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 narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers are tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault:
They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? (note to Lines 433-434)
Shade's full name is John Francis Shade. Sir Francis Drake (an English explorer and privateer, c.1540-96) was known to the Spanish as El Draque ("The Dragon" in old Spanish). The Spanish word for venom is veneno. In the third poem of his cycle Plyaski Smerti (“The Dances of Death,” 1912-14), Pustaya ulitsa. Odin ogon' v okne ("An empty street. One single light in a window"), Alexander Blok (1880-1921) mentions a Jewish chemist's cabinet inscribed Venena:
Пустая улица. Один огонь в окне.
Еврей-аптекарь охает во сне.
А перед шкапом с надписью Venena,
Хозяйственно согнув скрипучие колена,
Скелет, до глаз закутанный плащом,
Чего-то ищет, скалясь чёрным ртом...
Нашёл... Но ненароком чем-то звякнул,
И череп повернул... Аптекарь крякнул,
Привстал - и на другой свалился бок...
А гость меж тем - заветный пузырёк
Суёт из-под плаща двум женщинам безносым
На улице, под фонарём белёсым.
The epigraph to Blok’s poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21) is from Ibsen's play Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder, 1892): "Youth is retribution." Ibsen's last play is entitled Når vi døde vågner (When We Dead Awaken, 1899). A hellish hall of a Zemblan legend, narstran seems to combine når (Norwegian for when) and nár (Old Norse, “corpse; deceased man”) with strana (Russ., “land”); but it also brings to mind Chatski’s words in Griboedov’s play in verse Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824): Ya stranen; a ne stranen kto zh? / Tot, kto na vsekh gluptsov pokhozh (“I’m strange; and who is not strange? / He who looks like all fools.” Act III, scene 1). In Chapter Three of Blok’s "Retribution" strana is mentioned immediately after Gore ot uma:
В ком смутно брезжит память эта,
Тот странен и с людьми не схож:
Всю жизнь его — уже поэта
Священная объемлет дрожь,
Бывает глух, и слеп, и нем он,
В нём почивает некий бог,
Его опустошает Демон,
Над коим Врубель изнемог...
Его прозрения глубоки,
Но их глушит ночная тьма,
И в снах холодных и жестоких
Он видит «Горе от ума».
Страна — под бременем обид,
Под игом наглого насилья -
Как ангел, опускает крылья,
Как женщина, теряет стыд.
Безмолвствует народный гений,
И голоса не подаёт,
Не в силах сбросить ига лени,
В полях затерянный народ. (ll. 305-324)
A line in Blok's poem, I v snakh kholodnykh i zhestokikh (And in the cold and cruel dreams), brings to mind Kinbote's dreams about his wife, Queen Disa (Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone):
He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-like feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rending dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness - and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection - but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.
Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion: but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden - roses, black araucarias, rusty, greenish hydrangeas - one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her - prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron - and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extended her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object - a riding boot in his bed - establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead - but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear - a strong merciless dreamer might bear - the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave - and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced - as soon as the visitor left - by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead. (note to Lines 433-434)
Kinbote's Zembla brings to mind Ognennaya zemlya, the Russian name of Tierra del Fuego (an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan). The Drake Passage (named after Sir Francis Drake) is the body of water between South America's Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica.