In a conversation at the Faculty Club John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) asks Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) if his name means regicide in Zemblan:
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"
"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."
Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a "sympathetic ruler" had probably perished in prison.
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die--they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon--American History--"that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I heard," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time--"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere--"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to--what's his name--oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, are young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
In The Vision of Judgment (1822), a satirical poem in ottava rima written in response to Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgment (1821), Lord Byron says that Southey had written praises of a Regicide:
He had written — praises of a Regicide —
He had written praises of all kings whatever —
He had written for republics far and wide,
And then against them bitterer than ever —
For Pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever —
Then turned a hearty Antijacobin —
Had turned his coat — & would have turned his skin. (XCVII)
"A hearty Antijacobin" brings to mind "a domestic anti-Karlist" (as Kinbote calls Sybil Shade, the poet's wife) and Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer). In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.):
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 fngers 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 Finnigans 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 Kongs-skugg-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)
Lingo-Grande is the nonsensical language invented by Sara Coleridge (Southey's sister-in-law, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's wife). In Paradiso (Canto XXVI: ll. 103-114), the third and last part of Dante's Divine Comedy (1308-21), Adam (the first man) mentions verace speglio (the Truthful Mirror) and l'idïoma ch'usai e che fei (the tongue, which I both used and made):
Indi spirò: «Sanz' essermi proferta
da te, la voglia tua discerno meglio
che tu qualunque cosa t'è più certa;
perch' io la veggio nel verace speglio
che fa di sé pareglio a l'altre cose,
e nulla face lui di sé pareglio.
Tu vuogli udir quant' è che Dio mi puose
ne l'eccelso giardino, ove costei
a così lunga scala ti dispuose,
e quanto fu diletto a li occhi miei,
e la propria cagion del gran disdegno,
e l'idïoma ch'usai e che fei.
Then it breathed:
“Without its being told to me by thee,
better do I perceive what thou desirest,
than thou perceivest what thou knowest best;
for I behold it in the Truthful Mirror,
which of Itself makes other things a likeness,
though naught makes It a likeness of itself.
Thou fain wouldst hear how long it is since God
in that high garden placed me, where this Lady
prepared thee for so long a flight of stairs;
how long it was a pleasure to mine eyes;
the real occasion for the mighty wrath;
and what the tongue, which I both used and made.
In Byron’s poem The Prophecy of Dante (1821) Dante (the poet who was expelled from Florence and wrote The Divine Comedy in exile) mentions the solitude of kings in which he feels “without the power that makes them bear a crown:”
A wanderer, while even wolves can find a den,
Ripped from all kindred, from all home, all things
That make communion sweet, and soften pain—
To feel me in the solitude of kings
Without the power that makes them bear a crown— (Canto the First, ll. 163-167)
According to Kinbote, there is Dante’s bust on a bookshelf in Shade’s study:
How glad I was that the vigils I had kept all through the spring had prepared me to observe him at his miraculous midsummer task! I had learned exactly when and where to find the best points from which to follow the contours of his inspiration. My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor: at night, in the violet glow of his upstairs study where a kindly mirror reflected for me his hunched-up shoulders and the pencil with which he kept picking his ear (inspecting now and then the lead, and even tasting it); in the forenoon, lurking in the ruptured shadows of his first-floor study where a bright goblet of liquor quietly traveled from filing cabinet to lectern, and from lectern to bookshelf, there to hide if need be behind Dante's bust; on a hot day, among the vines of a small arborlike portico, through the garlands of which I could glimpse a stretch of oilcloth, his elbow upon it, and the plump cherubic fist propping and crimpling his temple. (note to Lines 47-48)
Pushkin's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830), with the epigraph from Wordsworth ("Scorn not the sonnet, critic"), begins with the line Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta ("Stern Dante did not scorn the sonnet"). 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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. In Blok’s poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21) Dostoevski (a guest at Anna Vrevski’s soirées) remarks that the hero’s father resembles Byron. At the end of his poem Ravenna from the cycle Ital'yanskie stikhi ("The Italian Verses," 1909) Blok mentions Dante's shade with the eagle profile that sings to him of the New Life:
Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.
Only at night, bending over the vallies
and counting the centuries to come,
Dante's shade with the eagle profile
Sings to me of the New Life.
Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). In The Vision of Judgment (LXV) Byron mentions the Shadow and a Shade:
The Shadow came — a tall, thin, grey-haired figure,
That looked as it had been a Shade on earth —
Quick in it’s motions, with an air of vigour —
But nought to mark it’s breeding or it’s birth —
Now it waxed little — then again grew bigger —
With now an air of gloom, or savage mirth —
But as you gazed upon it’s features they
Changed every instant — to what, none could say.
In his Commentary and Index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius:
He awoke to find her [Fleur de Fyler] standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young – little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
Sudarg seems to hint at gosudar' (sovereign). Gosudar' is the Russian title of Niccolo Machiavelli's political treatise The Prince (1532). At the end of his poem The Mirror Speaks R. L. Stevenson calls Henry James "the Prince of Men:"
Where the bells peal far at sea
Cunning fingers fashioned me.
There on palace walls I hung
While that Consuelo sung;
But I heard, though I listened well,
Never a note, never a trill,
Never a beat of the chiming bell.
There I hung and looked, and there
In my grey face, faces fair
Shone from under shining hair.
Well, I saw the poising head,
But the lips moved and nothing said;
And when lights were in the hall,
Silent moved the dancers all.
So awhile I glowed, and then
Fell on dusty days and men;
Long I slumbered packed in straw,
Long I none but dealers saw;
Till before my silent eye
On that sees came passing by.
Now with an outlandish grace,
To the sparkling fire I face
In the blue room at Skerryvore;
Where I wait until the door
Open, and the Prince of Men,
Henry James, shall come again.
At his Skerryvore house in the southern English coastal town of Bournemouth R. L. Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In Stevenson's novella Dr. Henry Jekyll pays the family of Edward Hyde's victim £100 to avoid a scandal. Kinboot or kinbot is a wergeld or man-boot paid by a homicide to the kin of the person slain. In his Cornell lecture on R. L. Stevenson VN points out that in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde there are really three personalities: Jekyll, Hyde and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus (who is Kinbote's double) seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin’s personality. 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 in Russian “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 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.
"The Prince of Men" (as R. L. Stevenson calls him), Henry James (1843-1916) is the author of several ghost stories. In Canto Three of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and mentions a domestic ghost:
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why
Scorn a hereafter none can verify:
The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks
With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks,
The seraph with his six flamingo wings,
And Flemish hells with porcupines and things?
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost. (ll. 221-230)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter). In Byron's dramatic poem Manfred (1817) Manfred tells the Spirit:
I am prepared for all things, but deny
The Power which summons me. Who sent thee here?
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.