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), King Alfin's question "What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot:
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). King Alfin's absent-mindedness knew no bounds. He was a wretched linguist, having at his disposal only a few phrases of French and Danish, but every time he had to make a speech to his subjects - to a group of gaping Zemblan yokels in some remote valley where he had crash-landed - some uncontrollable switch went into action in his mind, and he reverted to those phrases, flavoring them for topical sense with a little Latin. Most of the anecdotes relating to his naïve fits of abstraction are too silly and indecent to sully these pages; but one of them that I do not think especially funny induced such guffaws from Shade (and returned to me, via the Common Room, with such obscene accretions) that I feel inclined to give it here as a sample (and as a corrective). One summer before the first world war, when the emperor of a great foreign realm (I realize how few there are to choose from) was paying an extremely unusual and flattering visit to our little hard country, my father took him and a young Zemblan interpreter (whose sex I leave open) in a newly purchased custom-built car on a jaunt in the countryside. As usual, King Alfin traveled without a vestige of escort, and this, and his brisk driving, seemed to trouble his guest. On their way back, some twenty miles from Onhava, King Alfin decided to stop for repairs. While he tinkered with the motor, the emperor and the interpreter sought the shade of some pines by the highway, and only when King Alfin was back in Onhava, did he gradually realize from a reiteration of rather frantic questions that he had left somebody behind ("What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot). Generally speaking, in respect of any of my contributions (or what I thought to be contributions) I repeatedly enjoined my poet to record them in writing, by all means, but not to spread them in idle speech; even poets, however, are human. (note to Line 71)
Alfin is an anagram of final. The Final Problem (1893) is a short story by Conan Doyle. The story, set in 1891, introduces the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty. It was intended to be the final Holmes story, ending with the character's death, but Conan Doyle was later persuaded to revive Holmes for additional stories and novels. In Conan Doyle's story Holmes's violent struggle with Moriarty takes place near the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The characters in Pale Fire include Andronnikov and Niagarin, the two Soviet experts hired by the new Zemblan government to find the crown jewels. Niagarin (whose name hints at the Niagara Falls and who speaks English and French) had lived in Canada. In Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) Sir Henry Baskerville (the heir to the Baskerville fortune) arrives from Canada after the death of his uncle, Sir Charles. Jack Stapleton (the novel's antagonist) keeps his terrible dog (half-mastiff and half-bloodhound) in the center of the Grimpen Mire. Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) asked her mother (Sybil Shade, the poet's wife) what grimpen (a word used by T. S. Eliot in East Coker, no. 2 of Four Quartets) meant:
Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
"Mother, what's grimpen?" "What is what?" "Grim Pen."
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
"Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain,
Appending, "Would you like a tangerine?"
"No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?"
You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door. (ll. 365-376)
A young Zemblan interpreter whose sex Kinbote leaves open brings to mind Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter (1893). Conan Doyle (1926) is a sonnet by Igor Severyanin. In his autobiographical poem Rosa oranzhevogo chasa ("The Dew of the Orange Hour," 1925) Severyanin (the penname of Igor Lotaryov, 1887-1941) says that his ancestor was the emperor of Byzantium:
Все вы, Нелидовы и Дуки,
Лишь призраки истлевших дней,
Для слуха лишь пустые звуки…
Склоняясь ныне над сумой,
Таю, наперекор стихии,
Смешную мысль, что предок мой
Был император Византии!.. (Part One, 4)
Duki (the Dukes) mentioned by Severyanin bring to mind Conmal, Duke of Aros (the uncle of Charles the Beloved and Zemblan translator of Shakespeare), and Oleg, Duke of Rahl, son of Colonel Gusev, Duke of Rahl (b .1885, still spry), Charles Xavier Vseslav's beloved playmate (and first lover) who was killed in a toboggan accident. According to Kinbote, the young Prince and his playmate Oleg were handsome, long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood:
