A few minutes before Shade's death, 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) invites the poet to a glass of Tokay at his place:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-caped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and-"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)
Lob des Tokayers ("In Praise of Tokay Wine," 1815) is a song by Franz Schubert, an Austrian composer (1797-1828). The original text is by Gabriele von Baumberg (1766-1839), an Austrian lady poet who used the penname v. Traubenberg (Baron Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg, 1897-1919, was VN's first cousin and closest friend):
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Du stimmest meine Leier
Zu seltnen Reimerei’n.
Mit lang entbehrter Wonne
Und neuerwachtem Scherz
Erwärmst du gleich der Sonne
Mein halb erstorbnes Herz:
Du stimmest meine Leier
Zu seltnen Reimerei’n,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Du gießest Kraft und Feuer
Durch Mark und durch Gebein.
Ich fühle neues Leben
Durch meine Adern sprühn,
Und deine Nektarreben
In meinem Busen glühn.
Du gießest Kraft und Feuer
Durch Mark und durch Gebein,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Dir soll, als Gramzerstreuer,
Dies Lied geweihet sein!
In Schwermutsvollen Launen
Beflügelst du das Blut;
Bei Blonden und bei Braunen
Gibst du dem Blödsinn Mut.
Dir soll, als Gramzerstreuer,
Dies Lied geweihet sein,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
You give voice to my lyre,
Causing rare versifying.
With a delight missing for so long
And a newly awakened sense of fun,
Like the sun, you warm up
My half-frozen heart.
You give voice to my lyre,
Causing rare versifying,
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
You pour power and fire
Through my marrow and limbs.
I feel a new life
Sparkling through my veins
And your nectar grapes
Glow in my breast.
You pour power and fire
Through my marrow and limbs.
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
As destroyer of sorrow, we should
Dedicate this song to you!
In grief-laden moods
You give our blood wings,
To blondes and brunettes
You give the courage to mess about.
As destroyer of sorrow, we should
Dedicate this song to you,
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
(tansl. Malcolm Wren)
In the same year (1815) Schubert set to music Goethe's ballad Der Erlkönig (1782). The opening lines of Goethe's poem, Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind (Who rides, so late, through night and wind? / It is the father with his child), are a leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem. In 1818 Goethe's Erlkönig was translated into Russian, as Lesnoy tsar' ("The Forest King"), by Zhukovski. In his poem K Deliyu (“To Delius,” 1809) Zhukovski mentions tokayskoe vino (the Tokay wine):
Умерен, Делий, будь в печали
И в счастии не ослеплен:
На миг нам жизнь бессмертны дали;
Всем путь к Тенару проложен.
Хотя б заботы нас томили,
Хотя б токайское вино
Мы, нежася на дерне, пили –
Умрем: так Дием суждено.
Неси ж сюда, где тополь с ивой
Из ветвий соплетают кров,
Где вьется ручеек игривый
Среди излучистых брегов,
Вино, и масти ароматны,
И розы, дышащие миг.
О Делий, годы невозвратны:
Играй – пока нить дней твоих
У черной Парки под перстами;
Ударит час – всему конец:
Тогда прости и луг с стадами,
И твой из юных роз венец,
И соловья приятны трели
В лесу вечернею порой,
И звук пастушеской свирели,
И дом, и садик над рекой,
Где мы, при факеле Дианы,
Вокруг дернового стола,
Стучим стаканами в стаканы
И пьем из чистого стекла
В вине печалей всех забвенье;
Играй – таков есть мой совет;
Не годы жизнь, а наслажденье;
Кто счастье знал, тот жил сто лет;
Пусть быстрым, лишь бы светлым, током
Промчатся дни чрез жизни луг;
Пусть смерть зайдет к нам ненароком,
Как добрый, но нежданный друг.
Zhukovski’s poem ends in the lines:
May death visit us accidentally,
like a good but unexpected friend.
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 and musical compositions, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. Der Doppelgänger (1828) is a song by Franz Schubert. The composer set to music Heinrich Heine’s poem Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen (“The night is quiet, the streets are calm,” 1823-24):
Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen,
In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;
Sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,
Doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.
Da steht auch ein Mensch und starrt in die Höhe,
Und ringt die Hände, vor Schmerzensgewalt;
Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe -
Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt.
Du Doppelgänger! du bleicher Geselle!
Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,
Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle,
So manche Nacht, in alter Zeit?
Quiet is the night, the streets are at peace,
My darling lived in this house;
She has left the town now long ago
But the house still stands at the place.
There stands a man who stares into heaven,
Wringing his hands oppressed by pain;
I shudder when I see his face-
For the moon shows that the figure is mine.
You ghostly double! You pallid youth!
Why be deceived after the sorrow of love
That pained me at this very place
So many a night in former days?
