In his commentary and index 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 Queen Disa’s cousin, Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, who was nicknamed Curdy Buff by his admirers:
When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police, translated into crude Zemblan by a Hindu member of the Extremist party, and then read aloud to the royal captive in a would-be ironic voice by the preposterous commandant of the palace. There happened to be in that letter one - only one, thank God - sentimental sentence: "I want you to know that no matter how much you hurt me, you cannot hurt my love," and this sentence (if we re-English it from the Zemblan) came out as: "I desire you and love when you flog me" He interrupted the commandant, calling him a buffoon and a rogue, and insulting everybody around so dreadfully that the Extremists had to decide fast whether to shoot him at once or let him have the original of the letter.
Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla. Had she been permitted to land, she would have been forthwith incarcerated, which would have reacted on the King's flight, doubling the difficulties of escape. A message from the Karlists containing these simple considerations checked her progress in Stockholm, and she flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of even worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await there further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing on the terrace under the jacaranda a disconsolate letter to Lavender when the tall, sheared and bearded visitor with the bouquet of flowers-of-the-gods who had been watching her from afar advanced through the garlands of shade. She looked up - and of course no dark spectacles and no make-up could for a moment fool her.
…She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under the great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succumbed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily - especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, a phenomenally endowed young brute (whose family name, "knave's farm," is the most probable derivation of "Shakespeare"). Curdy Buff - as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers - had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught. At last she removed to the Riviera leaving him to amuse himself with a band of Eton-collared, sweet-voiced minions imported from England. (note to Lines 433-434)
Curdy Buff is a play on coeur de boeuf (bull’s heart). In Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America,” 1926) Vladimir Mayakovski (a Russian and Soviet poet, 1893-1930), the author of Misteriya-Buff (“Mystery-Bouffe,” 1918), a play written for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, describes bullfighting in Mexico and mentions bychye serdtse (the bull’s heart) pierced with a sword:
Я не мог и не хотел видеть, как вынесли шпагу главному убийце и он втыкал ее в бычье сердце. Только по бешеному грохоту толпы я понял, что дело сделано. Внизу уже ждали тушу с ножами сдиратели шкур. Единственное, о чем я жалел, это о том, что нельзя установить на бычьих рогах пулеметов и нельзя его выдрессировать стрелять.
In his poem Sovetskaya azbuka ("The Soviet Alphabet," 1919) Mayakovski mentions Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), an Italian poet who in 1919 set up the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro in Fiume with himself as Duce:
Фазан красив. Ума ни унции.
Фиуме спьяну взял д'Аннунцио.
A pheasant is beautiful. It has not one ounce of brain.
D'Annunzio, while drunk, took Fiume.
Fiume (the former name of Rijeka, a seaport and city in Croatia) and Yalta (a city and sea port in Crimea, the setting of Chekhov's story The Lady with the Lapdog) bring to mind VN's story Vesna v Fial'te ("Spring in Fialta," 1936). At the end of the English version of VN's story the narrator learns about Nina's death from a newspaper that he bought in Mlech (a fictional city, Milan in the Russian original):
But the stone was as warm as flesh, and suddenly I understood something I had been seeing without understanding—why a piece of tinfoil had sparkled so on the pavement, why the gleam of a glass had trembled on a tablecloth, why the sea was ashimmer: somehow, by imperceptible degrees, the white sky above Fialta had got saturated with sunshine, and now it was sun-pervaded throughout, and this brimming white radiance grew broader and broader, all dissolved in it, all vanished, all passed, and I stood on the station platform of Mlech with a freshly bought newspaper, which told me that the yellow car I had seen under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta, having run at full speed into the truck of a traveling circus entering the town, a crash from which Ferdinand and his friend, those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate, those basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out after all to be mortal.
The station platform of Mlech brings to mind Mlechnyi Put' (the Milky Way in Russian). In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions the Great Bear and the Milky Way:
That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear.
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
The regular vulgarian, I daresay,
Is happier: He sees the Milky Way
Only when making water. (ll. 119-127)
Forty ounces of fine sand make one think of uma ni untsii (not one ounce of brain), a phrase used by Mayakovski in "The Soviet Alphabet." Uma ni untsii brings to mind Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824), a play in verse by Alexander Griboedov (a Russian poet and diplomat, 1795-1829). The girl with whom Chatski is in love, Sofia (Famusov's daughter) is a namesake of Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin, the "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved).
In his poem Luchshiy stikh ("The Best Verse," 1927) Mayakovski says that the Yaroslavl' audience applauded him five, ten, fifteen minutes when he told from the stage that the Army of Canton just captured Shanghai:
И гаркнул я,
сбившись с поэтического тона,
громче иерихонских хайл:
— Товарищи!
Рабочими и войсками Кантона
взят Шанхай! —
Как будто жесть в ладонях мнут,
оваций сила росла и росла.
Пять, десять, пятнадцать минут
рукоплескал Ярославль.