In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions Hurricane Lolita and his wife’s portrait by Lang:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)
In his note to Line 682 (Lang) Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
A modern Fra Pandolf no doubt. I do not remember seeing any such painting around the house. Or did Shade have in mind a photographic portrait? There was one such portrait on the piano, and another in Shade's study. How much fairer it would have been to Shade's and his friend's reader if the lady had deigned answer some of my urgent queries.
By "a year of Tempests" Shade means 1958, the year when VN's novel Lolita (1955) was published in the USA. In 1962 Lolita was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick. Die tolle Lola ("The Great Lola," 1954) is a West German comedy film by Hans Deppe. A German cinematographer who collaborated with Hans Deppe on Die tolle Lola, Fritz Arno Wagner (1889-1958) had earlier collaborated with Fritz Lang (an Austrian film director, 1890-1976, the "Master of Darkness") on four films, Destiny (1921), Spies (1928), M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). At the end of his commentary Kinbote says that he may join forces with Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla) in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (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 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)
Btw., Sybil Shade (the poet's wife whose portrait was made by Lang) brings to mind the Sybil of Cumae, a character in Book XIV of Ovid's Metamorphoses. A character in Fritz Lang's science-fiction film Metropolis (1927), C. A. Rotwang (a brilliant scientist and inventor, whose greatest achievement is the creation of a robot made in the form of a woman) brings to mind a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying make anti-matter:
For almost a whole year after the King's escape the Extremists remained convinced that he and Odon had not left Zembla. The mistake can be only ascribed to the streak of stupidity that fatally runs through the most competent tyranny. Airborne machines and everything connected with them cast a veritable spell over the minds of our new rulers whom kind history had suddenly given a boxful of these zipping and zooming gadgets to play with. That an important fugitive would not perform by air the act of fleeing seemed to them inconceivable. Within minutes after the King and the actor had clattered down the backstairs of the Royal Theater, every wing in the sky and on the ground had been accounted for - such was the efficiency of the government. During the next weeks not one private or commercial plane was allowed to take off, and the inspection of transients became so rigorous and lengthy that international lines decided to cancel stopovers at Onhava. There were some casualties. A crimson balloon was enthusiastically shot down and the aeronaut (a well-known meteorologist) drowned in the Gulf of Surprise. A pilot from a Lapland base flying on a mission of mercy got lost in the fog and was so badly harassed by Zemblan fighters that he settled atop a mountain peak. Some excuse for all this could be found. The illusion of the King's presence in the wilds of Zembla was kept up by royalist plotters who decoyed entire regiments into searching the mountains and woods of our rugged peninsula. The government spent a ludicrous amount of energy on solemnly screening the hundreds of impostors packed in the country's jails. Most of them clowned their way back to freedom; a few, alas, fell. Then, in the spring of the following year, a stunning piece of news came from abroad. The Zemblan actor Odon was directing the making of a cinema picture in Paris!
It was now correctly conjectured that if Odon had fled, the King had fled too: At an extraordinary session of the Extremist government there was passed from hand to hand, in grim silence, a copy of a French newspaper with the headline: L'EX-ROI DE ZEMBLA EST-IL À PARIS? Vindictive exasperation rather than state strategy moved the secret organization of which Gradus was an obscure member to plot the destruction of the royal fugitive. Spiteful thugs! They may be compared to hoodlums who itch to torture the invulnerable gentleman whose testimony clapped them in prison for life. Such convicts have been known to go berserk at the thought that their elusive victim whose very testicles they crave to twist and tear with their talons, is sitting at a pergola feast on a sunny island or fondling some pretty young creature between his knees in serene security - and laughing at them! One supposes that no hell can be worse than the helpless rage they experience as the awareness of that implacable sweet mirth reaches them and suffuses them, slowly destroying their brutish brains. A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty. The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
Fritz Lang's movie brings to mind Metropol', a luxurious hotel (its central façade is decorated with Vrubel's “Princess of Dreams” majolica panel) in Moscow near the Bolshoy Theater. Vrubel's last painting is the Portrait of Valeriy Bryusov (1906). In his memoir essay Bryusov (1924) Vladislav Hodasevich quotes Sergey Krechetov's verses (epigram on Bryusov) in which the chief janitor from "Metropol" is mentioned:
Пока фельетонисты писали статьи об обращении "эстета" Брюсова к «общественности", - Брюсов на чердаке своего дома учился стрелять из револьвера, "на случай, если забастовщики придут грабить". В редакции «Скорпиона" происходили беседы, о которых Сергей Кречетов сложил не слишком блестящие, но меткие стишки:
Собирались они по вторникам,
Мудро глаголя.
Затевали погромы с дворником
Из Метрополя.
(Изд-во "Скорпион" помещалось в здании Метрополя.)
Так трогательно по вторникам,
В согласии вкусов,
Сочетался со старшим дворником
Валерий Брюсов.
В ту же пору его младший брат написал ему латинские стихи с обращением: Falsus Valerius, duplex lingua!
Bryusov is the author of Requiem (1924), a poem on Lenin's death (meant as the new text of Mozart's Requiem). In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse.