According to 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), Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus:
Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night. (note to Line 17)
Jacques de Grey seems to hint at Sir Jacques le Gris (lit. "the Gray," c. 1330s – 29 December 1386), a French squire and knight who gained fame and infamy, and was ultimately killed when he engaged in one of the last judicial duels permitted by the Parlement of Paris after he was accused of rape by Marguerite de Carrouges, the wife of his neighbour and rival, Sir Jean de Carrouges. Carrouges brought legal proceedings against Le Gris before King Charles VI who, after hearing the evidence, authorised a trial by combat to determine the question. The duel attracted thousands of spectators and has been discussed by many notable French writers, from the contemporary Jean Froissart to Voltaire.
Charles VI (3 December 1368 – 21 October 1422), nicknamed the Beloved (French: le Bien-Aimé) and later the Mad (French: le Fol or le Fou), was King of France from 1380 until his death in 1422. He is known for his mental illness and psychotic episodes that plagued him throughout his life. King Charles VI ascended the throne in 1380. 1380 is the year of the battle of Kulikovo, in which the Russians led by Dmitri Donskoy (1350-89, the Prince of Moscow since 1359) defeated the Tartars led by Khan Mamay. In his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers," 1944) VN mentions Karl Krasivyi i Karl Bezobraznyi (Charles the Handsome and Charles the Hideous) and says "za Mamayem vsyo tot zhe Mamay" ("on the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay"):
Вы будете (как иногда
говорится)
смеяться, вы будете (как ясновидцы
говорят) хохотать, господа, —
но, честное слово,
у меня есть приятель,
которого
привела бы в волнение мысль поздороваться
с главою правительства или другого какого
предприятия.
С каких это пор, желал бы я знать,
под ложечкой
мы стали испытывать вроде
нежного бульканья, глядя в бинокль
на плотного с ежиком в ложе?
С каких это пор
понятие власти стало равно
ключевому понятию родины?
Какие-то римляне и мясники,
Карл Красивый и Карл Безобразный,
совершенно гнилые князьки,
толстогрудые немки и разные
людоеды, любовники, ломовики,
Иоанны, Людовики, Ленины,
всё это сидело, кряхтя на эх и на ых,
упираясь локтями в колени,
на престолах своих матерых.
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем всё тот же Мамай.
В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя
поступить как чиновный Китай,
кучу лишних веков присчитавший
к истории скромной своей,
от этого, впрочем, не ставшей
ни лучше, ни веселей.
Кучера государств зато хороши
при исполнении должности: шибко
ледяная навстречу летит синева,
огневые трещат на ветру рукава…
Наблюдатель глядит иностранный
и спереди видит прекрасные очи навыкат,
а сзади прекрасную помесь диванной
подушки с чудовищной тыквой.
Но детина в регалиях или
волк в макинтоше,
в фуражке с немецким крутым козырьком,
охрипший и весь перекошенный,
в остановившемся автомобиле —
или опять же банкет
с кавказским вином —
нет.
Покойный мой тезка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на «монументален»,
на «переперчил»
и так далее.
You will (as sometimes
people say)
laugh; you will (as clairvoyants
say) roar with laughter, gentlemen—
but, word of honor,
I have a crony,
who
would be thrilled to shake hands
with the head of a state or of any other
enterprise.
Since when, I wonder,
in the pit of the stomach
we’ve begun to experience a tender
bubbling, when looking through an opera glass
at the burly one, bristly haired, in the grand box?
Since when the concept
of authority has been equated
with the seminal notion of patria?
All sorts of Romans and butchers;
Charles the Handsome and Charles the Hideous;
utterly rotten princelings; fat-breasted
German ladies; and various
cannibals, loverboys, lumbermen,
Johns, Lewises, Lenins,
emitting stool grunts of strain and release,
propping elbows on knees,
sat on their massive old thrones.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Does our plight really force us to do
what did bureaucratic Cathay
that with heaps of superfluous centuries
augmented her limited history
(which, however, hardly became
either better or merrier)?
Per contra, the coachmen of empires look good
when performing their duties: swiftly
toward them flies the blue of the sky;
their flame-colored sleeves clap in the wind;
the foreign observer looks on and sees
in front bulging eyes of great beauty
and behind a beautiful blend
of divan cushion and monstrous pumpkin.
But the decorated big fellow or else
the trench-coated wolf
in his army cap with a German steep peak,
hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted,
speaking from an immobile convertible,
or, again, a banquet
with Caucasian wine.
No, thank you.
If my late namesake,
who used to write verse, in rank
and in file, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as “praline”
or “air chill,”
and others of the same kind.
VN’s footnotes: Line 52: my late namesake. An allusion to the Christian name and patronymic of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893-1930), minor Soviet poet, endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served.
Lines 58-59: “praline” … “air chill.” In the original, monumentalen, meaning “[he is] monumental” rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning “[he] put in too much pepper,” offers an ingenuous correspondence with the name of the
British politician in a slovenly Russian pronunciation (“chair-chill”).
In his poem Horosho (“Good,” 1927) written for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution Mayakovski says that in his head zhar podymaet gradus (the fever raises its degree):
В голове
жар
подымает градус.
Зацветают луга,
май
поет
в уши -
это
тянется угар
из-под черных вьюшек. (13)
The Mayakovski pastiche in VN's story Istreblenie tiranov ("Tyrants Destroyed," 1938) begins with the word horosho-s (now then):
Хорошо-с,-- а помните, граждане,
Как хирел наш край без отца?
Так без хмеля сильнейшая жажда
Не создаст ни пивца, ни певца.
Вообразите, ни реп нет,
Ни баклажанов, ни брюкв...
Так и песня, что днесь у нас крепнет,
Задыхалась в луковках букв.
Шли мы тропиной исторенной,
Горькие ели грибы,
Пока ворота истории
Не дрогнули от колотьбы!
Пока, белизною кительной
Сияя верным сынам,
С улыбкой своей удивительной
Правитель не вышел к нам.
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
Thus, without hops, no matter how strong
One’s thirst, it is rather
Difficult, isn’t it,
To make both the beer and the drinking song!
Just imagine, we lacked potatoes,
No turnips, no beets could we get:
Thus the poem, now blooming, wasted
In the bulbs of the alphabet!
A well-trodded road we had taken,
Bitter toadstools we ate.
Until by great thumps was shaking
History’s gate!
Until in his trim white tunic
Which upon us its radiance cast,
With his wonderful smile the Ruler
Came before his subjects at last! (chapter 16)