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), New Wye (a small University town) is situated at the same latitude as Palermo:
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handfuls of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuña collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me. (Foreword)
The latitude of Palermo, Sicily, Italy is 38.116669. Kinbote's Zembla is a distant northern land. In his work Chto takoe iskusstvo? ("What is Art?" 1897-98) Leo Tolstoy quotes Baudelaire's poem in prose L'Étranger ("The Foreigner") in which the Foreigner says that he does not know at what latitude his homeland is situated:
Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, des: ton père, ta mère, ton frère ou ta soeur?
— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère.
— Tes amis?
— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.
— Ta patrie?
— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
— La beauté?
— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle,
— L’or?
— Je le haïs, comme vous haïssez Dieu.
— Eh! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger?
— J’aime les nuages... les nuages qui passent... là-bas,... les merveilleux nuages!
(Chapter X)
The Russian word for patrie (homeland) is otchizna (fatherland). Lyublyu otchiznu ya, no strannoyu lyubov'yu! (I love my homeland, but with a strange love!) is the first line of Lermontov's poem Rodina ("Motherland," 1841):
Люблю отчизну я, но странною любовью!
Не победит ее рассудок мой.
Ни слава, купленная кровью,
Ни полный гордого доверия покой,
Ни темной старины заветные преданья
Не шевелят во мне отрадного мечтанья.
Но я люблю — за что, не знаю сам, —
Ее степей холодное молчанье,
Ее лесов безбрежных колыханье,
Разливы рек ее, подобные морям.
Проселочным путем люблю скакать в телеге
И, взором медленным пронзая ночи тень,
Встречать по сторонам, вздыхая о ночлеге,
Дрожащие огни печальных деревень.
Люблю дымок спаленной жнивы,
В степи ночующий обоз
И на холме средь желтой нивы
Чету белеющих берез.
С отрадой, многим незнакомой,
Я вижу полное гумно,
Избу, покрытую соломой,
С резными ставнями окно.
И в праздник, вечером росистым,
Смотреть до полночи готов
На пляску с топаньем и свистом
Под говор пьяных мужичков.
I love my homeland, but in the strangest way;
My intellect could never conquer it.
The fame, earned with my blood and pain,
The peace, full of the proud fit,
The dark old age and its devoted tales
Won't stir in me the blithe inspiring gales.
But I do love, what for I do not know,
Its cold terrains' perpetuating quiet,
Its endless woodlands’ oscillation tired
The sea-like rivers' wild overflows.
Along the rural paths I favor taking rides,
And with a slow glance impaling morbid darks,
The trembling village lights discover on the side,
While thinking where this time for board I will park.
I like the smoke from garnered fields,
The sledges sleeping in the steppe,
The birches growing on the hill
That occupies the grassland gap.
With joy, that people fathom not,
I feel the rush of threshing scenes,
The covered with foliage huts,
The ornamented window screens.
And on the evening of the fete
I like to watch till the midnight
The dance with tapping and a chat
Of drunken fellows on the side.
(tr. B. Leyvi)
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen mentions Palermontovia (a portmanteau country that blends Palermo with Lermontov):
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive… But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
In several poems Alexander Blok mentions shchemyashiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound). In his essay Solntse nad Rossiey (“Sun above Russia,” 1908) written for Leo Tolstoy’s eightieth anniversary Blok asks whose dead hand aimed the pistols of d’Anthès and Martynov (the murderers of Pushkin and Lermontov):
Всё привычно, знакомо, как во все великие дни, переживаемые в России. Вспоминается всё мрачное прошлое родины, всё, как подобает в великие дни. Чья мёртвая рука управляла пистолетами Дантеса и Мартынова? Кто пришёл сосать кровь умирающего Гоголя? В каком тайном и быстро сжигающем огне сгорели Белинский и Добролюбов? Кто увёл Достоевского на Семёновский плац и в мёртвый дом?
Pushkin and Lermontov died in pistol duels. In the same Chapter X of his book What is Art? Tolstoy quotes (as another example of meaningless poetry) Baudelaire's sonnet Duellum ("The Duel"):
Deux guerriers ont couru l’un sur l’autre; leurs armes
Ont éclaboussé l’air de lueurs et de sang.
— Ces jeux, ces cliquetis du fer sont les vacarmes
D’une jeunesse en proie à l’amour vagissant.
Les glaives sont brisés! comme notre jeunesse,
Ma chère! Mais les dents, les ongles acérés,
Vengent bientôt l’épée et la dague traîtresse.
— О fureur des coeurs mûrs par l’amour ulcérés!
Dans le ravin hanté des chats-pards et des onces
Nos héros, s’étreignant méchamment, ont roulé,
Et leur peau fleurira l’aridité de ronces.