(transl. David Paley)
Tokay rhymes Bokay. In his commentary and index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius. The epigraph to Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836) is the saying Na zerkalo necha penyat', koli rozha kriva (It's no good blaming the mirror if the mug's crooked). Sudarg brings to mind Gosudar', the Russian title of Machiavelli's treatise The Prince (1532). Gradus contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:
Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. (note to Line 17)
The German word for grape, Weintrauben, brings to mind Weinstock, the medium in VN's short novel Soglyadatay ("The Eye," 1930), and v. Traubenberg (Gabriele Baumberg's pseudonym). Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus:"
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
Leningrad (1930) is a poem by Mandelshtam. In his poem V tot vecher ne gudel strel’chatyi les organa… (“That Evening the forest of organ pipes did not play…” 1918), with the epigraph from Heine’s poem about the doppelgänger, Mandelshtam mentions Schubert:
Du, Doppelgänger, du, bleicher Geselle!..
В тот вечер не гудел стрельчатый лес органа.
Нам пели Шуберта — родная колыбель!
Шумела мельница, и в песнях урагана
Смеялся музыки голубоглазый хмель!
Старинной песни мир — коричневый, зеленый,
Но только вечно-молодой,
Где соловьиных лип рокочущие кроны
С безумной яростью качает царь лесной.
И сила страшная ночного возвращенья —
Та песня дикая, как чёрное вино:
Это двойник — пустое привиденье —
Бессмысленно глядит в холодное окно!
Du, Doppelgänger, du, bleicher Geselle!..
That evening the forest of organ pipes did not play.
A native cradle sang Schubert for us,
The mill was grinding, the music's blue-eyed drunkenness
Laughed in the songs of the hurricane.
The world of the old song – brown, green,
But only eternally young where the Erl-king
Shakes the rumbling crowns of nightingaled
Linden trees in savage rage.
The awesome force of night's return,
That wild song, like black wine:
It is a double, a hollow ghost
Peering senselessly through the cold window!
Starinnoy pesni mir – korichnevyi, zelyonyi (“the world of the old song – brown, green”) in the second stanza of Mandelshtam’s poem brings to mind “the man in green” (Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus a lift to Kinbote’s rented house in New Wye) and “the man in brown” (Gradus) mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
Gradus returned to the Main Desk.
"Too bad," said the girl, "I just saw him leave."
"Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy," muttered Gradus, who sometimes at moments of stress used Russian ejaculations.
"You'll find him in the directory," she said pushing it towards him, and dismissing the sick man's existence to attend to the wants of Mr. Gerald Emerald who was taking out a fat bestseller in a cellophane jacket.
Moaning and shifting from one foot to the other, Gradus started leafing through the college directory but when he found the address, he was faced with the problem of getting there.
"Dulwich Road," he cried to the girl. "Near? Far? Very far, probably?"
"Are you by any chance Professor Pnin's new assistant?" asked Emerald.
"No," said the girl. "This man is looking for Dr. Kinbote, I think. You are looking for Dr. Kinbote, aren't you?"
"Yes, and I can't any more," said Gradus.
"I thought so," said the girl. "Doesn't he live somewhere near Mr. Shade, Gerry?"
"Oh, definitely," said Gerry, and turned to the killer: "I can drive you there if you like. It is on my way."
Did they talk in the car, these two characters, the man in green and the man in brown? Who can say? They did not. After all, the drive took only a few minutes (it took me, at the wheel of my powerful Kramler, four and a half).
"I think I'll drop you here," said Mr. Emerald. "It's that house up there."
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels. As he began hurriedly fumbling at the car door, unfastidious Emerald leaned, close to him, across him, almost merging with him, to help him open it - and then, slamming it shut again, whizzed on to some tryst in the valley. My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer; he will appreciate them even more if I tell him that, according to the legend spread later by the police, Jack Grey had been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a lonesome trucker! One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library - or in Mr. Emerald's car. (note to Line 949)
On the other hand, Kinbote's half a gallon of Tokay brings to mind "podi galonishcha dva vysvistal za-noch" (one of the soldiers' words in VN's novel Bend Sinister, 1947):
Krug was allowed to get out of the car for a minute. Crystalsen, who had no eye for beauty, remained inside eating an apple and skimming through a long private letter he had received the day before and had not had the time to peruse (even these men of steel have their domestic troubles). Krug stood with his back to the soldiers in front of a rock. This went on for such a long time that at last one of the soldiers remarked with a laugh:
'Podi galonishcha dva vysvistal za-noch [I fancy he must have drunk a couple of gallons during the night].' (Chapter 17)
The action in Bend Sinister takes place in Padukgrad (the city named after Paduk, Adam Krug’s former schoolmate who became the dictator of Padukgrad). Padukgrad seems to combine paduchaya (epilepsy) with Leningrad (St. Petersburg's name in 1924-91). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski, a writer who suffered from epilepsy.