We shall now go back from mid-August 1958 to a certain afternoon in May three decades earlier when he was a dark strong lad of thirteen with a silver ring on the forefinger of his sun-tanned hand. Queen Blenda, his mother, had recently left for Vienna and Rome. He had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg, Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions--of which we had so many during our long northern spring--sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens. I wish I could provide the reader with cut-out figures and parts of attire as given in paper-doll charts for children armed with scissors. It would brighten a little these dark evenings that are destroying my brain. Both lads were handsome, long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood. At twelve, Oleg was the best center forward at the Ducal School. When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet. On that particular afternoon a copious shower lacquered the spring foliage of the palace garden, and oh, how the Persian lilacs in riotous bloom tumbled and tossed behind the green-streaming, amethyst-blotched windowpanes! One would have to play indoors. Oleg was late. Would he come at all? (note to Line 130)
In his poem Olegov shchit (“Oleg’s Shield,” 1829) Pushkin calls Oleg (the first Kievan prince of the Rurik family who attacked the Greeks and nearly took Constantinople in 907) voinstvennyi varyag (the bellicose Varangian):
Когда ко граду Константина
С тобой, воинственный варяг,
Пришла славянская дружина
И развила победы стяг,
Тогда во славу Руси ратной,
Строптиву греку в стыд и страх,
Ты пригвоздил свой щит булатный
На цареградских воротах.
Настали дни вражды кровавой;
Твой путь мы снова обрели.
Но днесь, когда мы вновь со славой
К Стамбулу грозно притекли,
Твой холм потрясся с бранным гулом,
Твой стон ревнивый нас смутил,
И нашу рать перед Стамбулом
Твой старый щит остановил.
When you, O warlike soldier-Viking,
Accompanied by Slav brigade,
At Constantine’s Great City striking
Unfurled the victory banner frayed,
Then to great Russia’s martial glory,
To shame and fear of stubborn Greek,
You pinned amidst the great furore
Your damask shield to gates antique.
The days of bloody strife’s furore
Are here again, we’ve followed you.
But now we’ve come afresh in glory
With menaces on Stamboul too,
Your hill by fearsome roar was shaken,
Resounded loud your jealous moan,
And though Stamboul again was taken
By ancient shield we still were thrown.
(tr. R. Moreton)
Pushkin’s Pesn' o veshchem Olege ("The Song of Wise Oleg," 1822) is based on the legend of Oleg’s death cited by Lomonosov at the end of O knyazhenii Olgove (“On Oleg’s Princedom”):
О смерти его дивное осталось повествование, вероятность по мере древности имеющее. Прежде войны на греков спросил Олег волхвов, от чего ему конец жизни приключится. Ответ дали, что от любимого своего коня умрет. Для того положил он никогда на него не садиться, нижe к себе приводить, но поставить и кормить на особливом месте. Возвратясь из Греции по четырех летах, во время осени об оном вспомнил. Призвал старейшину конюхов и, жив ли оный конь, спросил. Услышав, что умер, волхвам посмеялся. "Лживы, - сказал, - все ваши гадания: конь мертв, а я жив; хочу видеть кости его и вам показать в обличение". Итак, поехал на место, где лежали голые кости, и, голый лоб увидев, сошел с коня, наступил на него и молвил: "От того ли мне смерть быть может?". Внезапно змея, изо лба выникнув, в ногу ужалила, от чего разболелся и умер, княжив тридцать три года. Весь народ много об нем плакал. Погребен на горе Щековице, и могила его видна была во время летописателя Нестора.
Prince Oleg died from a snake's poisonous bite. In Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892) a venomous snake (identified by Holmes as an Indian swamp adder) kills Roylott (the evil stepfather of the twins Julia and Helen Stoner).
Colonel Peter Gusev (Oleg's father) was King Alfin's 'aerial adjutant:'
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death (1919) and Byzantium (1928) are poems by W. B. Yeats. In the second of them Yeats mentions the Emperor and says that before him floats an image, man or shade, shade more than man, more image than a shade:
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
In agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.