In his Foreword 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) calls himself "the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils with the fate of the innocent author:"
Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to come swirling around her husband's manuscript (transferred by me to a safe spot even before his body had reached the grave) by signing an agreement to the effect that he had turned over the manuscript to me; that I would have it published, without delay, with my commentary by a firm of my choice; that all profits, except the publisher's percentage, would accrue to her; and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation. I defy any serious critic to find this contract unfair. Nevertheless, it has been called (by Shade's former lawyer) "a fantastic farrago of evil," while another person (his former literary agent) has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned "in some peculiar kind of red ink." Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.
"The beholder and only begetter" brings to mind the saying "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" and the cryptic dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets:
To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W H:
“All happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet,” wisheth the Well-Wishing Adventurer in setting forth.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act I, scene 1) Horatio, as he speaks to the Ghost, uses the phrase "But soft, behold!":
But soft, behold! Lo, where it comes again!
Re-enter Ghost
I'll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me.
The proverb "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" makes one think of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun):
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
In Shakespeare's play Love’s Labor Lost (Act II, scene 1) the Princess of France says:
Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues:
I am less proud to hear you tell my worth
Than you much willing to be counted wise
In spending your wit in the praise of mine.
At the beginning of Canto Four of his poem Shade says that he will spy on beauty as none has spied on it yet:
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:
I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. (ll. 835-846)
Later in the Canto Shade says that he will speak of evil as none has spoken before:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 923-930)
According to Kinbote, Shade's former lawyer called the contract signed by Sybil Shade (the poet's widow) "a fantastic farrago of evil." "Some peculiar kind of red ink" (as Shade's former literary agent calls blood) brings to mind the inky maze mentioned by Shade in Canto Four of his poem:
In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill
Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on
Or walking briskly to the corner store
To buy the paper he has read before.
Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because
In penless work there is no pen-poised pause
And one must use three hands at the same time,
Having to choose the necessary rhyme,
Hold the completed line before one's eyes,
And keep in mind all the preceding tries?
Or is the process deeper with no desk
To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?
For there are those mysterious moments when
Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;
I ambulate - and by some mute command
The right word flutes and perches on my hand. (ll. 847-872)
Sergey Esenin (1895-1925) wrote his last poem, Do svidan’ya, drug moy, do svidan’ya (Goodbye, my friend, goodbye), with his own blood (because he had no ink in his Angleterre Hotel room). Esenin is the author of an original version of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:
Хороша была Танюша, краше не было в селе,
Красны губки, как кораллы, белы груди в подоле.
Ходит Таня у оврага, где холодная роса,
Душегубкою-змеею вьется черная коса.
Щечки Танины смуглее, чем колёр заморских роз,
Дух от Тани здоровее, чем на клевере навоз.
Не заутренние звоны, не венчальный перебор,
А на свете всех милее Тани ладный разговор.
Широка и величава, шаг уверенно кладёт,
Выступает, словно пава - не лебёдушкой плывёт.
Может, ангела походка и легка, и хороша,
Но когда идет Танюша - услаждается душа.
Врут, что девки есть пригожей, под гармонь навеселе -
Хороша была Танюша, краше не было в селе.
Esenin committed suicide (on Dec. 28, 1925) in Leningrad (St. Petersburg’s name in 1924-1991). In his Commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (Shade's murderer who 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) “Vinogradus” and “Leningradus:”
Such things rankle – but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
In the dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets “All happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet” is mentioned. In Esenin's poem Chyornyi chelovek (“The Black Man,” 1925) the Black Man says that schast'ye (happiness) is a sleight of mind and hand:
Счастье, — говорил он, —
Есть ловкость ума и рук.
Все неловкие души
За несчастных всегда известны.
Это ничего,
Что много мук
Приносят изломанные
И лживые жесты.
Happiness — he said —
is a sleight of mind and hand.
All clumsy souls are always
known for being unhappy.
It does not matter much
that broken and false gestures
bring many tortures.
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart mentions his chyornyi chelovek (man in black; Shade's murderer, Gradus is "the man in brown") who ordered a Requiem and who seems to sit with him and Salieri sam-tretey (as a third):
М о ц а р т
Мне день и ночь покоя не дает
Мой черный человек. За мною всюду
Как тень он гонится. Вот и теперь
Мне кажется, он с нами сам-третей
Сидит.
С а л ь е р и
И, полно! что за страх ребячий?
Рассей пустую думу. Бомарше
Говаривал мне: "Слушай, брат Сальери,
Как мысли черные к тебе придут,
Откупори шампанского бутылку
Иль перечти "Женитьбу Фигаро".
М о ц а р т
Да! Бомарше ведь был тебе приятель;
Ты для него "Тарара" сочинил,
Вещь славную. Там есть один мотив...
Я все твержу его, когда я счастлив...
Ла ла ла ла... Ах, правда ли, Сальери,
Что Бомарше кого-то отравил?
С а л ь е р и
Не думаю: он слишком был смешон
Для ремесла такого.
М о ц а р т
Он же гений,
Как ты да я. А гений и злодейство --
Две вещи несовместные. Не правда ль?
Mozart
He gives me no rest night or day,
My man in black. He’s everywhere behind
Me like a shadow. Even now he seems
To sit here with us as a third.
Salieri
Come, come!
What sort of childish fright is this? Dispel
These empty fancies. Beaumarchais would often
Say to me "Listen, Salieri, old friend,
When black thoughts come your way, uncork the champagne
Bottle, or re-read The Marriage of Figaro."
Mozart
Yes, you and Beaumarchais were pals, weren’t you?
It was for him you wrote Tarare, a lovely
Work. There is one tune in it, I always
Hum it to myself when I feel happy . . .
La la la la . . . Salieri, is it true
That Beaumarchais once poisoned somebody?
Salieri
I don’t think so. He was too droll a fellow
For such a trade.
Mozart
Besides, he was a genius,
Like you and me. And genius and villainy
Are two things incompatible, aren’t they?
(Scene II)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse. 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). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword to Shade's poem not in "Cedarn, Utana," but in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), writes his poem "Wanted." In one of the chapters of his manuscript Humbert mentions frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec and ends the chapter with a pseudo-Shakespearean quote:
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (2.31)