Describing Shade's murder by Gradus, 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 a line from Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy (1853):
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library--let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt--I still feel--John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)
"The inviolable shade" brings to mind not only Shade (the author of the poem that Kinbote holds in his left hand) but also Viola, Sebastian's twin sister in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will. At the end of VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian's half-brother V.) says that, despite Sebastian's death, the hero remains:
The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her
grave) - but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed
off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Chapter 20)
Similarly, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus can be someone whom neither of them knows. In fact, they seem to represent three different aspects of mad 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). Nadezhda means "hope." In Matthew Arnold's poem the line quoted by Kinbote is preceded by the line "Still nursing the unconquerable hope:"
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade-
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark tingles, to the nightingales!
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says that he thinks that she always nursed a small mad hope. The name of the capital of Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at "heaven" (onhava-onhava means in Zemblan "far, far away"). In his sonnet Shakespeare Matthew Arnold says that Shakespeare made the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality:
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst walk on Earth unguess'd at. Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
In his "Preface to Wilhelm von Polenz's novel Der Büttnerbauer" (1902) Leo Tolstoy (the author of "On Shakespeare and on Drama," 1906) mentions Matthew Arnold and his excellent essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time:
Лет 20 тому назад Мэтью Арнольд написал прекрасную статью о назначении критики. По его мнению, назначение критики в том, чтобы находить во всем том, что было где бы и когда бы то ни было писано, самое важное и хорошее и обращать на это важное и хорошее внимание читателей.
Ответить на этот огромной важности вопрос: что читать из всего того, что написано? — может только настоящая критика, та, которая, как говорит Мэтью Арнольд, поставит себе целью выдвигать и указывать людям все, что есть самого лучшего как в прежних, так и в современных писателях.
Leo Tolstoy's English translators, Aylmer and Louise Maude, bring to mind Shade's dear bizarre Aunt Maud and Maud Bodkin (1875-1967), an English classical scholar, writer on mythology, and literary critic.
The characters in Tolstoy’s story Hadji Murat (published posthumously in 1911) include Count Vorontsov, commander-in-chief and viceroy of the Caucasus. 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, like Count Vorontsov (Pushkin's boss in Odessa and a target of the poet’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Izmuchen zhizn’yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy (“By Life Tormented and by Cunning Hope,” 1864) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet, the poet who was married (since 1856) to Maria Botkin. Fet's poem has the epigraph from Schopenhauer:
Die Gleichmässigkeit des Laufes der Zeit in allen Kopfen beweist mehr, als irgend etwas, dass wir Alle in denselben Traum versenkt sind, ja dass es Ein Wesen
ist, welches ihn träumt.
"That regularity of the passage of time in all our heads indicates, more than anything else, that we are all sunk in the same dream, and that it is a single Being that is dreaming it." (Parerga II, § 29.)
Fet's poem Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) brings to mind Sofia Lastochkin, the maiden name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved). Gradus's wife (a beader in Radugavitra) who left her husband with a gypsy lover makes one think of Pushkin's poem Tsygany ("The Gypsies," 1824) and of Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy. Radugavitra blends raduga (rainbow) with vitrazh (stained glass). Raduga ("The Rainbow," 1865) is a poem by Tyutchev. Shade collection Hebe's Cup reminds one of vetrenaya Geba (capricious Hebe) who spilled on Earth a thunder-boiling goblet in the last stanza of Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya groza (“The Spring Thunderstorm,” 1828):
Ты скажешь: ветреная Геба,
Кормя Зевесова орла,
Громокипящий кубок с неба,
Смеясь, на землю пролила.
You’d say: capricious Hebe,
feeding Zeus’ eagle,
had spilled on Earth, laughing,
a thunder-boiling goblet.