According to 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), the King saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
The King’s uncle Conmal, Duke of Aros, is the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare:
Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K.'s uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q. v.); noble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962. (Index)
Blenda, Queen, the King's mother, 1878-1936, reigned from 1918, 71. (Index)
Queen Blenda seems to hint at blenda, Russian for 'lens hood' (or 'lens shade'). Blenden is German for "to blind." Die Blendung ("The Blinding," 1935) is a novel by Elias Canetti (an Austrian writer, 1905-94) translated into English as Auto da Fé. In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote describes Shade destroying his drafts and mentions the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé:
This batch of eighty cards was held by a rubber band which I now religiously put back after examining for the last time their precious contents. Another, much thinner, set of a dozen cards, clipped together and enclosed in the same manila envelope as the main batch, bears some additional couplets running their brief and sometimes smudgy course among a chaos of first drafts. As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé. But he saved those twelve cards because of the unused felicities shining among the dross of used draftings. Perhaps, he vaguely expected to replace certain passages in the Fair Copy with some of the lovely rejections in his files, or, more probably, a sneaking fondness for this or that vignette, suppressed out of architectonic considerations, or because it had annoyed Mrs. S., urged him to put off its disposal till the time when the marble finality of an immaculate typescript would have confirmed it or made the most delightful variant seem cumbersome and impure. And perhaps, let me add in all modesty, he intended to ask my advice after reading his poem to me as I know he planned to do.
Describing the death of King Alfin (the father of Charles the Beloved), Kinbote mentions several pictures snapped by Queen Blenda:
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)
Queen Blenda brings to mind the amber spectacles for life's eclipse mentioned by Shade in Canto Three of his poem:
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)
According to Kinbote, “How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, / Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp” is the loveliest couplet in the Canto. An orbicle of jasp brings to mind “a perfect image of one orbicular millennium” that Archibald Moon, a character in VN’s novel Podvig (“Glory,” 1932”), wanted to give in his book on Russia:
Профессором русской словесности и истории был в ту пору небезызвестный Арчибальд Мун. В России он прожил довольно долго, всюду побывал, всех знал, всё перевидел. Теперь, черноволосый, бледный, в пенсне на тонком носу, он бесшумно проезжал на велосипеде с высоким рулём, сидя совсем прямо, а за обедом, в знаменитой столовой с дубовыми столами и огромными цветными окнами, вертел головой, как птица, и быстро, быстро крошил длинными пальцами хлеб. Говорили, единственное, что он в мире любит, это - Россия. Многие не понимали, почему он там не остался. На вопросы такого рода Мун неизменно отвечал: "Справьтесь у Робертсона" (это был востоковед) "почему он не остался в Вавилоне". Возражали вполне резонно, что Вавилона уже нет. Мун кивал, тихо и хитро улыбаясь. Он усматривал в октябрьском перевороте некий отчетливый конец. Охотно допуская, что со временем образуется в Советском Союзе, пройдя через первобытные фазы, известная культура, он вместе с тем утверждал, что Россия завершена и неповторима, - что её можно взять, как прекрасную амфору, и поставить под стекло. Печной горшок, который там теперь обжигался, ничего общего с нею не имел. Гражданская война представлялась ему нелепой: одни бьются за призрак прошлого, другие за призрак будущего, - меж тем, как Россию потихоньку украл Арчибальд Мун и запер у себя в кабинете. Ему нравилась её завершённость. Она была расцвечена синевою вод и прозрачным пурпуром пушкинских стихов. Вот уже скоро два года, как он писал на английском языке её историю, надеялся всю её уложить в один толстенький том. Эпиграф из Китса ("Создание красоты - радость навеки"), тончайшая бумага, мягкий сафьяновый переплёт. Задача была трудная: найти гармонию между эрудицией и тесной живописной прозой, дать совершенный образ одного округлого тысячелетия.
