In Canto Four of his poem Pale Fire John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving and mentions sunglassers touring Beirut (the capital of Lebanon):
And while the safety blade with scrap and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-938)
In his poem Zabludivshiysya tramvay (“The Lost Tram,” 1921) Gumilyov mentions a poor old man who had died in Beirut a year ago:
И, промелькнув у оконной рамы,
Бросил нам вслед пытливый взгляд
Нищий старик, - конечно, тот самый,
Что умер в Бейруте год назад.
And slipping by the window frame,
A poor old man threw us an inquisitive glance-
The very same old man, of course,
Who had died in Beirut a year ago.
In his poem Rabochiy ("The Worker," 1916) Gumilyov (a World War I hero who in August 1921 was executed by the Bolsheviks) imagines a German worker who is busy casting the bullet that will whistle over the Dvina River and kill him:
Он стоит пред раскаленным горном,
Невысокий старый человек.
Взгляд спокойный кажется покорным
От миганья красноватых век.
Все товарищи его заснули,
Только он один еще не спит:
Все он занят отливаньем пули,
Что меня с землею разлучит.
Кончил, и глаза повеселели.
Возвращается. Блестит луна.
Дома ждет его в большой постели
Сонная и теплая жена.
Пуля им отлитая, просвищет
Над седою, вспененной Двиной,
Пуля, им отлитая, отыщет
Грудь мою, она пришла за мной.
Упаду, смертельно затоскую,
Прошлое увижу наяву,
Кровь ключом захлещет на сухую,
Пыльную и мятую траву.
И Господь воздаст мне полной мерой
За недолгий мой и горький век.
Это сделал в блузе светло-серой
Невысокий старый человек.
He’s standing there, beside the glowing furnace,
A small man, probably older than you’d think.
His gaze is peaceful, seems almost submissive
From the way his reddened eyelids blink.
All his workmates have knocked off — they’re sleeping
But he’s still working, showing what he’s worth,
Devoted to his task — casting the bullet
That soon will separate me from the earth.
He’s finished. Now his eyes get back their twinkle.
He’s going home. A bright moon shines ahead.
A house is waiting for him, warm and toasty
A sleepy wife, blankets and a big bed.
And the bullet he has cast now whistles
Over the Dvina’s gray rippling spray
Homeward toward the heart it has been seeking,
And the bullet he has cast has found its way.
And I am falling, dazed by my own dying,
Watching a lifetime of moments pass,
And my blood, as from a fountain, now starts spurting
On the dusty, dry, flat trodden grass.
And the good Lord will repay me in full measure
For a life too brief to toast, too bitter to drink.
And he was wearing a gray shirt when he made it —
That small man, probably older than you’d think.
(tr. G. M. Young)
Zapadnaya Dvina is the Russian name of the Daugava, the river that flows in Riga (the capital of Latvia). The father of Shade's murderer, Martin Gradus had been a Protestant minister in Riga:
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. (note to Line 17)
In his poem Ya i Vy ("Me and you," 1917) Gumilyov mentions protestantskiy, pribrannyi ray (the tidy Protestant paradise):
Да, я знаю, я вам не пара,
Я пришел из иной страны,
И мне нравится не гитара,
А дикарский напев зурны.
Не по залам и по салонам
Темным платьям и пиджакам —
Я читаю стихи драконам,
Водопадам и облакам.
Я люблю — как араб в пустыне
Припадает к воде и пьет,
А не рыцарем на картине,
Что на звезды смотрит и ждет.
И умру я не на постели,
При нотариусе и враче,
А в какой-нибудь дикой щели,
Утонувшей в густом плюще,
Чтоб войти не во всем открытый,
Протестантский, прибранный рай,
А туда, где разбойник, мытарь
И блудница крикнут: вставай!
Yes, I know, we're not a pair,
In some other land I was born,
What I like is not the guitar
But the wild blows of a horn.
Not to gowns and tails I deliver
My best poems in luxurious halls,
I would rather read them to a river,
To the clouds and waterfalls.
And I love, like in desert a nomad
Drinking greedily from a jar,
Not a cavalier, sort of mad,
Who's just waiting and staring at stars.
And I'll die not in a bed, surrounded
By the doctors and notaries,
But somewhere in a dumping ground,
Or in jungles under giant trees,
Just to enter not cute and common
Tidy protestant paradise,
But the place where the footpad, loose woman,
And th' publican will tell me, «Rise!»
(tr. V. Gurvich)
A distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, John Shade dies not in a bed, surrounded by the doctors and notaries:
Had I ever seen Gradus before? Let me think. Had I? Memory shakes her head. Nevertheless the killer affirmed to me later that once from my tower, overlooking the Palace orchard, I had waved to him as he and one of my former pages, a boy with hair like excelsior, were carrying cradled glass from the hothouse to a horse-drawn van; but, as the caller now veered toward us and transfixed us with his snake-sad, close-set eyes, I felt such a tremor of recognition that had I been in bed dreaming I would have awoken with a groan.
