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), on his deathbed Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) called his nephew, the King Charles the Beloved, "Karlik:"
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla—partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle’s raucous dying request: “Teach, Karlik!” Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
Karlik is Russian for "dwarf." The characters in Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) include karla (the dwarf) Chernomor, the wizard with a long beard. On the other hand, Karlik seems to be a cross between the two characters in Pushkin's poem Poltava (1829), Karl (King Charles XII of Sweden) and Orlik (Mazepa's closest aid). Orlik is a river in Russia, a tributary of the Oka (a tributary of the Volga). Oryol (a city in Russia, about 370 km south-southwest of Moscow) stands on the banks of the Oka River and its tributary Orlik river. Oryol is Russian for "eagle." Oryol-karlik (the booted eagle) is the bird Hieraaetus pennatus (also classified as Aquila pennata). Shade's parents were ornithologists:
I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her. (ll. 71-78)
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”). In VN's novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934) Hermann Karlovich (the narrator and main character) kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. The characters in Despair include Orlovius, the insurance agent who looks like a purblind owl. Among the guests at Shade's birthday party are purblind Mr. Kaplun (the New Wye antiquarian) and his wife, a dilapidated eagle:
From behind a drapery, from behind a box tree, through the golden veil of evening and through the black lacery of night, I kept watching that lawn, that drive, that fanlight, those jewel-bright windows. The sun had not yet set when, at a quarter past seven, I heard the first guest's car. Oh, I saw them all. I saw ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman arrive in a tottering Ford with his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow. I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr. Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation. I saw a world-famous old writer, bent under the incubus of literary honors and his own prolific mediocrity, arrive in a taxi out of the dim times of yore when Shade and he had been joint editors of a little review. I saw Frank, the Shades' handyman, depart in the station wagon. I saw a retired professor of ornithology walk up from the highway where he had illegally parked his car. I saw, ensconced in their tiny Pulex, manned by her boy-handsome tousle-haired girl friend, the patroness of the arts who had sponsored Aunt Maud's last exhibition, I saw Frank return with the New Wye antiquarian, purblind Mr. Kaplun, and his wife, a dilapidated eagle. I saw a Korean graduate student in dinner jacket come on a bicycle, and the college president in baggy suit come on foot. I saw, in the performance of their ceremonial duties, in light and shadow, and from window to window, where like Martians the martinis and highballs cruised, the two white-coated youths from the hotel school, and realized that I knew well, quite well, the slighter of the two. And finally, at half past eight (when, I imagine, the lady of the house had begun to crack her finger joints as was her impatient wont) a long black limousine, officially glossy and rather funereal, glided into the aura of the drive, and while the fat Negro chauffeur hastened to open the car door, I saw, with pity, my poet emerge from his house, a white flower in his buttonhole and a grin of welcome on his liquor-flushed face. (note to Line 181)
Kaplun is Russian for "capon, castrate, gelt cock." Karlik and Orlik bring to mind Osric, in Shakespeare's Hamlet the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes (Ophelia's brother). Hamlet's friend Horatio calls Osric “this lapwing:”
This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head. (5.2)
Chibisy (“Lapwings,” 1906) is a poem by Ivan Bunin:
Заплакали чибисы, тонко и ярко
Весенняя светится синь,
Обвяла дорога, где солнце - там жарко,
Сереет и сохнет полынь.
На серых полях - голубые озёра,
На пашнях - лиловая грязь.
И чибисы плачут - от света, простора.
От счастия - плакать, смеясь.
In his story Ten’ ptitsy (“The Shadow of the Bird,” 1907) Bunin quotes Saadi’s words “No one seeks shelter in the shadow of the owl, even if the Huma bird (Huma is a legendary bird whose shadow brings to everything on which it falls kingliness and immortality) does not exist:”
Кто знает, что такое птица Хумай? О ней говорит Саади:
"Нет жаждущих приюта под тенью совы, хотя бы птица Хумай и не существовала на свете!"
И комментаторы Саади поясняют, что это -- легендарная птица и что тень её приносит всему, на что она падает, царственность и бессмертие.
Russian for "owl" is sova. Karlikovaya sova (dwarf owl) or splyushka (from splyu, "I sleep") is the European bird scops owl (Otus scops). In his famous soliloquy in Shakespeare's play (3.1) Hamlet says: "to die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream" and mentions a bare bodkin. 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 “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 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.