At that time the chair of Russian literature and history was occupied by the distinguished scholar Archibald Moon. He had lived fairly long in Russia, and had been everywhere, met everyone, seen everything there. Now, pale and dark-haired, with a pince-nez on his thin nose, he could be observed riding by, sitting perfectly upright, on a bicycle with high handlebars; or, at dinner in the renowned hall with oaken tables and huge stained-glass windows, he would jerk his head from side to side like a bird, and crumble bread extremely fast between his long fingers. They said the only thing this Englishman loved in the world was Russia. Many people could not understand why he had not remained there. Moon’s reply to questions of that kind would invariably be: “Ask Robertson” (the orientalist) “why he did not stay in Babylon.” The perfectly reasonable objection would be raised that Babylon no longer existed. Moon would nod with a sly, silent smile. He saw in the Bolshevist insurrection a certain clear-cut finality. While he willingly allowed that, by-and-by, after the primitive phases, some civilization might develop in the “Soviet Union,” he nevertheless maintained that Russia was concluded and unrepeatable, that you could embrace it like a splendid amphora and put it behind glass. The clay kitchen pot now being baked there had nothing in common with it. The civil war seemed absurd to him: one side fighting for the ghost of the past, the other for the ghost of the future, and meanwhile Archibald Moon quietly had stolen Russia and locked it up in his study. He admired this finality. It was colored by the blue of waters and the transparent porphyry of Pushkin’s poetry. For nearly two years now he had been working on an English-language history of Russia, and he hoped to squeeze it all into one plump volume. An obvious motto (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”), ultrathin paper, a soft Morocco binding. The task was a difficult one: to find a harmony between erudition and tight picturesque prose, to give a perfect image of one orbicular millennium. (chapter XVI)
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Aunt Maud's verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral):
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (the poet who was married to Maria Botkin). Sofia is a character (Famusov’s daughter with whom Chatski is in love) in Griboedov’s play in verse Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824). At the beginning of his essay Mil'yon terzaniy ("A Million Torments," 1872) Goncharov compares Griboedov's comedy to stoletniy starik (a hundred-year-old man):
Комедия «Горе от ума» держится каким-то особняком в литературе и отличается моложавостью, свежестью и более крепкой живучестью от других произведений слова. Она, как столетний старик, около которого все, отжив по очереди свою пору, умирают и валятся, а он ходит, бодрый и свежий, между могилами старых и колыбелями новых людей. И никому в голову не приходит, что настанет когда-нибудь и его черед.
The comedy Woe from Wit holds itself apart in literature and is distinguished by its youthfulness, freshness and stronger vitality from other works of the word. She is like a hundred-year-old man, around whom everyone, having outlived their time in turn, dies and falls, and he walks, cheerful and fresh, between the graves of old and the cradles of new people. And it never occurs to anyone that someday his turn will come.
Conmal (1855-1955) dies at the age of hundred. The title of Goncharov's essay, "A Million Torments" (an allusion to Chatski's words in Act Three of Griboedov's play), brings to mind a million photographers mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
In his Foreword to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions his favorite photograph of Shade:
I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that had belonged to his aunt Maud (see line 86). I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised--not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture; and the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find that he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally, we separated at once, and through a chink in the window curtains I saw bad Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut, and shabby valise, and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything save treason.
Kinbote's favorite photograph of Shade (who was photographed with Kinbote) brings to mind Levitski's photograph of Goncharov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich, Druzhinin and Ostrovski (the leading contributors to The Contemporary) taken in 1856:
A Russian literary, social and political magazine published in Saint Petersburg in 1836-66, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) originated as a private enterprise of Pushkin who was running out of money to support his growing family. In his essay Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable (1937) VN points out that, had Pushkin lived a couple of years longer, we would have had his photograph. "A bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus" who will presently ring at Kinbote's door makes one think of the real Inspector whose arrival is announced at the end of Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836):
Жандарм. Приехавший по именному повелению из Петербурга чиновник требует вас сей же час к себе. Он остановился в гостинице.
Произнесённые слова поражают как громом всех. Звук изумления единодушно взлетает из дамских уст; вся группа, вдруг переменивши положение, остаётся в окаменении.
GENDARME. The Inspector-General sent by Imperial command has arrived, and requests your attendance at once. He awaits you in the inn.
(They are thunderstruck at this announcement. The ladies utter simultaneous ejaculations of amazement; the whole group suddenly shift their positions and remain as if petrified.)
Gogol (who signed the fragment of a historical novel with 0000, “the quadruple of zeroes”) was also photographed by Levitski (in 1849):
One of the patriarchs of Russian photography and one of Europe's most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators, Count Sergey Levitski (1819-98) was a cousin of Alexander Herzen (whose photographic portrait was made by Levitski in 1860, in London). Herzen and Goncharov were born in 1812, the year of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Herzen's novel Kto vinovat? ("Who is to Blame?" 1847) reminds one of the question Kinbote asks Sybil Shade:
In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of that year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend's past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S. S.?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa's grandfather in 1908; and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, "for reasons of health" (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells. (note to Lines 433-434)
A million photographers mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary brings to mind dvunogikh tvarey milliony (the millions of two-legged creatures) mentioned by Pushkin in Canto Two (XIV: 6-7) of Eugene Onegin:
Но дружбы нет и той меж нами.
