In his Foreword 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) quotes Shade's words “crystal to crystal:”
Despite a wobbly heart (see line 735), a slight limp, and a certain curious contortion in his method of progress, Shade had an inordinate liking for long walks, but the snow bothered him, and he preferred, in winter, to have his wife call for him after classes with the car. A few days later, as I was about to leave Parthenocissus Hall - or Main Hall (or now Shade Hall, alas), I saw him waiting outside for Mrs. Shade to fetch him. I stood beside him for a minute, on the steps of the pillared porch, while pulling my gloves on, finger by finger, and looking away, as if waiting to review a regiment: "That was a thorough job," commented the poet. He consulted his wrist watch. A snowflake settled upon it. "Crystal to crystal," said Shade. I offered to take him home in my powerful Kramler. "Wives, Mr. Shade, are forgetful." He cocked his shaggy head to look at the library clock. Across the bleak expanse of snow-covered turf two radiant lads in colorful winter clothes passed, laughing and sliding. Shade glanced at his watch again and, with a shrug, accepted my offer.
Shade's words seem to hint at the phrase in the burial prayer of the Catholics and Protestants: "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." The Ethics of the Dust, ten lectures to little housewives on the elements of crystallization (1865), is a book (written in the form of a Socratic dialogue) by John Ruskin. The lectures have the following titles:
The valley of diamonds
The pyramid builders
The Crystal life
The crystal orders
Crystal virtues
Crystal quarrells
Home virtues
Crystal caprice
Crystal sorrows
Lecture 10
In Ruskin's book there are the following Personae:
OLD LECTURER (of incalculable age).
FLORRIE, on astronomical evidence presumed to be aged 9.
ISABEL ..................................... " 11.
MAY ........................................ " 11.
LILY ....................................... " 12.
KATHLEEN.................................... " 14.
LUCILLA..................................... " 15.
VIOLET ..................................... " 16.
DORA (who has the keys and is housekeeper)... " 17.
EGYPT (so called from her dark eyes) ....... " 17.
JESSIE (who somehow always makes the room look brighter when she is in it) ........... " 18.
MARY (of whom everybody, including the Old Lecturer, is in great awe) ................. " 20.
Like Florrie, Alphina (the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters) is nine:
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. (note to Lines 47-48)
Astronomical evidence brings to mind the great Starover Blue, the college astronomer mentioned by Shade in Canto Two and Canto Three of his poem:
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. 183-195)
We heard cremationists guffaw and snort
At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort
As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.
We all avoided criticizing faiths.
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go.
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 623-634)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet's entourage - for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag. (note to Line 627: The great Starover Blue)
In Of the Pathetic Fallacy, a chapter in Volume III of his Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin discusses the word 'Blue:'
The word 'Blue', say certain philosophers, means the sensation of colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at a bell gentian.
...the word 'blue' does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth...
...a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And, therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.
Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) is a namesake of Sibyl, the twelfth girl (whose age is not specified) in Ruskin's The Ethics of the Dust. In Note I (of the six notes appended to the Dialogues) Ruskin says:
THROUGHOUT the dialogues, it must be observed that "Sibyl" is addressed (when in play) as having once been the Cumaean Sibyl; and "Egypt" as having been Queen Nitocris,—the Cinderella and "the greatest heroine and beauty" of Egyptian story. The Egyptians called her "Neith the Victorious" (Nitocris), and the Greeks "Face of the Rose" (Rhodope). Chaucer's beautiful conception of Cleopatra in the "Legend of Good Women," is much more founded on the traditions of her than on those of Cleopatra; and, especially in its close, modified by Herodotus's terrible story of the death of Nitocris, which, however, is mythologically nothing more than a part of the deep monotonous ancient dirge for the fulfillment of the earthly destiny of Beauty: "She cast herself into a chamber full of ashes."
I believe this Queen is now sufficiently ascertained to have either built, or increased to double its former size, the third pyramid of Gizeh: and the passage following in the text refers to an imaginary endeavor, by the Old Lecturer and the children together, to make out the description of that pyramid in the 167th page of the second volume of Bunsen's "Egypt's Place in Universal History"—ideal endeavor,—which ideally terminates as the Old Lecturer's real endeavors to the same end always have terminated. There are, however, valuable notes respecting Nitocris at page 210 of the same volume: but the "Early Egyptian History for the Young," by the author of "Sidney Gray," contains, in a pleasant form, as much information as young readers will usually need.
In Lecture 1, "The Valley of Diamonds," Sindbad is mentioned:
A very idle talk, by the dining-room fire, after raisin-and-almond time.
OLD LECTURER; FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LILY, and SIBYL.
OLD LECTURER (L.). Come here, Isabel, and tell me what the make- believe was, this afternoon.
ISABEL (arranging herself very primly on the foot-stool). Such a dreadful one! Florrie and I were lost in the Valley of Diamonds.
L. What! Sindbad's, which nobody could get out of? ISABEL. Yes; but Florrie and I got out of it.
L. So I see. At least, I see you did; but are you sure Florrie did?
ISABEL. Quite sure.
FLORRIE (putting her head round from behind L.'s sofa-cushion). Quite sure. (Disappears again.)
L. I think I could be made to feel surer about it.
(FLORRIE reappears, gives L. a kiss, and again exit.)
L. I suppose it's all right; but how did you manage it?
ISABEL. Well, you know, the eagle that took up Sindbad was very large—very, very large—the largest of all the eagles.
L. How large were the others?
ISABEL. I don't quite know—they were so far off. But this one was, oh, so big! and it had great wings, as wide as—twice over the ceiling. So, when it was picking up Sindbad, Florrie and I thought it wouldn't know if we got on its back too: so I got up first, and then I pulled up Florrie, and we put our arms round its neck, and away it flew.
Sindbad the Sailor is a character in A Thousand and One Nights (an Arabian collection of fairy tales). 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," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski ("Dusty," as Hermann calls him in the English version of VN's novel Despair, 1934).
According to Kinbote, in one of the discarded variants Shade mentioned the Tanagra dust:
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft-and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:
Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of Tanagra and the first three letters of "dust" form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. "Simple chance!" the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. "Leningrad used to be Petrograd?" "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?"
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.
The Tanagra figurines were a mold-cast type of Greek terracotta figurines produced from the later fourth century BC, named after the Beotian town of Tanagra, where many were excavated and which has given its name to the whole class. In lines 627-626 of Shade's poem that Kinbote is tempted to delete the great Starover Blue is mentioned.