In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead parents and mentions a preterist (one who collects cold nests):
I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
A preterist: one who collects cold nests. (ll. 71-79)
In Canto Three of his poem Poltava (1828) Pushkin describes the battle of Poltava (June 27, 1709) and mentions ptentsy gnezda Petrova (the fledglings of Peter's nest):
И он промчался пред полками,
Могущ и радостен, как бой.
Он поле пожирал очами.
За ним вослед неслись толпой
Сии птенцы гнезда Петрова -
В пременах жребия земного,
В трудах державства и войны
Его товарищи, сыны:
И Шереметев благородный,
И Брюс, и Боур, и Репнин,
И, счастья баловень безродный,
Полудержавный властелин.
He tore ahead of all the ranks,
Enraptured, mighty as the battle.
His eyes devoured the martial field.
The fledglings of Peter's nest
Surged after him, a loyal throng-
Through all the shifts of worldly fate,
In trials of policy and war,
These men, these comrades, were like sons:
The noble Sheremetev,
And Bryus, and Bour, and Repnin,
And, fortune's humble favorite,
The mighty half-sovereign.
(trans. Ivan Eubanks)
One of the fledglings of Peter's nest, Prince Anikita Repnin (1668-1726) is the ancestor of Ivan Petrovich Pnin (1773-1805), a poet and president of The Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences and Arts (an illegitimate son of Prince Nikolay Repnin, 1734-1801). Na smert' Pnina ("On the Death of Pnin," 1805) is a poem by Batyushkov. Pnin is the title character of a novel (1957) by VN. In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Prof. Pnin, the Head of the bloated Russian Department at Wordsmith University, and Professor Botkin (who taught in another department):
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
The characters in Ilf and Petrov's novel Zolotoy telyonok ("The Golden Calf, 1931) include Mikhail Samuelevich Panikovski, gusekrad (the goose thief). John Shade is the son of Samuel Shade and Caroline Lukin:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
A schoolmate of Gogol at the Nezhin Lyceum, Platon Lukashevich is the author of Ob'yasnenie assiriyskikh imyon ("The Interpretation of Assyrian Names," 1868). Describing King Alfin's death, Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames) mentions Colonel Peter Gusev (King Alfin's "aerial adjutant"):
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Gusev (1890) is story by Chekhov. In Chekhov’s story Ionych (1898) Kitten, as she speaks to Dr Startsev (“Ionych”), mentions Pisemski and his funny patronymic:
— Что вы читали на этой неделе, пока мы не виделись? — спросил он теперь. — Говорите, прошу вас.
— Я читала Писемского.
— Что именно?— «Тысяча душ», — ответила Котик. — А как смешно звали Писемского: Алексей Феофилактыч!
"What have you been reading this week since I saw you last?" he asked now. "Do please tell me."
"I have been reading Pisemski."
"What exactly?"
"'A Thousand Souls,' "answered Kitten. "And what a funny name Pisemski had -- Alexey Feofilaktych!” (chapter II)
The title of Pisemski's novel, Tysyacha dush ("A Thousand Souls," 1858), brings to mind Gogol’s Myortvye dushi ("Dead Souls," 1842) and "A Thousand and One Nights" (an Arabic collection of fairy tales). Chekhov is the author of Tysyacha odna strast’, ili Strashnaya noch’ (“A Thousand and One Passions, or The Terrible Night,” 1880), a parody of Gothic stories dedicated to Victor Hugo (the author of Notre Dame de Paris, 1831). In his story Strashnaya mest' ("A Terrible Vengeance," 1832) Gogol says that a rare bird would fly to the middle of the Dnepr. Shade's poem is almost finished, when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade's poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski (whom Shade listed among Russian humorists), a poem (1862) by Polonski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok (who confessed that he did not know what a coda is). Shade's murderer, Jakob Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). Prishli i stali teni nochi (“The shadows of the night came and mounted guard at my door,” 1842) is a poem by Polonski. The third word in Polonski's poem, stali ("mounted"), brings to mind Stalin (the Soviet leader in 1924-53). According to Kinbote, the terrible name of the leader of the Shadows cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar:
Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q. v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys. (Index)
The grandfather of Charles the Beloved, the king Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid, brings to mind Polonski's friend Turgenev. Dvoryanskoe gnezdo ("A Nest of the Gentry," 1859) is a novel by Turgenev. Its title brings to mind Vsevolod Bol'shoe Gnezdo (Vsevolod the Big Nest, 1154-1212), the Grand Prince of Vladimir. The characters in Slovo o polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign"), an anonymous epic poem of the twelfth century, include Buy Tur Vsevolod (Wild Bull Vsevolod), Igor's brother.
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 Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Petrovich 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 epigram, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Professor Botkin has the same first name as Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855-88) and the same patronymic as Yakov Petrovich Polonski (1819-98), the author of Pamyati Garshina ("In Memory of Garshin," 1888), a poem on Garshin's death. In his poem Polonski compares Garshin (the author of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, 1885) to ranenaya ptitsa (a wounded bird):
Как птица раненая, он
Приник — и уж не ждал полета;
А я сказал ему, чтоб он
Житейских дрязг порвал тенета,
Чтоб он рванулся на простор —
Бежал в прохладу дальних гор, —
В глушь деревень, к полям иль к морю, —
Туда, где человек в борьбе
С природой смело смотрит горю
В лицо, не мысля о себе…
...И огненные сновиденья
Его умчали в край иной.
Без крика и без сожаленья
Покинул он больной наш свет…
Его не восторгал он — нет!..
В его глазах он был теплицей,
Где гордой пальме места нет,
Где так роскошен пустоцвет,
Где пойманной, помятой птицей,
Не веря собственным крылам,
Сквозь стекла потемневших рам,
Сквозь дымку чадных испарений
Напрасно к свету рвется гений, —
К полям, к дубровам, к небесам…
In March 1888 Garshin committed suicide by throwing himself over the banisters of a staircase landing. According to Kinbote, of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method:
I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred such sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gentle--not fall, not jump--but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off--farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one's eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one's liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality. (Note to Line 493)
Btw., in Gogol's story Shinel' ("The Overcoat," 1842) Petrovich is the tailor who makes the new carrick for Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin. The surname Gogol means "goldeneye" (the bird Bucephala clangula). In Gogol's story Zapiski sumasshedshego ("The Notes of a Madman," 1835) Poprishchin imagines that he is Ferdinand VIII, the king of Spain. Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851) is a book by Vasiliy Petrovich Botkin (1811-69), the author of Mozart (1838), a biographical essay. In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin in reverse.