Following comments on skaters and frost ( Jerry Friedman: Some sort of adjective for "frost" is needed, since mere frost doesn't made skating possible..., but I don't think "special" is the right word...CHW: ...I don’t really agree that an adjective for “frost” is needed, since if there are skaters the mind already accepts the idea that the frost is serious enough for the ice to bear them) I decided to check them in Pale Fire, with additions:

(lines 489-490) : "People have thought she tried to cross the lake/ At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed/ From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.";

index: Yaruga, Queen, reigned 1799-1800, sister of Uran (q.v.); drowned in an ice-hole with her Russian lover during traditional New Year’s festivities, 681.

Not being familiar with frozen lakes and skating parties, I must rely on paitings ( Brueghel's Winter scenes) and on literature to recreate these images in my mind. Whenever I read Shade's lines I experience a déjà-vu, intensified by Queen Yaruga's drowning.

Virginia Woolf describes the congealed waters of a river with transparent spots that show different strata ( MR's "palimpsest"?) with drowned apple-sellers complete with basket, emprisoned tortoises, sunken boats ( "Orlando, a Biography", 1928).

In a note appended to her novel Virginia Woolf describes London's January 1608 "Great Frost" and links it with Moscow and "all the traffic passing to and fro across the frozen river as though it were a road". Using this association, she has Orlando meet and fall in love with a Russian princess ( Marousha Romanovitch, or Shasha), during a skating party. Much later a decisive moment is marked by the twelfth stroke of midnight, just when the river suddenly starts to thaw and Orlando realizes he'd been jilted by the Muscovite princess.

Unfortunately the entire context, once I re-read the novel, was totally discrepant with Shade's.Virginia Woolf's fantasy about Royal courts, or her description of trancelike dreams, creates eery worlds which are also totally unlike Kinbote's Zembla mirrored in Pale Fire. And yet, because of the intensity of V Woolf's festive but disastrous scenery, I decided to share it with the List.

Strong Opinions ( Vintage, page 35): " I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate? I have found a queer substitute for music in chess - more exactly, in the composing of chess problems."

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