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), the king saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
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). A masked ball in Conmal's palace at Aros (a fine town in E. Zembla, capital of Conmal's dukedom) brings to mind Lermontov's verse play Maskarad (Masquerade, 1835). On the other hand, in Chapter Eight (XLVI) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Tatiana mentions vetosh' maskarada (the frippery of this masquerade) and te mesta (those haunts) where she saw Onegin for the first time:
А мне, Онегин, пышность эта,
Постылой жизни мишура,
Мои успехи в вихре света,
Мой модный дом и вечера,
Что в них? Сейчас отдать я рада
Всю эту ветошь маскарада,
Весь этот блеск, и шум, и чад
За полку книг, за дикий сад,
За наше бедное жилище,
За те места, где в первый раз,
Онегин, видела я вас,
Да за смиренное кладбище,
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной нянею моей...
“But as to me, Onegin, this magnificence,
a wearisome life's tinsel, my successes
in the world's vortex,
my fashionable house and evenings,
what do I care for them?... At once I'd gladly
give all the frippery of this masquerade,
all this glitter, and noise, and fumes,
for a shelfful of books, for a wild garden,
for our poor dwelling,
for those haunts where for the first time,
Onegin, I saw you,
and for the humble churchyard where
there is a cross now and the shade
of branches over my poor nurse.
At the end of his commentary Kinbote mentions his Zemblan nurse:
Many years ago - how many I would not care to say - I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"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)
Kinbote was a boy of six in 1921 (the year of Alexander Blok's and Nikolay Gumilyov's death) and Shade, in 1904 (the year of Chekhov's death and of the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war). In 1919, when John Shade and Sybil Swallow were married, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer who is Kinbote's double) were four. A million photographers brings to mind dvunogikh tvarey milliony (the millions of two-legged creatures) mentioned by Pushkin in Canto Two (XIV: 6-7) of EO:
Но дружбы нет и той меж нами.
Все предрассудки истребя,
Мы почитаем всех нулями,
А единицами - себя.
Мы все глядим в Наполеоны;
Двуногих тварей миллионы
Для нас орудие одно;
Нам чувство дико и смешно.
Сноснее многих был Евгений;
Хоть он людей, конечно, знал
И вообще их презирал, -
Но (правил нет без исключений)
Иных он очень отличал
И вчуже чувство уважал.
But in our midst there’s even no such friendship:
Having destroyed all the prejudices,
We deem all people naughts
And ourselves units.
We all expect to be Napoleons;
the millions of two-legged creatures
for us are only tools;
feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
Napoleon became Emperor of the French in 1804 and died in 1821 (the year of Dostoevski's birth). George d'Anthès (Pushkin's murderer) and Natalia Goncharov (Pushkin's wife, in the second marriage Lanskoy) were born in 1812 (the year of the battle of Borodino). Borodino (1837) is a poem by Lermontov. Lermontov’s poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… ("No, I'm not Byron, I'm another..." 1832) ends in the line Ya – ili Bog – ili nikto (myself, or God, or none at all):
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Еще неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Gloomy ocean, who can
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse. 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 (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name), like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again. 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," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski. The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). The characters in Griboedov's play in verse Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824) include Sofia (Famusov's daughter with whom Chatski is in love) and Colonel Skalozub (a play on zuboskal, scoffer; cf. a similar transposition of syllables in Kinbote). In Chapter Eight (XIII: 13-14) of EO Pushkin compares Onegin to Chatski:
Им овладело беспокойство,
Охота к перемене мест
(Весьма мучительное свойство,
Немногих добровольный крест).
Оставил он свое селенье,
Лесов и нив уединенье,
Где окровавленная тень
Ему являлась каждый день,
И начал странствия без цели,
Доступный чувству одному;
И путешествия ему,
Как всё на свете, надоели;
Он возвратился и попал,
Как Чацкий, с корабля на бал.
A restlessness took hold of him,
the inclination to a change of places
(a most excruciating property,
a cross that few deliberately bear).
He left his countryseat,
the solitude of woods and fields,
where an ensanguined shade
daily appeared to him,
and started upon travels without aim,
accessible to one sensation;
and to him journeys,
like everything on earth,
grew boring. He returned and found himself,
like Chatski, come from boat to ball.
Posle bala ("After the Ball," 1902) is a story by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of Voyna i mir ("War and Peace," 1869) who in 1862 married Sofia Behrs. Several poems of Afanasiy Fet (the poet who in 1856 married Maria Botkin) are dedicated to Tolstoy's wife. Fet's mother, née Charlotte Becker, is a namesake of Lolita's mother (Charlotte Haze, born Becker) in VN's novel Lolita (1955).