According to Professor Hurley, the chief passion of Samuel Shade (the poet’s father in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) was the study of the feathered tribe:
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, née 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. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (Kinbote’s note to Line 71)
The author of The Birds of America (1827), John James Audubon called his birds the “little citizens of the feathered tribe:”
Money flowed in and he was soon again established with his family in a house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says, became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a week or more, "to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe."
In Russian, the feathered tribe is pernatoe plemya. Plemya (tribe) differs only in one letter from plamya (fire). Pernatye ("The Feathered Folk,” 1923) is a poem by Mayakovski, VN's "late namesake." By the feathered folk Mayakovski means the writers (the Russian word pero means "feather" and "pen"). VN's Russian nom de plume, Sirin hints at the bird of Russian fairy tales. The mythical Sirin had the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a bird (usually an owl). It lived in Iriy (in Slavic mythology, a place where birds fly for the winter and souls go after death; Iriy is sometimes identified with ray, paradise) or around the Euphrates River. At the age of six the boy in VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man:
When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow yard where the rain tinkled in the dark against some battered ash cans, windows were blandly alight and in one of them a black-trousered man with In his bare elbows raised could be seen lying supine on a untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby he looked more surprised than most babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiance fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house front badly out of focus. Four years old, in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. Age six - that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player. He again, aged about eight, already difficult to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree. Aged ten: the year they left Europe. The shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties, the ugly, vicious, backward children he was with in that special school. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened as it were into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making him totally inaccessible to normal minds. (2)
According to Kinbote, as a little man of six he was in the throes of adult insomnia:
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"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)
Gut is German for "good," Pern (the Devil in Zemblan) seems to hint at Perun (the Slavic god of thunder). A Grand Prince of Kiev who converted to Christianity in 988, Vladimir I (958-1015) caused the effigy of Perun to be drowned in the Dnepr. In his story Strashnaya mest’ (“A Terrible Vengeance,” 1832) Gogol says that a rare bird can fly to the middle of the Dnepr. Pernatyi (the feathered one) brings to mind Athanasius Pernath, a character in Gustav Meyrink's novel Der Golem ("The Golem," 1914). In Meyrink's novel the story of Athanasius Pernath, a jeweler and art restorer who lives in the ghetto of Prague, is experienced by an anonymous narrator, who, during a visionary dream, assumes Pernath's identity thirty years before. This dream was perhaps induced because he inadvertently swapped his hat with the real (old) Pernath's. In VN's story Conversation Piece, 1945 the narrator swaps hats with Dr. Shoe. According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Botkin is one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear.
Gustav Meyrink is the author of Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster ("The Angel of the West Window," 1927). At the end of Canto Four of his poem Shade mentions old Dr. Sutton's West-facing windows:
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 985-999)
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”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski, a poem (1862) by Yakov Polonski, a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," I. Annenski's penname) and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok.
In music, a coda (in Italian coda means 'tail') is a passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end. Mozart's Piano Sonata no. 7 in C Major ends in a coda. Minnamin (“my darling” in Zemblan) brings to mind madamina (“my dear lady”), the first word of Leporello’s "Catalogue aria" in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni:
Madamina, il catalogo è questo
Delle belle che amò il padron mio;
un catalogo egli è che ho fatt'io;
Osservate, leggete con me.
In Italia seicento e quaranta;
In Alemagna duecento e trentuna;
Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna;
Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre.
My dear lady, this is the list
Of the beauties my master has loved,
A list which I have compiled.
Observe, read along with me.
In Italy, six hundred and forty;
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;
A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;
But in Spain already one thousand and three.
Don Giovanni premiered on October 29, 1787 (the day after Mozart had completed it), in Prague. A character in Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute," 1791), Papageno is the bird-catcher. In J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Holden Caulfield imagines himself as making a job of saving children running through a field of rye by catching them before they fell off a nearby cliff. According to Kinbote, of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method. Immediately after completing his work on Shade's poem (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum) Kinbote commits suicide. The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadezhda means in Russian “hope.” There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again. Mozart (1838) is a biographical essay by Vasiliy Botkin (1812-69), the author of Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851). In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (Botkin in reverse):
Моцарт
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! но нет; тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
Mozart
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother with the needs of lowly life;
all would surrender to free art. (Scene II)