According to 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), he was introduced to Shade on Monday, February 16, 1959:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
At the beginning of her travelogue Iz peshcher i debrey Indostana ("From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan," 1883) Helena Blavatsky (a Russian and American mystic, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, 1831-1891) says that late in the evening on February 16, 1879, after the tiring thirty-two-day-long sea voyage from Liverpool she and other passangers heard the cries from the deck "lighthouse, the Bombay lighthouse!":
Поздно вечером 16 февраля 1879 года, после тяжелого тридцатидвухдневного плавания из Ливерпуля, раздались с пассажирской палубы радостные восклицания: "Маяк, Бомбейский маяк!.." И вот все, кто ни был чем занят, побросали карты, книги, музыку и кинулись наверх. Луна еще не всходила и, невзирая на звездное тропическое небо, на верхней палубе было совершенно темно. Звезды блистали так ярко, что трудно было сразу разглядеть между ними земной огонек: точно громадные глазища навыкате, моргали они на вас с черного неба, на склоне которого тихо сиял Южный Крест... Но вот, наконец, еще ниже на далеком горизонте заблистал и маяк, ныряя огненною точкой в волнах словно из растопленного фосфора. Горячо приветствовали измученные путешественники давно желанное явление. Все развеселились...
Late in the evening of the sixteenth of February, 1879, after a rough voyage which lasted thirty-two days, joyful exclamations were heard everywhere on deck. "Have you seen the lighthouse?" "There it is at last, the Bombay lighthouse."
Cards, books, music, everything was forgotten. Everyone rushed on deck. The moon had not risen as yet, and, in spite of the starry tropical sky, it was quite dark. The stars were so bright that, at first, it seemed hardly possible to distinguish, far away amongst them, a small fiery point lit by earthly hands. The stars winked at us like so many huge eyes in the black sky, on one side of which shone the Southern Cross. At last we distinguished the lighthouse on the distant horizon. It was nothing but a tiny fiery point diving in the phosphorescent waves. The tired travellers greeted it warmly. The rejoicing was general. ("In Bombay")
In an open letter in Banner of Light (Boston, Vol. XXXIX, No. 7, May 13, 1876, p. 8), an American spiritualist journal published weekly in newspaper format between 1857 and 1907, Madame Blavatski mentions the proper credentials given to Prof. Kittary (a Russian chemist-technologist, member of the Supreme Privy Council, 1824/25-1880, whom Emperor Alexander II had sent to America to partake in the official celebrations of the Centenary of the United States) by Mr. Aksakov (a fellow spiritualist, 1832-1903):
But another distinguished Russian scientist is also coming, for whom I bespeak a very different reception. Professor Kittara, the greatest technologist of Russia, and a member of the Emperor’s Privy Council, is really sent by the government to the Centennial. He is deeply interested in Spiritualism, very anxious to investigate it, and will bring the proper credentials from Mr. Aksakoff. The latter gentleman writes me that every civility and attention will be shown Professor Kittara, as his report, if favorable, will have a tremendous influence upon public opinion. ("Mediums, Beware!")
Helena Blavatsky was the first cousin of Count Sergey Yulievich Wittle (a Russian statesman, 1849-1915, who served as the first Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire from November 1905 to April 1906, overseeing the October Manifesto). On September 5, 1905, Count Witte, Korostovets and K. D. Nabokov (VN's uncle, a diplomat, 1872-1927) signed the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. As a result, Witte was nicknamed by his enemies "Count Sakhalinsky" and "Count Half-Sakhalinsky" (following defeat in the war, Russia ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island, below the 50th parallel north, to Japan). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN says that his uncle is portrayed (together with Count Witte, the two Japanese delegates and a benevolent Theodore Roosevelt) in a mural of the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on the left side of the main entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History:
Uncle Konstantin was in the diplomatic service and, in the last stage of his career in London, conducted a bitter and unsuccessful struggle with Sablin as to which of them would head the Russian mission. His life was not particularly eventful, but he had had a couple of nice escapes from a fate less tame than the draft in a London hospital, which killed him in 1927. Once, in Moscow, on February 17, 1905, when an older friend, the Grand Duke Sergey, half a minute before the explosion, offered him a lift in his carriage, and my uncle said no, thanks, he’d rather walk, and away rolled the carriage to its fatal rendezvous with a terrorist’s bomb; and the second time, seven years later, when he missed another appointment, this one with an iceberg, by chancing to return his Titanic ticket. We saw a good deal of him in London after we had escaped from Lenin’s Russia. Our meeting at Victoria Station in 1919 is a vivid vignette in my mind: my father marching up to his prim brother with an unfolding bear hug; he, backing away and repeating: “Mï v Anglii, mï v Anglii [we are in England].” His charming little flat was full of souvenirs from India such as photographs of young British officers. He is the author of The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921), easily obtainable in large public libraries, and of an English version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; and he is portrayed, goatee and all (together with Count Witte, the two Japanese delegates and a benevolent Theodore Roosevelt), in a mural of the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on the left side of the main entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History—an eminently fit place to find my surname in golden Slavic characters, as I did the first time I passed there—with a fellow lepidopterist, who said “Sure, sure” in reply to my exclamation of recognition. (Chapter Three, 1)
The Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich (the uncle of Nicholas II) was assassinated on February 17, 1905 (the Grand Duke's carriage was blown up by a bomb thrown by the terrorist Ivan Kaliayev in the Kremlin). Emperor Alexander II was killed by the bomb of a terrorist on March 1, 1881 (a month after Fyodor Dostoevski's death). In Bombay (the former name of Mumbai, a city and port in India) and in Bombycilla shadei (a bird that was named after Shade's father, the ornithologist) there is "bomb." At the end of his commentary Kinbote mentions "ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square:"
"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 the other two 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 principles: 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)
If one day Kinbote sails back to his recovered kingdom, he will see the Onhava lighthouse. The author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), R. L. Stevenson (a Scottish writer, 1850-1894) was the son of a designer and builder of lighthouses who invented intermittent and flashing lights (his invention earned him a gold medal from the King of Netherlands). Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde bring to mind Dr Kinbote and Mr Shade. In Stevenson's novella, Dr. Henry Jekyll pays the family of Edward Hyde's victim £100 to avoid a scandal. Kinboot or kinbot is a wergeld or man-boot paid by a homicide to the kin of the person slain. In his Cornell lecture on R. L. Stevenson VN points out that in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde there are really three personalities: Jekyll, Hyde and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). 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, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.