In his Commentary and Index to Shade’s poem 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) mentions Queen Disa’s cousin, Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, who was nicknamed Curdy Buff by his admirers:
When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police, translated into crude Zemblan by a Hindu member of the Extremist party, and then read aloud to the royal captive in a would-be ironic voice by the preposterous commandant of the palace. There happened to be in that letter one - only one, thank God - sentimental sentence: "I want you to know that no matter how much you hurt me, you cannot hurt my love," and this sentence (if we re-English it from the Zemblan) came out as: "I desire you and love when you flog me" He interrupted the commandant, calling him a buffoon and a rogue, and insulting everybody around so dreadfully that the Extremists had to decide fast whether to shoot him at once or let him have the original of the letter.
Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla. Had she been permitted to land, she would have been forthwith incarcerated, which would have reacted on the King's flight, doubling the difficulties of escape. A message from the Karlists containing these simple considerations checked her progress in Stockholm, and she flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of even worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await there further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing on the terrace under the jacaranda a disconsolate letter to Lavender when the tall, sheared and bearded visitor with the bouquet of flowers-of-the-gods who had been watching her from afar advanced through the garlands of shade. She looked up - and of course no dark spectacles and no make-up could for a moment fool her.
…She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under the great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succumbed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily - especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, a phenomenally endowed young brute (whose family name, "knave's farm," is the most probable derivation of "Shakespeare"). Curdy Buff - as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers - had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught. At last she removed to the Riviera leaving him to amuse himself with a band of Eton-collared, sweet-voiced minions imported from England. (note to Lines 433-434)
Shalksbore, Baron Harfar, known as Curdy Buff, b. 1921, man of fashion and Zemblan patriot, 433. (Index)
In Harfar there is arfa (Russian for 'harp'). Eolova arfa (The Aeolian Harp," 1815) is a poem by Zhukovski; Arfa ("The Harp," 1830) is a poem by Lermontov; Arfa skal'da ("The Skald's Harp," 1834) is a poem by Tyutchev. Zhukovski translated into Russian (as Lesnoy tsar', "The Forest King," 1817) Goethe's ballad Erlkönig (its opening two lines are a leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem); Lermontov translated into Russian Goethe's poem Über allen Gipfeln ("O’er all the hill-tops"); Tyutchev translated into Russian Lied des Harfners ("Song of the Harpist") from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-96). Harfar seems to hint at der Harfner (the Harpist), a character in Goethe's novel. Here is his Song (which was set to music by Schubert):
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,
wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
auf seinem Bette weinend saß,
der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
ihr laßt den Armen schuldig werden,
dann überlaßt ihr ihn der Pein;
denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
Ihm färbt der Morgensonne Licht
den reinen Horizont mit Flammen,
und über seinem schuld'gen Haupte bricht
das schöne Bild der ganzen Welt zusammen.
Who never ate his bread in tears,
Who never lay awake for hours
Plagued by doubts and fears,
Knows you not, you heavenly powers!
Into life you lead every being,
You let poor man hurt foe and friend,
Then turn him over to suffering:
For on earth all wrongs are avenged.
(tr. Thomas Dorset)
In De Profundis (1897), a letter written during his imprisonment in Reading Goal and addressed to his lover "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas), Oscar Wilde says that his mother used often to quote to him Goethe’s lines—written by Thomas Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago:
I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines—written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:—
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,—
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.
I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
"That noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality," is Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1776-1810), the wife of King Frederick William III. When Napoleon occupied Berlin, she went into exile to Memel (now Klaipeda, Lithuania), in the easternmost part of the kingdom. She met Napoleon on July 6, 1807, in Tilsit (now Sovetsk, a city located on the south bank of the Neman River which forms the border with Lithuania, in the Province of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg). Kinbote's Zembla is a peninsula and brings to mind the Samland (or Sambia) Peninsula (now Kaliningrad Peninsula) northwest of Kaliningrad, on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. In Russian it is also called Zemlandskily poluostrov (the Zemlandic Peninsula).
