"Alfin the Vague... was given
his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the
liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital
Uranograd!)." (Pale Fire, Kinbote's note to
Line 71)
In his story Tochka opory
("Point of Rest", 1923) Aleksandr Amfiteatrov (1862-1938) mentions the
planet Uranus: Эйфелева башня кувыркалась
где-то далеко, между Сатурном и Ураном, в перегонку с неистово визжавшей
Айседорой Дункан. ("The Eifel tower went head over heels somewhere far
away, between Saturn and Uranus, racing with furiously screaming Isadora
Duncan.")
A play on uranography (the branch of
astronomy concerned with the description and mapping of the heavens, and esp. of
the fixed stars) and uranism (VN's word for
homosexuality), "Uranograd" seems to hint at St. Petersburg, VN's home
city. In 1914, when the war with Germany broke out, it was renamed
Petrograd, and ten years later, after Lenin's death, Leningrad. Like a
number of tsars (including the city's founder, Peter I, the drunk
and maniac, who, they say, was somewhat left-handed sexually) before
him, Lenin was tiran (a tyrant), therefore the city named after
him can be renamed Tiranograd. Interestingly, the word "tyrant" also occurs in Amfiteatrov's
story:
— Сударыня — сказал он
жене — знаете ли вы, кто такое
я?
— Знаю, — отвечала
супруга — вы — дурак, тиран и
изверг!
Слюзин
смутился: к столь определённому ответу он не был
подготовлен.
— Нет-с,
неправда, — возразил он — я ни тиран, ни дурак, ни изверг, а великий гений,
творец perpetuum mobile котораго искали Рожер Бэкон, Галилей, Кеплер, все
учёные, до Эдисона включительно... (the
hero's wife calls him a fool, tyrant and monster but Slyuzin
retorts he is none of these but a great genius, creator of
the perpetuum mobile that was looked for by all great scientists,
including Galileo, Kepler, etc.)
Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus "Vinogradus" and
"Leningradus": "Vinogradus should never, never provoke
God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at
people even in dreams" (note to Line 171).
Everything what happens in the Amfiteatrov story turns out to be the hero's
dream.
Amfiteatrov is the author of the satirical article
Gospoda Obmanovy ("The Obmanovs", 1902; the title is a play on
Gospoda Golovlyovy, a novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin, and
Romanov, the surname of Russian tsars), in which he dubs the tsar
Nicolas II Nika Milusha and mentions Prince Meshchersky,
the homosexual editor of Grazhdanin ("The Citizen", a
newspaper).
In 1921 Amfiteatrov and his family escaped from
Petrograd on a Finnish boat. Among VN's friends in Berlin was one of
Amfiteatrov's four sons.
Note that Alfin = final = alin
+ f (cf. "she [Countess de
Fyler] beat them [seven councilors] by
one alin and spat out the news", n. to line 71; cf. colonel St. Alin in
Ada); Odon = Nodo = odno ("one") = o + dno ("bottom")
Alexey Sklyarenko