— Ce gouffre, c’est l’enfer, de nos amis peuplé!
Roulons y sans remords, amazone inhumaine,
Afin d’éterniser l’ardeur de notre haine!
Two warriors rushed upon each other; their arms
Spattered the air with sparks and blood.
This fencing, this clashing of steel, are the uproar
Of youth when it becomes a prey to puling love.
The blades are broken! like our youth
My darling! But the teeth, the steely fingernails,
Soon avenge the sword and the treacherous dagger.
— O Fury of mature hearts embittered by love!
In the ravine haunted by lynxes and panthers,
Our heroes viciously clasping each other, rolled,
And their skin will put blooms on the barren brambles.
This abyss, it is hell, thronged with our friends!
Let us roll there without remorse, cruel amazon,
So the ardor of our hatred will be immortalized!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
At the end of Baudelaire's poem in prose L'Étranger the Foreigner says that he loves les merveilleux nuages (the marvelous clouds). Oblako, ozero, bashnya ("Cloud, Castle, Lake," 1936) is a story by VN. In Canto One of his poem Shade (whose daughter drowned in Lake Omega) mentions the iridule:
My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged. (ll. 99-114)
In his note to Line 109 (iridule) Kinbote writes:
An iridescent cloudlet, Zemblan muderperlwelk. The term "iridule" is, I believe, Shade's own invention. Above it, in the Fair Copy (card 9, July 4) he has written in pencil "peacock-herl." The peacock-herl is the body of a certain sort of artificial fly also called "alder." So the owner of this motor court, an ardent fisherman, tells me. (See also the "strange nacreous gleams" in line 634.)
Muderperlwelk combines Perlmutter (Germ., mother-of-pearl) with Wolke (Germ., cloud). Describing the Goldsworth chateau (Kinbote's rented house) and Shade's house in New Wye, Kinbote mentions wisps and pale plumes of cirrus clouds:
After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction through a beautifully sprayed and irrigated residential section with variously graded lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield; the other continues to the campus. Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnificent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quadrangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, Spencer House and its lily pond, the Chapel, New Lecture Hail, the Library, the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices (to be called from now on Shade Hall), the famous avenue to all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (note to ll. 47-48)
In his poem Razmyshleniya u paradnogo pod'yezda ("Musings by the Front Door," 1858) Nekrasov, the author of Moroz Krasnyi Nos ("Red-Nosed Frost," 1864), famously mentions the enchanting sky of Sicily (pod plenitel'nym nebom Sitsilii):
Безмятежней аркадской идиллии
Закатятся преклонные дни:
Под пленительным небом Сицилии,
В благовонной древесной тени,
Созерцая, как солнце пурпурное
Погружается в море лазурное,
Полосами его золотя, —
Убаюканный ласковым пением
Средиземной волны, — как дитя
Ты уснешь, окружен попечением
Дорогой и любимой семьи
(Ждущей смерти твоей с нетерпением);
Привезут к нам останки твои,
Чтоб почтить похоронною тризною,
И сойдешь ты в могилу... герой,
Втихомолку проклятый отчизною,
Возвеличенный громкой хвалой!..
Vtikhomolku proklyatyi otchiznoyu (Silently damned by fatherland), a line in Nekrasov's poem, brings to mind Proklyatye Poety (Les Poètes maudits, "The Accursed Poets," 1884), a series of essays by Paul Verlaine. In the same Chapter X of his book What is Art? Tolstoy quotes Verlaine's poem Art poétique:
The poet Verlaine (who followed next after Baudelaire, and was also esteemed great) even wrote an “Art poétique,” in which he advises this style of composition:—
De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
And again:—
De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.
Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin,
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ...
Et tout le reste est littérature.
Palermo + latitude + Dantov = platitude + Lermontov + Ada
latitfolia + patrie = patifolia + ale + tri
Dantov Ad - Dante's Inferno (Russ.); Dantov = dva (2) + ton/not (ton - Russ., tone)
tri - 3 (three in Russian)
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. (note to Line 80)
Describing his first meeting with Shade, Kinbote mentions a bottle of good college ale:
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 Hurley, "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)
After the death of Queen Blenda (the mother of Charles the Beloved) Fleur de Fyler (Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting) sleeps in a patifolia (a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed that Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor):
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. (note to Line 80)
Patifolia seems to hint at latifolia, "broad-leaved" in taxonomic Latin. Typha latifolia, better known as broadleaf cattail, is a perennial herbaceous plant in the genus Typha. It is found as a native plant species in North and South America, Eurasia, and Africa. Pentachlaena latifolia is a plant in the family Sarcolaenaceae. It is endemic to Madagascar. There are other plants with the epithet latifolia in their names.