Strelitzia (a genus of five species of perennial plants native to South Africa, named by Joseph Banks, an English naturalist, in honour of the British queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III) reminds one of the Disa orchids (the bouquet of flowers-of-the-gods) that Kinbote brings his wife:
No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains; but the part concerning Garh displeased her as if, paradoxically, she would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome hough-magandy with the wench. She told him sharply to skip such interludes, and he made her a droll little bow. But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant express on appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared. That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. "I do have some business matters to discuss," he said. "And there are papers you have to sign." Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the roses. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white mantilla, brought certain documents from Disa's boudoir. Upon hearing the King's mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by his excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycines. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot. (note to Lines 433-434)
In a conversation with Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! 1974) Louise Adamson (Vadim's third wife) mentions Strelitzia:
VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.
LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know, I've been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand at eighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal--and absolutely irresistible.
VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous style very fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we want a little more dignity, don't we?
LOUISE We'll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look like an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vases and not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in my time. (Part Four, 5)
Describing his life in Paris, Vadim mentions the poet Basilevski who defined Keats as "a pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era:"
It was good to see old Morozov's rough-hewn clever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for a special reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski--not because he had just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty who wrote doggerel verse and vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hoped he had already seen the fun I had made of him in the last issue of a literary review in which we both collaborated. Although his English was inadequate for the interpretation of, say, Keats (whom he defined as "a pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski was fond of attempting just that. In discussing recently the "not altogether displeasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popular line from Keats, rendering it as:
Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsa
which in retranslation gives:
"A pretty bauble always gladdens us."
Our conversation, however, turned out to be much too brief to disclose whether or not he had appreciated my amusing lesson. He asked me what I thought of the new book he was telling Morozov (a monolinguist) about--namely Maurois' "impressive work on Byron," and upon my answering that I had found it to be impressive trash, my austere critic muttered, "I don't think you have read it," and went on educating the serene old poet. (2.1)
In his review of Vadim’s stuff Basilevski mistranslated the first line of Keats’s Endymion (1818), “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Keats is the author of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818), a narrative poem adapted from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron (IV, 5). In the last line of his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde mentions Isabella and her Basil-tree:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Keats’ Isabella and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (a poem translated into Russian by VN) bring to mind Isabel (“Bel”), the daughter of Vadim and his second wife, Annette Blagovo. In a conversation with Basilevski (overheard by Vadim from behind a more or less Doric column) Annette mentions the too big and too slow tears rolling down the faces:
I might have been displeased by the tolerance she showed Basilevski (knowing none of his works and only vaguely aware of his preposterous reputation) had it not occurred to me that the theme of her sympathy was repeating, as it were, the friendly phase of my own initial relations with that faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric column I overheard him asking my naive gentle Annette had she any idea why I hated so fiercely Gorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was it because I resented the world fame of a proletarian? Had I really read any of that wonderful writer's books? Annette had looked puzzled but all at once a charming childish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a corny Soviet film that I had criticized, she said, "because the tears rolling down the faces were too big and too slow."
"Aha! That explains a lot," proclaimed Basilevski with gloomy satisfaction. (2.9)
Lenin said that, of all arts, cinema and circus were the most important for us. A corny Soviet film that Vadim had criticized was based on Gorki's novel Mat' ("The Mother," 1906). Harfar Baron Shalksbore brings to mind the Baron, a character in Gorki's play Na dne ("The Lower Depths," 1902). Stalin famously said that Gorki's juvenile poem Devushka i smert' ("The Girl and Death") was more powerful than Goethe's Faust. In Pushkin's "A Scene from Faust" (1825) Mephistopheles compares himself to arlekin (an harlequin) whom Faust conjured up from the fire.
Btw., "knave's farm" makes one think of "We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery" (Hamlet's words to Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, 3.1). Napoleon is a boar in George Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1945). In the Introduction to his novel Bend Sinister (1947) VN mentions Orwell. The characters in VN's novel include Krug's friend Ember, the Shakespeare specialist.
On the other hand, Harfar may hint at Harald Fairhair (Old Norse: Haraldr Hárfagri), c. 850 – c. 932, the first Norwegian king who united the petty kingships of Norway into a single realm in about 885.