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life.
One of the bullets that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart. His presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my balance, and, simultaneously, to complete the farce of fate, my gardener's spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow on the pate, felling him and sending his weapon flying from his grasp. Our savior retrieved it and helped me to my feet. My coccyx and right wrist hurt badly but the poem was safe. John, though, lay prone on the ground, with a red spot on his white shirt. I still hoped he had not been killed. The madman sat on the porch step, dazedly nursing with bloody hands a bleeding head. Leaving the gardener to watch over him I hurried into the house and concealed the invaluable envelope under a heap of girls' galoshes, furred snowboots and white wellingtons heaped at the bottom of a closet, from which I exited as if it had been the end of the secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to this Arcady. I then dialed 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage. The poor poet had now been turned over and lay with open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening azure. The armed gardener and the battered killer were smoking side by side on the steps. The latter, either because he was in pain, or because he had decided to play a new role, ignored me as completely as if I were a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava; but the poem was safe. (note to Line 1000)
The capital of Kinbote's Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. A tessera is a region of heavily deformed terrain on Venus. Na dalyokoy zvezde Venere ("On the distant star Venus," 1921) is a poem by Gumilyov written not long before the poet's arrest:
На далекой звезде Венере
Солнце пламенней и золотистей,
На Венере, ах, на Венере
У деревьев синие листья.
Всюду вольные звонкие воды,
Реки, гейзеры, водопады
Распевают в полдень песнь свободы,
Ночью пламенеют, как лампады.
На Венере, ах, на Венере
Нету слов обидных или властных,
Говорят ангелы на Венере
Языком из одних только гласных.
Если скажут еа и аи,
Это радостное обещанье,
Уо, ао — о древнем рае
Золотое воспоминанье.
На Венере, ах, на Венере
Нету смерти терпкой и душной,
Если умирают на Венере,
Превращаются в пар воздушный.
И блуждают золотые дымы
В синих, синих вечерних кущах
Иль, как радостные пилигримы,
Навещают еще живущих.
The sunglassers who tour Beirut and "the distant star Venus" bring to mind “a dazzling synthesis of sun and star” (as in Canto Two of his poem Shade calls his little scissors):
The little scissors I am holding are
A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.
I stand before the window and I pare
My fingernails and vaguely am aware
Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,
Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum
College astronomer Starover Blue;
The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;
The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;
And little pinky clinging to her skirt.
And I make mouths as I snip off the thin
Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin." (ll. 183-194)
In his poem K Rodzyanke (“To Rodzyanko,” 1825) Pushkin says that he disapproves of divorce (Rodzyanko’s mistress, Anna Kern, born Poltoratski, was married to general Kern) and, in the poem’s closing lines, mentions the sun of marriage that eclipses the shy star of love:
Но не согласен я с тобой,
Не одобряю я развода!
Во-первых, веры долг святой,
Закон и самая природа…
А во-вторых, замечу я,
Благопристойные мужья
Для умных жён необходимы:
При них домашние друзья
Иль чуть заметны, иль незримы.
Поверьте, милые мои,
Одно другому помогает,
И солнце брака затмевает
Звезду стыдливую любви.
In June 1825 Pushkin (who lived in exile in Mikhaylovskoe) met Anna Kern in Trigorskoe, the family estate of the Osipov family (Pushkin's neighbors and friends) in the Province of Pskov, and wrote his famous poem K*** ("To***"): Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnoven'ye ("I remember a wondrous moment"). In July 1825 Anna Kern (whose husband, General Yermolay Kern, was the military commander of Riga) left for Riga.
Zvezda stydlivaya lyubvi (the shy star of love) in Pushkin's "Epistle to Rodzyanko" is clearly Venus. In Chapter One (XXV) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin compares Onegin to giddy Venus and says that one can be an efficient man and mind the beauty of one's nails:
Быть можно дельным человеком
И думать о красе ногтей:
К чему бесплодно спорить с веком?
Обычай деспот меж людей.
Второй Чадаев, мой Евгений,
Боясь ревнивых осуждений,
В своей одежде был педант
И то, что мы назвали франт.
Он три часа по крайней мере
Пред зеркалами проводил
И из уборной выходил
Подобный ветреной Венере,
Когда, надев мужской наряд,
Богиня едет в маскарад.
One can be an efficient man —
and mind the beauty of one's nails:
why vainly argue with the age?
Custom is despot among men.
My Eugene, a second [Chadáev],
being afraid of jealous censures,
was in his dress a pedant
and what we've called a fop.
Three hours, at least,
he spent in front of glasses,
and from his dressing room came forth
akin to giddy Venus
when, having donned a masculine attire,
the goddess drives to a masqued ball.
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and compares tips it offered to the amber spectacles for life's eclipse:
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)