bobolink + Keats = Botkin + Blok + sea

P. B. Shelley is the author of Adonaïs (1821), an Elegy on the Death of John Keats. Keats is the author of Ode to a Nightingale (1820), one of Shelley’s most famous poems is To a Skylark (1820).

Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name seems to be Vsevolod Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of her father’s poem).

Alexander Blok (1880-1921) is the author of Dvenadtsat’ (“The Twelve,” 1918), Korol’ na ploshchadi (“The King in a Square,” 1906), a play, and Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1909), a poem that ends in the lines:

Быть может, себя самого
Я встретил на глади зеркальной?

Perhaps, I met myself

on the smooth surface of a mirror?

The last (unwritten) lines of Shade’s poem seem to be:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By its own double in the windowpane. (ll. 1000-1001)

In his poem K moryu (“To the Sea,” 1824) Pushkin speaks of Napoleon’s and Byron’s deaths:

Одна скала, гробница славы...
Там погружались в хладный сон
Воспоминанья величавы:
Там угасал Наполеон.

Там он почил среди мучений.
И вслед за ним, как бури шум,
Другой от нас умчался гений,
Другой властитель наших дум.

Исчез, оплаканный свободой,
Оставя миру свой венец.
Шуми, взволнуйся непогодой:
Он был, о море, твой певец.

Твой образ был на нем означен,
Он духом создан был твоим:
Как ты, могущ, глубок и мрачен,
Как ты, ничем неукротим.

One lofty crag, a glorious tomb...
There stately memories dwelled on
And plunged in sleep of cold and gloom:
There faded great Napoleon.

Amid great pangs he rested there.
And like a thunder afterwards,
Another genius left us bare,
Another master of our hearts.

He fled, bewailed by liberty,
Bequeathing to the world his palms.
Grow agitated, roar, o sea:
Of you, of you he sang his psalms.

Your image was designed on him,
In spirit he was made the same:
Like you, dynamic, deep and grim.
Like you, impossible to tame.

(transl. Genia Gurarie)

In my previous post (“Samuel Shade & Caroline Lukin in Pale Fire”) I did not mention the fact that Franklin invented the lightning rod, because I thought that everybody knew it.

Alexey Sklyarenko