In his Commentary to Shade's poem 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) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the king’s uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
In his sonnet Natur und Kunst ("Nature and Art," 1800) Goethe famously says In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister (It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself):
Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen
Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden;
Der Widerwille ist auch mir verschwunden,
Und beide scheinen gleich mich anzuziehen.
Es gilt wohl nur ein redliches Bemühen!
Und wenn wir erst in abgemeßnen Stunden
Mit Geist und Fleiß uns an die Kunst gebunden,
Mag frei Natur im Herzen wieder glühen.
So ists mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Höhe streben.
Wer Großes will, muß sich zusammenraffen;
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
Nature and art, they seem to shun each other
Yet in a trice can draw back close once more;
The aversion’s gone too that I felt before,
Both equally attract me, I discover.
An honest effort’s all that we require!
Only when we’ve assigned art clear-cut hours,
With full exertion of our mental powers,
Is nature free our hearts once more to inspire.
Such is the case with all forms of refinement:
In vain will spirits lacking due constraint
Seek the perfection of pure elevation.
He who’d do great things must display restraint;
The master shows himself first in confinement,
And law alone can grant us liberation.
(tr. John Irons)
In Oscar Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying: an Observation (1889) Goethe's words are quoted by Vivian:
‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says, somewhere—
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style. However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism. The Tempest is the most perfect of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing. As a method, realism is a complete failure.'
The characters in Shakespeare's play The Tempest include Caliban, Prospero's and Miranda's slave, half man and half monster. According to Conmal, he is not slave. In the Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Oscar Wilde mentions the rage of Caliban:
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
Conmal's "Let be my critic slave" brings to mind Oscar Wilde's essay The Critic as Artist (1890) and the critic in Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Goethe mentions die Beschränkung (the constraint) in another sonnet:
Sich in erneutem Kunstgebrauch zu üben,
Ist heilge Pflicht, die wir dir auferlegen.
Du kannst dich auch, wie wir, bestimmt bewegen
Nach Tritt und Schritt, wie es dir vorgeschrieben.
Denn eben die Beschränkung läßt sich lieben,
Wenn sich die Geister gar gewaltig regen;
Und wie sie sich denn auch gebärden mögen,
Das Werk zuletzt ist doch vollendet blieben.
So möcht ich selbst in künstlichen Sonetten,
In sprachgewandter Mühe kühnem Stolze,
Das Beste, was Gefühl mir gäbe, reimen;
Nur weiß ich hier mich nicht bequem zu betten.
Ich schneide sonst so gern aus ganzem Holze,
Und müßte nun doch auch mitunter leimen.
Goethe famously said: Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein (None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free). In Canto One of his poem Shade says that no free man needs a God and wonders if he was free:
My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged. (ll. 99-114)
A leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem are the opening lines of Goethe's Erlkönig (1782): Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind (Who rides so late through night and wind? / It is the father with his child). In Canto Three Shade describes his heart attack and calls 1958 "a year of Tempests:"
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)
Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) brings to mind Sibyl Vane (a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray) and treffliche Sibylle (“excellent Sibyl”), as In Goethe's Faust (1808) Mephistopheles calls the witch:
Genug, genug, o treffliche Sibylle!
Gib deinen Trank herbei, und fülle
Die Schale rasch bis an den Rand hinan;
Denn meinem Freund wird dieser Trunk nicht schaden:
Er ist ein Mann von vielen Graden,
Der manchen guten Schluck getan.
O Sibyl excellent, enough of adjuration!
But hither bring us thy potation,
And quickly fill the beaker to the brim!
This drink will bring my friend no injuries:
He is a man of manifold degrees,
And many draughts are known to him. (Part One, “Witches’ Kitchen”)
Ein Mann von vielen Graden (“a man of manifold degrees”), as Mephistopheles calls Faust, makes one think of Gradus (Shade’s murderer).
The three main characters in Pale Fire, Shade, Kinbote and 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). The poet's daughter, Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. According to Alexandra Smirnova (whose spurious memoirs Merezhkovski quotes in his essay Pushkin, 1896), Pushkin called Goethe’s Faust “alpha and omega of human thought since the times of Christianity:”
Вот как русский поэт понимает значение «Фауста»: «Фауст» стоит совсем особо. Это последнее слово немецкой литературы, это особый мир, как «Божественная комедия»; это – в изящной форме альфа и омега человеческой мысли со времён христианства». (IV)
Pushkin compared Goethe's Faust to Dante's Divine Comedy. 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"). In Faust Mephistopheles mentions Three and One, One and Three:
Mein Freund, die Kunst ist alt und neu.
Es war die Art zu allen Zeiten,
Durch Drei und Eins, und Eins und Drei
Irrtum statt Wahrheit zu verbreiten.
The art is old and new, for verily
All ages have been taught the matter —
By Three and One, and One and Three,
Error instead of Truth to scatter. (“Witches’ Kitchen”)
In another scene of Goethe's tragedy Mephistopheles says:
Der ganze Strudel strebt nach oben;
Du glaubst zu schieben, und du wirst geschoben.
The whirlpool swirls to get above:
Thou’rt shoved thyself, imagining to shove. (“The Walpurgis Night”)
In a letter of Jan. 4, 1858, to Vasliy Botkin Leo Tolstoy (the author of Master and Man who disliked Shakespeare and Goethe) quotes the second line (Du glaubst zu schieben, und du wirst geschoben) and mentions raby (the slaves):
Человек везде человек, т. е. слаб. Нечто мученики, только одни мученики непосредственно действовали для добра. Т. е. делали то самое добро, которое хотели делать. А эти все деятели — рабы самих себя и событий. Хотят звезды или славы, а выходит государственная польза, а государственная польза выходит зло для всего человечества. А хотят государственной пользы, выходит кому-нибудь звезда и на ней останавливается. Glaubst zu schieben und wirst geschoben.
In Canto Four of his poem Shade describes shaving and mentions slaves who make hay as he shaves the space between his mouth and nose:
And while the safety blade with scrap and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-938)
In VN’s novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934) Hermann Karlovich loves to recite Pushkin's poem in which the poet calls himself ustalyi rab (weary slave):
Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит —
Летят за днями дни, и каждый час уносит
Частичку бытия, а мы с тобой вдвоём
Предполагаем жить, и глядь — как раз умрём.
На свете счастья нет, но есть покой и воля.
Давно завидная мечтается мне доля —
Давно, усталый раб, замыслил я побег
В обитель дальную трудов и чистых нег.
'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose.
Day after day flits by, and with each hour there goes
A little bit of life; but meanwhile you and I
Together plan to dwell… yet lo! 'tis then we die.
There is no bliss on earth: there is peace and freedom, though.
An enviable lot I long have yearned to know:
Long have I, weary slave, been contemplating flight
To a remote abode of work and pure delight.
In Despair Hermann kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. 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. One of Blok's poems begins: Kogda zamrut otchayanie i zloba ("When despair and spite stop bother you," 1908).