In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter and says that she called her mother "a didactic katydid:"
She twisted words: pot, top
Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."
She called you a didactic katydid.
She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll. 347-356)
In his Song of Myself (included in Leaves of Grass, 1855) Walt Whitman (an American poet, 1819-1892) mentions the katy-did working her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well:
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well,
Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the office or public hall... (33)
A katydid is a cricket or grasshopper. On the Grasshopper and Cricket (1816) is a sonnet by John Keats (an English poet, 1795-1821). Kuznechik-pouchitel' (as in her Russian translation of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov renders "a didactic katydid") brings to mind Yakov Polonski's poem Kuznechik-muzykant ("The Grasshopper Musician," 1859). In Polonski's poem the grasshopper falls in love with a pretty butterfly. Polonski's poem (that Gogol has copied out in his notebook) Prishli i stali teni nochi (“The shadows of the night came and mounted guard at my door,” 1842) brings to mind Stalin (the Soviet leader in 1924-53) and the Shadows, a rigicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (Shade's murderer) to assassinate the self-banished king:
Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q. v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys. (Index)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), he was nicknamed “the great beaver” because of his brown beard:
One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess My Shade has already left with the great beaver." Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. (Foreword)
In Song of Myself Walt Whitman mentions, among other animals, the beaver:
Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,
Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish,
Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail... (33)
In his article Uitmen v russkoy literature ("Whitman in the Russian Literature") Korney Chukovski (a Russian poet and critic, born Korneychukov, 1882-1969) quotes Whitman's lines:
И так дальше. Стоит только сопоставить с этими футуристическими строками ту „Песню о самом себе", где Уитмэн, воспаряя над пространством и временем, в пророческом бреду охватывает взором всю вселенную, — и его влияние на русского будущника тотчас же определится с несомненностью. Напомню хоть несколько строк этой песни:
Где бобр стучит по болоту хвостом, как веслом,
Где плавник акулы торчит из ,воды! словно черная щепка,
Где телки пасутся, где гуси хватает короткими хватками пищу,
Где стадо буйволов закрывает собою всю. землю на квадратные мили вокруг,
и т. д.
Later in the same section Chukovski mentions the poet Ivan Oredezh (pseudonym of VN's Berlin friend and coauthor Ivan Lukash, 1892-1940):
В петербургском эго-футуризме такой же культ Уота Уитмэна. Там появился рьяный уитмэнианец Иван Оредеж, который, подобно Хлебникову, старательно пародирует Уитмэна:
Я создал вселенные, я создам мириады вселенных; ибо они во мне,
Желтые с синими жилками груди старухи прекрасны, как сосцы юной девушки,
О, дай поцеловать мне темные зрачки твои, усталая ломовая лошадь, и т. д.
(„Петербургский Глашатай", 1912, II).
Это почти подстрочник, и о другой поэме того же писателя, помещенной в альманахе „.Оранжевая Урна", Валерий Брюсов воскликнул:
— Что же такое эти стихи, как не пересказ „своими словами" одной из поэм Уота Уитмэна*.
* „Русская Мысль", 1913, март.
Lukash brings to mind Lukashevich mentioned by Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames) in his commentary to Shade's poem:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
The author of Ob'yasnenie assiriyskikh imyon ("The Interpretation of Assyrian Names," 1868), Platon Lukashevich (1809-1887) was Gogol's schoolmate at the Nezhin Lyceum. The characters in Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836) include Luka Lukich Khlopov, the Inspector of Schools. According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade listed Gogol among Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)