Все предрассудки истребя,
Мы почитаем всех нулями,
А единицами — себя.
Мы все глядим в Наполеоны;
Двуногих тварей миллионы
Для нас орудие одно;
Нам чувство дико и смешно.
Сноснее многих был Евгений;
Хоть он людей, конечно, знал
И вообще их презирал, —
Но (правил нет без исключений)
Иных он очень отличал
И вчуже чувство уважал.
But in our midst there’s even no such friendship:
Having destroyed all the prejudices,
We deem all people naughts
And ourselves units.
We all expect to be Napoleons;
the millions of two-legged creatures
for us are only tools;
feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
According to Pushkin, the millions of two-legged creatures for us are orudie odno (only tools). Odno (neut. of odin, one) = Odon (stage name of Donald O'Donnell, a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla) = Nodo (Odon's half-brother, a cardsharp and despicable traitor).
Duke of Aros makes one think of Eros bozhestvennogo (Eros of the Divine) mentioned by the philosopher Semyon Frank in Artisticheskoe narodnichestvo (“The Artistic Populism,” 1910), a review of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s book Po zvyozdam (“By the Stars,” 1909):
Пафос идеалистического символизма -- иллюзионизм... Пафос реалистического символизма: чрез Августиново "transcende te ipsum", к лозунгу: "a realibus ad realiora". Его алхимическая загадка, его теургическая попытка религиозного творчества -- утвердить, познать, выявить в действительности иную, более действительную действительность. Это -- пафос мистического стремления к ens realissimum, эрос божественного.
According to S. Frank, the pathos of the realistic symbolism (a theory advocated by Vyacheslav Ivanov) is through St. Augustine's "transcende te ipsum" to the motto "a realibus ad realiora." In De Vera Religione (“Of True Religion”) St. Augustine says:
Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas; et si tuam naturam mutabilem inveneris, transcende et teipsum. Sed memento cum te transcendis, ratiocinantem animam te transcendere. Illuc ergo tende, unde ipsum lumen rationis accenditur.
Do not look outside yourself but turn, rather, inside yourself. In the inner man dwells truth. And if therein you find your mutable nature, transcend even yourself. But remember that when you transcend yourself, you transcend the rational soul. Proceed onward, therefore, to the place where the very light of reason is illuminated. (XXXIX, 72)
In his sonnet Transcende te ipsum (1904) V. Ivanov mentions vechnaya Sofia (eternal Sophia):
Два жала есть у царственного змия;
У ангела Порывов — два крыла.
К распутию душа твоя пришла:
Вождь сей тропы — Рахиль; и оной — Лия.
Как двум вожжам послушны удила,
Так ей — дела, а той — мечты благие.
Ей Отреченье имя, — чьи дела;
Той — Отрешенье. Вечная София —
Обеим свет. Одна зовет: «Прейди
Себя, — себя объемля в беспредельном».
Рахиль: «Себя прейди — в себя сойди».
И любит отчужденного в Одном,
А Лия — отчужденного в Раздельном.
И обе склонены над темным дном.
The regal serpent has a two-pointed tongue;
The angel of Impulses has two wings.
To a parting of the ways your soul has come:
The ruler of this path is Rachel; and of the other — Leah.
Just as a horse's bit obeys two reins,
So to one belong actions, and to the other - blessed dreams.
Repudiation is the name of the one whose sphere is actions;
The name of the other is Renunciation. Eternal Sophia
Is light to them both. One calls: "Transcend
Yourself — by embracing yourself in the infinite."
Rachel says: "Transcend yourself - descend into yourself."
And she loves the other in the One,
While Leah loves the other in the Divided.
And both are bowed over the dark deep.
(tr. Pamela Davidson)
There is Aros in Pharos, a small island located on the western edge of the Nile Delta. The Lighthouse of Alexandria is sometimes called the Pharos of Alexandria. Nilskaya delta (“The Nile Delta,” 1898) is a poem by Vladimir Solovyov, the author of a doctrine about the Divine Sophia. In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert mentions a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of big Frank's crippled hand:
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scarshad been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy. (2.22)
In the same chapter of Lolita Humbert mentions a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. (2.22)
A leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade’s poem is the beginning of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782):
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.
Who rides so late through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
In his Eugene Onegin Commentary VN several times mentions Jean-François Ducis (1733-1816), a fervent admirer of "Sakespir." In Ducis’s French version (1772) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.1) Hamlet tells Ophelia (whom Hamlet eventually marries):
Que tu me connois mal , ô ma chere Ophélie!