The three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus. Shade's poem is written in heroic couplets. In his commentary Kinbote says that Shade embowers his muse between the two masters of the heroic couplet (Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-74, and William Wordsworth, 1770-1850):
Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith
The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade's. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows.
Besedka muz ("The Bower of Muses," 1817) is a poem by Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855), a poet who went mad and was insane in the last thirty-three years of his life. In a letter of the second half of June, 1826, to Pushkin Delvig says that Gnedich lives in Batyushkov’s former rooms and mentions two inscriptions made by mad Batyushkov on the windowpanes, Est’ zhizn’ i za mogiloy! (“There is life beyond the grave!”) and Ombra adorara! (“Beloved shade!”):
Гнедичу лучше, он тоже живет на даче и тебе кланяется. В комнатах, в которых он живет, жил в последнее время Батюшков. До сих пор видна его рука на окошках. Между прочим, на одном им написано: «Есть жизнь и за могилой!», а на другом: «Ombra adorata!». Гнедич в восторге меланхолическом по целым часам смотрит на эти строки.
Ombra adorara brings to mind "Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' in Spanish" in Shade's variant quoted by Kinbote in his commentary. The Spanish word for “man” is hombre. Hombre = H + ombre ('shade' in French). H is Homer's initial. In Chapter Five (XXXVI: 13-14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Tatiana's nameday party and mentions bozhestvennyi Omir (divine Homer, Omir is the archaic form of Gomer, Homer in Russian spelling), the idol of thirty centuries:
Уж восемь робертов сыграли
Герои виста; восемь раз
Они места переменяли;
И чай несут. Люблю я час
Определять обедом, чаем
И ужином. Мы время знаем
В деревне без больших сует:
Желудок — верный наш брегет;
И кстати я замечу в скобках,
Что речь веду в моих строфах
Я столь же часто о пирах,
О разных кушаньях и пробках,
Как ты, божественный Омир,
Ты, тридцати веков кумир!
Eight rubbers have already played
whist's heroes; eight times they
have changed their seats —
and tea is brought. I like defining
the hour by dinner, tea,
and supper. In the country
we know the time without great fuss:
the stomach is our accurate Bréguet;
and, apropos, I'll parenthetically note
that in my strophes I discourse
as frequently on feasts, on various
dishes and corks,
as you, divine Homer, you, idol
of thirty centuries!
Homer's Iliad was translated into Russian by Nikolay Gnedich (1784-1833), Batyushkov's close friend. The Hilliad is a mock epic poem written by Christopher Smart as a literary attack upon John Hill on 1 February 1753. The title is a play on Alexander Pope's The Dunciad with a substitution of Hill's name, which represents Smart's debt to Pope for the form and style of The Hilliad as well as a punning reference to the Iliad. John Shade is an authority on Pope (a poet who mentions Zembla in his Essay on Man, 1733-34). In "Book the First" of The Hilliad, Hillario is seduced by Sybil to give up his career as an apothecary and instead becomes a writer. However, his fortune quickly descends with Hillario ultimately turning into the "arch-dunce".
The origins of the work come from a dispute between Hill and Henry Fielding; a "paper war" that involved a widespread literary dispute, Hill turned his attention to Smart and published attacks upon Smart's Poems on Several Occasions. In response, Smart wrote The Hilliad, claiming it as the "balance due" on Hill's treatment towards his person and poetry. The work was responded to by multiple parties, but it was the last major contribution of Smart in the literary conflict and attacks upon Smart soon ceased.
Although the work is only of one book that is 259 lines long, its "Notes Variorum" attached to the work more than doubles the length. It is unknown who contributed to the notes, but it is thought that Smart, along with Arthur Murphy and Henry Fielding, put them together.
