Describing the Zemblan Revolution and the king's confinement in the Onhava Palace, 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 a cricket that cricked:
The King sighed and began to undress. His camp bed and a bedtable had been placed, facing the window, in the northeast corner. East was the turquoise door; north, the door of the gallery; west, the door of the closet; south, the window. His black blazer and white trousers were taken away by his former valet's valet. The King sat down on the edge of the bed in his pajamas. The man returned with a pair of morocco bed slippers, pulled them on his master's listless feet, and was off with the discarded pumps. The King's wandering gaze stopped at the casement which was half open. One could see part of the dimly lit court where under an enclosed poplar two soldiers on a stone bench were playing lansquenet. The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning. Around the lantern that stood on the bench a batlike moth blindly flapped - until the punter knocked it down with his cap. The King yawned, and the illumined card players shivered and dissolved in the prism of his tears. His bored glance traveled from wall to wall. The gallery door stood slightly ajar, and one could hear the steps of the guard coming and going. Above the closet, Iris Acht squared her shoulders and looked away. A cricket cricked. The bedside light was just strong enough to put a bright gleam on the gilt key in the lock of the closet door. And all at once that spark on that key caused a wonderful conflagration to spread in the prisoner's mind. (note to Line 130)
Sverchok (Cricket) was Pushkin's nickname within the Arzamas Society (a literary society in St. Petersburg in 1815-18). "A cricket cricked" brings to mind Zhuk zhuzhzhal (The beetle churred) in Chapter Seven (XV: 2) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Был вечер. Небо меркло. Воды
Струились тихо. Жук жужжал.
Уж расходились хороводы;
Уж за рекой, дымясь, пылал
Огонь рыбачий. В поле чистом,
Луны при свете серебристом,
В свои мечты погружена,
Татьяна долго шла одна.
Шла, шла. И вдруг перед собою
С холма господский видит дом,
Селенье, рощу под холмом
И сад над светлою рекою.
Она глядит — и сердце в ней
Забилось чаще и сильней.
'Twas evening. The sky darkened. Waters
streamed quietly. The beetle churred.
The choral throngs already were dispersing.
Across the river, smoking, glowed already
the fire of fishermen. In open country
by the moon's silvery light,
sunk in her dreams,
long did Tatiana walk alone. She walked,
she walked. And suddenly before her from a hill
she sees a manor house, a village,
a grove below hill, and a garden
above a luminous river.
She gazes, and the heart in her
faster and harder has begun to beat.
In his EO Commentary (vol III, p. 81) VN quotes Pushkin's manuscript note (Boldino, 1830):
"I glanced through the review of Chapter Seven in the Northern Bee at a house where I was a guest and at a minute when I was not concerned with Onegin. I noticed some very well-written verse and a rather amusing joke about a beetle. I have:
'T was evening. The day darkened. Waters
streamed quietly. The beetle churred.
The reviewer [Faddey Bulgarin] welcomed the appearance of a new personage and expected him to prove a better sustained [vyderzhannyi] character than the others."
According to VN, Pushkin's coleopterous insect is a cockchafer, a scarabaeoid beetle, the European maybug, either of the two species of Melolontha, which flies at dusk, with a bumbling, blind perseverance, along country lanes in May and June. In the same note VN adds: "When Bulgarin welcomed Pushkin's beetle as a new character, he was wrong: it was a very old character indeed." (vol. III, p. 82) In Canto Two of his poem Shade says that Lafontaine (the author of La Cigale et la Fourmi) was wrong:
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous. Espied on a pine's bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant. That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song. (ll. 235-244)
As Vera Nabokov points out in a footnote to her unrhymed Russian translation of Shade's poem, Krylov (the author of Strekoza i muravey) translated strekoza (dragonfly) instead of tsikada (cicada). A world-famous Zemblan actor who helps the king to escape from Zembla, Odon (the stage name of Donald O'Donnell) brings to mind Odonata, an order of predatory flying insects that includes the dragonflies and damselflies. In 'dragonfly' there is a dragon. Drakon ("The Dragon") is a story (1924) by VN and a poem (1900) by Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900):
(Зигфриду)
Из-за кругов небес незримых
Дракон явил свое чело, —
И мглою бед неотразимых
Грядущий день заволокло.
Ужель не смолкнут ликованья
И миру вечному хвала,
Беспечный смех и восклицанья:
«Жизнь хороша, и нет в ней зла!»
Наследник меченосной рати!
Ты верен знамени креста,
Христов огонь в твоем булате,
И речь грозящая свята.
Полно любовью Божье лоно,
Оно зовет нас всех равно…
Но перед пастию дракона
Ты понял: крест и меч — одно.
