда́рь, прошу я толком
Туда не жаловать ни прямо, ни проселком;
И ваша такова последняя черта,
Что, чай, ко всякому дверь будет заперта:
Я постараюсь, я, в набат я приударю,
По городу всему наделаю хлопот,
И оглашу во весь народ:
В Сенат подам, министрам, государю.
No, brother, you're cheating, and I'll never let it pass.
I don't believe you, it's an invention of your own.
You, Filka, crazy stupid ass !
I made a doorman out of a lazybones !
Whatever happens, he never knows !
Where were you ? Where did you go ?
Why did you not lock up the doors ?
How come, you missed all this ? How come, you didn't you know ?
I'll send you to the farm, to work there in the fields.
About selling me you'd make no bones.
You, watchful girl ! With your perpetual tricks;
That is the fruit of love of fashion shops and clothes !
You've learnt to pimp and pander lovers.
I'll put you right. I know what I can do.
Go feed the poultry ! Move to the service-house !
My dear daughter, you, too, will get your due,
Have patience; my decision will be simple:
You will not live here in Moscow with the people.
In a day or two I'll send you off
To a god-forsaken place, your aunt's, near Saratov.
You'll pass the time there grieving,
Sitting tambour in hand, card-reading.
And I should ask you, Chatsky, this:
You will not visit her by any means,
With you I'll draw the line at this:
All doors will be locked up for you by all the families.
I'll do my best to make a din,
I'll make the whole of Moscow learn it.
I'll make it public, ring the tocsin,
I'll write to the Senate, to the ministers, to the tsar.
The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Mot i lastochka ("The Spendthrift and the Swallow") is a fable by Krylov. One of Krylov’s most famous fables is Kvartet (“The Quartet”). The words grimpen, chthonic and sempiternal (whose meaning Hazel Shade, the poet's daughter, wants to know) occur in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1941). “Toilest” (according to Kinbote, it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips,” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest”) brings to mind Geroy truda ("The Hero of Toil," 1925), Marina Tsvetaev's memoir essay on Valeriy Bryusov. In her essay Marina Tsvetaev contrasts Bryusov with Balmont and mentions Krylov's fable Strekoza i muravey ("The Dragonfly and the Ant"):
Бальмонт. Брюсов. Два полюса творчества. Творец-ребёнок (Бальмонт) и творец-рабочий (Брюсов). (Ребёнок, как der Spieler, игрун.) Ничего от рабочего - Бальмонт, ничего от ребёнка - Брюсов. Творчество игры и творчество жилы. Почти что басня «Стрекоза и муравей», да в 1919 г. она и осуществилась, с той разницей, что стрекоза моей басни и тогда, умирая с голоду, жалела муравья.
According to Marina Tsvetaev, Krylov's fable was fulfilled in 1919. John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet's wife) were married in 1919. In a footnote to her Russian translation of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov points out that Krylov translated Lafontaine’s fable La Cigale et la Fourmi (alluded to by Shade in Canto Two of his poem) as Strekoza i muravey (“The Dragonfly and the Ant”). Strekoza was a magazine in which young Chekhov (the author of "The Sea Gull," 1896) published his humorous short stories. In the draft of Domik v Kolomne ("A Small House in Kolomna," 1830), a mock epic in octaves, Pushkin calls Jacques Delille (a French poet, 1738-1813) parnasskiy muravey (the Parnassian ant):
О, что б сказал поэт-законодатель,
Гроза несчастных мелких рифмачей!
И ты, Расин, бессмертный подражатель,
Певец влюблённых женщин и царей!
И ты, Вольтер, философ и ругатель,
И ты, Делиль, парнасский муравей,
Что б вы сказали, сей соблазн увидя?
Наш век обидел вас, ваш стих обидя!
In his Epigramma (“Epigram,” 1829) whose second part (after the waist) is patterned on a sonnet Pushkin mentions gospodin parnasskiy starover (Mister Parnassian Old Believer):
Журналами обиженный жестоко,
Зоил Пахом печалился глубоко;
На цензора вот подал он донос;
Но цензор прав, нам смех, зоилу нос.
Иная брань, конечно, неприличность,
Нельзя писать: Такой-то де старик,
Козёл в очках, плюгавый клеветник,
И зол и подл: все это будет личность.
Но можете печатать, например,
Что господин парнасский старовер
(В своих статьях) бессмыслицы оратор,
Отменно вял, отменно скучноват,
Тяжеловат и даже глуповат;
Тут не лицо, а только литератор.
Insulted deeply by some journalists
Zoilus Pakhom files charges, where he lists
Claims and complains. The teasers, yet,
For sure will be found not guilty, one can bet.
Some invective, of course, aren't recommended.
One cannot write that Mister Such-and-Such,
Bespectacled goat... - this is a bit too much,
A shabby libeler... - should also be amended.
However, one can say politely that
Mr. Parnassian Old Believer is just sad
And slightly ponderous, and in the latest journal
His article is sort of daft and dull,
A bit annoying, honestly, 'tis fool.
Here is the literateur and nothing personal.
(transl. V. Gurvich)
Stella Lazurchik brings to mind Stella, Gonville's wife in VN’s two-act play in blank verse Smert’ (“Death,” 1923), and Stella Fantasia ("adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her"), in VN's novel Lolita (1955) Lolita's classmate in the Ramsdale school. Revisiting Ramsdale in 1952, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in Lolita) meets Mrs. Chatfield (whose daughter Phyllis was Lolita’s and Stella's classmate):
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was - ? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen -
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)
Humbert thinks of the French phrase vient de mourir. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his first erotic experience and quotes the words of his father, "Tolstoy vient de mourir:"
High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother.
“Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters. (Chapter Ten, 3)
Leo Tolstoy died on Nov. 7, 1910 (OS). Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris. In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita Gumbert Gumbert's sarcasm is much more venomous:
"В самом деле", сказал я (пользуясь дивной свободою, свойственной сновидениям). "Вот так судьба! Бедный мальчик пробивал нежнейшие, невосстановимейшие перепоночки, прыскал гадючьим ядом - и ничего, жил превесело, да ещё получил посмертный орденок. Впрочем, извините меня, мне пора к адвокату".
Stella Fantasia brings to mind Fet’s poem Quasi una fantasia (1889). The author of More i zvyozdy (“The Sea and the Stars,” 1859), Sredi zvyozd ("Among the Stars," 1876) and Ugasshim zvyozdam ("To the Extinguished Stars," 1890), Afanasiy Fet was a son of Afanasiy Shenshin (a Russian landowner) and Charlotte Becker (a German inn-keeper's daughter whose first husband was Johann Foeth). The maiden name of Charlotte Haze (Lolita's mother) is Charlotte Becker. The name of Lolita’s husband, Richard F. Schiller, seems to hint at Friedrich Schiller (a German poet, 1759-1805). Shilleru ("To Schiller," 1857) is a poem by Fet. In 1856 Afanasiy Fet married Maria Botkin.
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions the fantasies of Poe (the author of The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy, 1842):
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.
Among our auditors were a young priest
And an old Communist. Iph could at least
Compete with churches and the party line. (ll. 632-637)
A Daguerreotype portrait (1849) of Edgar Allan Poe is commonly known as the "Stella" Daguerreotype. On Stella's Birth-day 1719 is a poem by Jonathan Swift. According to Sir Walter Scott (Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D. D., 1826), Pope observed, that though Swift’s face had an expression of dullness, his eyes were very particular. They were as azure, he said, as the heavens, and had an unusual acuteness. W. B. Yeats’s one-act play The Words upon the Windowpane (1930) features a séance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium, along with those of his two lovers, Stella and Vanessa. Witnessing these forces at work, those attending the séance are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths in their own lives.