A poet who was diagnosed as suffering from religious mania, Christopher Smart (1722-71) wrote A Song to David and Jubilate Agno (Smart's two best known poems) during his confinement in St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London. It seems that Kinbote (whose "real" name is Botkin, which is also the "real" name of Shade and Gradus) writes his commentary, index and foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem not in "Cedarn, Utana," but in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) writes his poem "Wanted." After her husband's death, Sybil Shade (the poet's wife whose "real" name seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin) moved to Quebec:
Frank has acknowledged the safe return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention in my Preface - and this I willingly do - that I alone am responsible for any mistakes in my commentary. Insert before a professional. A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem against the phototype of the manuscript, and has found a few trivial misprints I had missed; that has been all in the way of outside assistance. Needless to say how much I had been looking forward to Sybil Shade's providing me with abundant biographical data; unfortunately she left New Wye even before I did, and is dwelling now with relatives in Quebec. We might have had, of course, a most fruitful correspondence, but the Shadeans were not to be shaken off. They headed for Canada in droves to pounce on the poor lady as soon as I had lost contact with her and her changeful moods. Instead of answering a month-old letter from my cave in Cedarn, listing some of my most desperate queries, such as the real name of "Jim Coates" etc., she suddenly shot me a wire, requesting me to accept Prof. H. (!) and Prof. C (!!) as coeditors of her husband's poem. How deeply this surprised and pained me! Naturally, it precluded collaboration with my friend's misguided widow. (Foreword)
The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. In 1825 Baron Anton Delvig (Pushkin's Lyceum friend, 1798-1831) married Sofia Saltykov. K lastochke ("To the Swallow," 1820) is a poem in hexameter by Delvig. In his Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830) Pushkin mentions Delvig among famous sonneteers:
Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
Wordsworth.
Суровый Дант не презирал сонета;
В нём жар любви Петрарка изливал;
Игру его любил творец Макбета;
Им скорбну мысль Камоэнс облекал.
И в наши дни пленяет он поэта:
Вордсворт его орудием избрал,
Когда вдали от суетного света
Природы он рисует идеал.
Под сенью гор Тавриды отдаленной
Певец Литвы в размер его стесненный
Свои мечты мгновенно заключал.
У нас ещё его не знали девы,
Как для него уж Дельвиг забывал
Гекзаметра священные напевы.
Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;
Into it Petrarch poured out the ardor of love;
Its play the creator of Macbeth loved;
With it Camoes clothed his sorrowful thought.
Even in our days it captivates the poet:
Wordsworth chose it as an instrument,
When far from the vain world
He depicts nature's ideal.
Under the shadow of the mountains of distant Tavrida
The singer of Lithuania in its constrained measure
His dreams he in an instant enclosed.
Here the maidens did not yet know it,
When for it even Delvig forgot
The sacred melodies of the hexameter.
(transl. Ober)
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”). In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol mentions sonetto colla coda and in a footnote explains that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as “a sonnet with the tail” (con la coda), when the idea cannot not be expressed in fourteen lines and entails an appendix which is often longer than the sonnet itself:
В италиянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), когда мысль не вместилась и ведёт за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Kinbote's landlaord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman law. Judge Goldsworth's alphabetic family brings to mind azbuka (the ABC) that Zaretski (a character in Eugene Onegin, Lenski's second in his fatal duel with Onegin) teaches his children:
Как я сказал, Зарецкий мой,
Под сень черёмух и акаций
От бурь укрывшись наконец,
Живёт, как истинный мудрец,
Капусту садит, как Гораций,
Разводит уток и гусей
И учит азбуке детей.
As I've said, my Zarétski,
beneath the racemosas and the pea trees
having at last found shelter
from tempests, lives like a true sage,
plants cabbages like Horace,
breeds ducks and geese,
and teaches [his] children the A B C. (Six: VII: 8-14)
The stanza’s Line 9, Pod sen’ cheryomukh i akatsiy (beneath the racemosas and the pea trees), is a parody of two passages in Batyushkov’s poem The Bower of Muses:
Под тению черемухи млечной
И золотом блистающих акаций
Спешу восстановить олтарь и Муз и Граций,
Сопутниц жизни молодой.
