In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that, when he was a child, all colors made him happy, even gray:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves. (ll. 29-40)
Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours, 1810) is a book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how they are perceived by humans. The book contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration. The book is a successor to two short essays titled Beiträge zur Optik ("Contributions to Optics").
In Goethe's Faust (1808) Mephistopheles famously says: "Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum." ("Grey is, dear friend, all theory, And green of life the golden tree").
At the end of Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four (1890) Sherlock Holmes quotes Goethe (Xenien, XX):
“Strange,” said I, “how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.”
“Yes,” he answered, “there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe,—
Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus Dir schuf,
Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff."
[Pity that Nature made of you only one person,
because there was material enough for a worthy man and a rogue.]
(Chapter XII "The The Strange Story of Jonathan Small")
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes and a pheasant's feet:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
Kazhdyi Okhotnik ZHelaet Znat' Gde Sidit Fazan (Every hunter wants to know where sits the pheasant) is the Russian counterpart of "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain", a mnemonic used for remembering the colour sequence (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) in the rainbow.
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints.
Shade's murderer, Gradus brings to mind ein Mann von vielen Graden (a man of manifold degrees), as in Goethe’s tragedy Mephistopheles calls Faust:
Mephistopheles:
Genug, genug, o treffliche Sibylle!
Gib deinen Trank herbei, und fülle
Die Schale rasch bis an den Rand hinan;
Denn meinem Freund wird dieser Trunk nicht schaden:
Er ist ein Mann von vielen Graden,
Der manchen guten Schluck getan.
Mephistopheles:
O Sibyl excellent, enough of adjuration!
But hither bring us thy potation,
And quickly fill the beaker to the brim!
This drink will bring my friend no injuries:
He is a man of manifold degrees,
And many draughts are known to him. (Faust, Part One, “Witches’ Kitchen”)
Treffliche Sibylle (excellent Sibyl), as Mephistopheles calls a witch, brings to mind Sybil Shade (the poet's wife). In a conversation at the faculty club Kinbote calls the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria "the third in the witch row:"
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die--they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon--American History--"that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I heard," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time--"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere--"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to--what's his name--oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, are young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions his favorite young shagbark:
I had a favorite young shagbark there
With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone
Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.
It is now stout and rough; it has done well.
White butterflies turn lavender as they
Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway
The phantom of my little daughter's swing. (ll. 49-57)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King's Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade's collection of short poems Hebe's Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting here (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):
THE SACRED TREE
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados. (note to Line 49)
Ginkgo biloba is a poem by Goethe included in West-Eastern Divan (1819):
Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Giebt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut,
Ist es ein lebendig Wesen,
Das sich in sich selbst getrennt?
Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen,
Daß man sie als Eines kennt?
Solche Frage zu erwidern,
Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn,
Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern,
Daß ich Eins und doppelt bin?
This leaf from a tree in the East,
Has been given to my garden.
It reveals a certain secret,
Which pleases me and thoughtful people.
Is it one living being,
Which has separated in itself?
Or are these two, who chose
To be recognized as one?
Answering this kind of question,
Haven't I found the proper meaning,
Don't you feel in my songs,
That I'm one and double?
Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double (both Kinbote and Gradus were born on July 5, 1915; July 5 is also Shade's birthday, but Shade was born in 1898). The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Vsevolod Botkin. 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). The wife of Charles the Beloved, Queen Disa, and the poet's wife Sybil seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. In his review of Andrey Bely's Zapiski chudaka ("The Notes of an Eccentric," 1922) Osip Mandelshtam criticizes theosophy ("a knitted jersey of degenerating religion") and calls the Goetheanum (a temple built by the theosophists in Switzerland) kakay-to novaya Sofia (some new Hagia Sophia):
Что за безвкусная нелепая идея строить «храм всемирной мудрости» на таком неподходящем месте? Со всех сторон швейцары, пансионы и отели; люди живут на чеки и поправляют здоровье. Самое благополучное место в мире. Чистенький нейтральный кусочек земли и в то же время в сытом своем международном благополучии самый нечистый угол Европы. И на этом-то месте, среди фамильных пансионов и санаторий, строится какая-то новая София. Ведь нужно было потерять всякое чутье значительности, всякий такт, всякое чувство истории, чтобы додуматься до такой нелепицы? Отсутствие меры и такта, отсутствие вкуса — есть ложь, первый признак лжи. У Данта одного душевного события хватило на всю жизнь. Если у человека три раза в день происходят колоссальные душевные катастрофы, мы перестаем ему верить, мы вправе ему не верить — он для нас смешон. А над Белым смеяться не хочется и грех: он написал «Петербург». Ни у одного из русских писателей предреволюционная тревога и сильнейшее смятение не сказались так сильно, как у Белого. И если он обратил свое мышление, свою тревогу, свой человеческий и литературный стиль в нелепый и безвкусный танец, тем хуже для него. Танцующая проза «Записок чудака» — высшая школа литературной самовлюбленности. Рассказать о себе, вывернуть себя наизнанку, показать себя в четвертом, пятом, шестом измерении. Другие символисты были осторожнее, но в общем русский символизм так много и громко кричал о «несказанном», что это «несказанное» пошло по рукам, как бумажные деньги. Необычайная свобода и легкость мысли у Белого, когда он в буквальном смысле слова пытается рассказать, что думает его селезенка, или: «событие неописуемой важности заключалось в том, каким образом я убедился, что этот младенец есть я» (младенец, разумеется, совершенно иносказательный и отвлеченный). Основной нерв прозы Белого — своеобразное стремление к изяществу, к танцу, к пируэту, стремление танцуя объять необъятное. Но отсутствие всякой стилистической мысли в его новой прозе делает ее чрезвычайно элементарной, управляемой двумя или тремя законами. Проза асимметрична: её движения — движения словесной массы — движение стада, сложное и ритмичное в своей неправильности; настоящая проза — разнобой, разлад, многоголосие, контрапункт; а «Записки чудака» — как дневник гимназиста, написанный полустихами.