Solovyov's poem (dedicated to Siegfried, a legendary hero of Germanic heroic legend, who killed a dragon—known in some Old Norse sources as Fáfnir—and who was later murdered) ends in the line: Ty ponyal: krest i mech - odno (You have realized: the cross and the sword are one). Krest i mech brings to mind krest i ten' vetvey (a cross and the shade of branches) over the grave of Tatiana's poor nurse in Chapter Eight (XLVI: 13) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
А мне, Онегин, пышность эта,
Постылой жизни мишура,
Мои успехи в вихре света,
Мой модный дом и вечера,
Что в них? Сейчас отдать я рада
Всю эту ветошь маскарада,
Весь этот блеск, и шум, и чад
За полку книг, за дикий сад,
За наше бедное жилище,
За те места, где в первый раз,
Онегин, видела я вас,
Да за смиренное кладбище,
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной нянею моей...
“But as to me, Onegin, this magnificence,
a wearisome life's tinsel, my successes
in the world's vortex,
my fashionable house and evenings,
what do I care for them?... At once I'd gladly
give all the frippery of this masquerade,
all this glitter, and noise, and fumes,
for a shelfful of books, for a wild garden,
for our poor dwelling,
for those haunts where for the first time,
Onegin, I saw you,
and for the humble churchyard where
there is a cross now and the shade
of branches over my poor nurse.
In Chapter Two (XIV: 5-7) of EO Pushkin mentions the millions of two-legged creatures who for us are orudie odno (only tools):
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.
Neutral of odin (one), odno = Odon = Nodo. In his commentary and index to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions the actor Odon and his half-brother Nodo:
Nodo, Odon's half-brother, b. 1916, son of Leopold O'Donnell and of a Zemblan boy impersonator; a cardsharp and despicable traitor, 171. (Index)
Odon, pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b. 1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret passage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O'Donnell, Sylvia. (Index)
O'Donnell, Sylvia, nee O'Connell, born 1895? 1890?, the much-traveled, much-married mother of Odon (q. v.), 149, 691; after marrying and divorcing college president Leopold O'Donnell in 1915, father of Odon, she married Peter Gusev, first Duke of Rahl, and graced Zembla till about 1925 when she married an Oriental prince met in Chamonix; after a number of other more or less glamorous marriages, she was in the act of divorcing Lionel Lavender, cousin of Joseph, when last seen in this Index.
Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov, a writer whom Shade lists among Russian humorists and who published his early humorous short stories (signed Antosha Chekhonte) in the Strekoza magazine. The surname Gusev comes from gus' (goose). A goose was the symbol of the Arzamas Society (which received its name after Dmitri Bludov's humorous work A Vision at the Inn at Arzamas, Published by the Society of Scholars). On the Grasshopper and Cricket (1816) is a well-known sonnet by Keats:
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
The sonnet's first line brings to mind Shade's "Dead is the mandible, alive the song." In Zolotoy klyuchik, ili Priklyucheniya Buratino (The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino, 1936), Alexey Tolstoy's literary treatment of Carlo Collodi's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), there is Govoryashchiy Sverchok (the Talking Cricket) and a secret door behind the painting on the wall of Father Carlo's room. Tolstoy's golden key makes one think of the gilt key in the lock of the closet door. A spark on that key causes a wonderful conflagration to spread in the prisoner's mind. Iz iskry vozgoritsya plamya (The spark will become a flame) is a line from a poem by Alexander Odoevski (a Decembrist, 1802-39):
Струн вещих пламенные звуки
До слуха нашего дошли,
К мечам рванулись наши руки,
И — лишь оковы обрели.
Но будь покоен, бард! — цепями,
Своей судьбой гордимся мы,
И за затворами тюрьмы
В душе смеемся над царями.
Наш скорбный труд не пропадет,
Из искры возгорится пламя,
И просвещенный наш народ
Сберется под святое знамя.
Мечи скуем мы из цепей
И пламя вновь зажжем свободы!
Она нагрянет на царей,
И радостно вздохнут народы!
Odoevski's poem is a response to Pushkin's poem Vo glubine sibirskikh rud ("In the depths of the Siberian mines," 1827) addressed to the Decembrists. The line "The spark will become a flame" was used by Lenin as the motto of his newspaper Iskra (The Spark). 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) Vinogradus and Leningradus. Vinograd ("The Grapes," 1824) is a poem by Pushkin:
Не стану я жалеть о розах,
Увядших с легкою весной;
Мне мил и виноград на лозах,
В кистях созревший под горой,
Краса моей долины злачной,
Отрада осени златой,
Продолговатый и прозрачный,
Как персты девы молодой.
I shall not miss the roses, fading
As soon as spring's fleet days are done;
I like the grapes whose clusters ripen
Upon the hillside in the sun —
The glory of my fertile valley,
They hang, each lustrous as a pearl,
Gold autumn's joy: oblong, transparent,
Like the slim fingers of a girl.
(tr. B. Deutsch)