In his commentary to Shade’s poem, 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) mentions the society sculptor and poet Arnor:
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin. (note to Line 80)
The society sculptor and poet Arnor brings to mind Nora Gal (born Eleonora Galperin, 1912-1991), the author of a Russian translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale Le Petit Prince ("The Little Prince," 1943). Fleur de Fyler makes one think of Les Fleurs du Mal ("The Flowers of Evil," 1857) by Charles Baudelaire (a French poet, 1821-1867). A wise character in "The Little Prince," le renard (the fox) teaches the prince about love, friendship, and responsibility. The Little Prince meets the Fox on Earth in the Sahara Desert after leaving his tiny planet (asteroid B-612). The Fox is unhappy and asks the prince to "tame" him. In Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions his collection of essays The Untamed Seahorse that appeared shortly before (or soon after) his daughter’s death:
Later came minutes, hours, whole days at last,
When she'd be absent from our thoughts, so fast
Did life, the wooly caterpillar run.
We went to Italy. Sprawled in the sun
On a white beach with other pink or brown
Americans. Flew back to our small town.
Found that my bunch of essay The Untamed
Seahorse was "universally acclaimed"
(It sold three hundred copies in one year). (ll. 665-673)
As Kinbote points out, Shade borrowed the title of his book from Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess (1842):
See Browning's My Last Duchess.
See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry--or a long poem, alas--with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick. (note to Lines 671-672)
At the end of Browning’s poem, the Duke of Ferrara mentions Neptune taming a sea-horse:
‘Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!’
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa is the wife of Charles the Beloved. Countess Fleur de Fyler is Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting. The Russian word for le renard (male fox), lis brings to mind Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, in Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831), a beautiful young noblewoman who is engaged to Phoebus de Châteaupers. A character in Hugo's novel, the Gypsy girl Esmeralda makes one think of Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus (Shade's murderer) a lift to Kinbote's rented house in New Wye. Quasimodo (the hunchback in Notre Dame de Paris) brings to mind Nodo (a cardsharp and despicable traitor), half-brother of Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla). The Little Prince and his friend the Fox in Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale bring to mind an exiled prince and an old fox in the book publishing business mentioned by Kinbote in his foreword to Shade's poem:
Imagine a soft, clumsy giant; imagine a historical personage whose knowledge of money is limited to the abstract billions of a national debt; imagine an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links! This is to say - oh, hyperbolically - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first touchingly carefree and chummy, with expansive banterings and all sorts of amiable tokens. I have no reason to suppose that anything will ever happen to prevent this initial relationship with good old Frank, my present publisher, from remaining a permanent fixture.
Golconde (1953) is an oil painting on canvas by Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967):
In Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale, the Little Prince says: "C’est comme pour la fleur. Si tu aimes une fleur qui se trouve dans une étoile, c’est doux, la nuit, de regarder le ciel. Toutes les étoiles sont fleuries... (It is the same as for the flower. If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom..." Chapter XXVI). Magritte's succession of paintings The Empire of Light makes one think of Tyutchev's poem Dusha khotela b byt' zvezdoy ("My soul would like to be a star," 1830):
Душа хотела б быть звездой,
Но не тогда, как с неба полуночи
Сии светила, как живые очи,
Глядят на сонный мир земной, –
Но днем, когда, сокрытые как дымом
Палящих солнечных лучей,
Они, как божества, горят светлей
В эфире чистом и незримом.
[My soul would like to be a star, but not when these bright things in midnight skies, like living eyes, shine, stare upon, gaze at our sleepy earth-world from afar. No, but during daytime when, as if they are hidden in a searing sunbeam-haze, in pure, unseen expanses, like deities, to burn more brightly they are bidden.]
Kon' morskoy ("The Sea Horse," 1830) is a poem Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873):
О рьяный конь, о конь морской,
С бледно-зеленой гривой,
То смирный-ласково-ручной,
То бешено-игривый!
Ты буйным вихрем вскормлен был
В широком божьем поле,
Тебя он прядать научил,
Играть, скакать по воле!
Люблю тебя, когда стремглав,
В своей надменной силе,
Густую гриву растрепав
И весь в пару и мыле,
К брегам направив бурный бег,
С веселым ржаньем мчишься,
Копыта кинешь в звонкий брег –
И в брызги разлетишься!..
Ardent horse, sea-horse,
pale-green maned,
gentle, loving-tamed,
raging, wild-playing,
fed by violent storms
in God’s open plains!
He taught and trained you
to play, to leap at will.
I love you when you bound
madly, arrogantly strong,
tossing your thick mane,
sweating, foaming,
dashing fast storms against the shore,
gaily neighing, galloping,
drumming cliffs with your hooves,
white-flecked, flying!
(tr. F. Jude)
Shade borrowed the title of his book Hebe's Cup from Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya groza ("The Spring Thunderstorm," 1829):
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.