In the shade of milky racemosas
and golden-glistening pea tree
I hasten to restore the altar of Muses and Graces,
the companions of young life. (ll. 1-4)
Пускай и в сединах, но с бодрою душой,
Беспечен, как дитя всегда беспечных Граций,
Он некогда придет вздохнуть в сени густой
Своих черемух и акаций.
Even though gray-haired, but with the cheerful soul,
carefree as is the child of ever carefree Graces,
someday he’ll come to sigh in the dense shelter
of his racemosas and pea trees. (ll. 25-28)
Zaretski brings to mind Zagoretski, a character in Griboedov's play in verse Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824). The characters in Griboedov's play include Sofia, Famusov's daughter with whom Chatski is in love, and Colonel Skalozub. It is Sofia Pavlovna who spreads rumors that Chatski is mad. The surname Skalozub is a play on zuboskal (a scoffer). There is a similar transposition of syllables in Botkin - Kinbote.
Pushkin's Zaretski breeds utok i gusey (ducks and geese). Sergey Utochkin (1876-1915) was a Russian aviation pioneer. In his commentary and index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Colonel Peter Gusev, King Alfin's "aerial adjutant:"
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Oleg, Duke of Rahl, 1916-1931, son of Colonel Gusev, Duke of Rahl (b .1885, still spry); K.'s beloved playmate, killed in a toboggan accident, 130. (Index)
Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov, the author of Palata № 6 ("Ward Six," 1892). Its main character, Dr Ragin, ends up as the sixth patient in Ward No. 6, a lunatic asylum, where he suffers an apoplectic stroke and dies on the next day. According to Kinbote, Shade listed Chekhov 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)
King Alfin brings to mind Alphina, the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters:
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. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. (note to Lines 47-48)
The name of Judge Goldsworth’s second oldest daughter, Candida seems to hint at toga candida, a white woolen toga worn in ancient Rome by senators and candidates (the Latin word candidatus comes from toga candida). Oratio in Toga Candida is a speech given by Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and Academic skeptic, 103 BC - 43 BC) during his election campaign in 64 BC for the consulship of 63 BC. In Chapter Eight (I: 3-4) of EO Pushkin says that at the Lyceum he would eagerly read Apuleius and did not read Cicero:
В те дни, когда в садах Лицея
Я безмятежно расцветал,
Читал охотно Апулея,
А Цицерона не читал,
В те дни, в таинственных долинах,
Весной, при кликах лебединых,
Близ вод, сиявших в тишине,
Являться Муза стала мне.
Моя студенческая келья
Вдруг озарилась: Муза в ней
Открыла пир младых затей,
Воспела детские веселья,
И славу нашей старины,
И сердца трепетные сны.
И свет ее с улыбкой встретил;
Успех нас первый окрылил;
Старик Державин нас заметил
И, в гроб сходя, благословил.
In those days when in the Lyceum's gardens
I bloomed serenely,
would eagerly read Apuleius,
did not read Cicero;
in those days, in mysterious valleys,
in springtime, to the calls of swans,
near waters shining in the stillness,
the Muse began to visit me.
My student cell was all at once
radiant with light: in it the Muse
opened a banquet of young fancies,
sang childish gaieties,
and glory of our ancientry,
and the heart's tremulous dreams.
And with a smile the world received her;
the first success provided us with wings;
the aged Derzhavin noticed us — and blessed us
as he descended to the grave.
Derzhavin's poem Pamyatnik ("The Monument," 1795) that Pushkin parodies in his poem Exegi Monumentum (1836) was first published under the title K Muze. Podrazhanie Goratsiyu ("To the Muse. Imitation of Horace"). In his poem Derzhavin imitates Horace's Ode to Melpomene (Book III, 30). One of the nine muses, Melpomene is the muse of tragedy in Greek mythology. At the end of his commentary Kinbote says that he may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)