In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his visit to a Mrs. Z. who told him that her niece had climbed the Matterhorn:
"I can't believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound--But I'm so dense!" (ll. 781-786)
In Deucalion (1886) John Ruskin claims to have been the first to take a photograph of the Matterhorn, or indeed of any Swiss mountain, on August 8, 1849. In Greek mythology, Deucalion was the son of Prometheus (one of the Titans and a god of fire who is best known for defying the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and, more generally, civilization). In punishment Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle—the emblem of Zeus—was sent to eat his liver (in ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions). In the last stanza of his poem Vesennyaya groza (“The Spring Thunderstorm,” 1828) Tyutchev mentions Zeus' eagle:
Ты скажешь: ветреная Геба,
Кормя Зевесова орла,
Громокипящий кубок с неба,
Смеясь, на землю пролила.
You’d say: capricious Hebe,
feeding Zeus’ eagle,
had spilled on Earth, laughing,
a thunder-boiling goblet.
Shade's third collection of poetry was entitled Hebe's Cup:
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 957-962)
In Modern Painters (Vol. III, Part 4, Chap. 16) Ruskin (the author of The Eagle's Nest, Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art) says: ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.’ Hundreds - thousands - millions. At the end of his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a million photographers:
"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)
According to Kinbote, the whole clan of Gradus (Shade's murderer) seems to have been in the liquor business:
Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. (note to Line 17)
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a Scottish sherry and wine importer, founding partner and de facto business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq. On April 10, 1848, Ruskin married Euphemia ("Effie") Gray (a couple of years later the marriage was annuled and Effie, still a virgin, married John Everett Millais, a pre-Raphaelite painter). Effi Briest (1895) is a realist novel by Theodor Fontane (a German novelist and poet, 1819-98). Fontan ("The Fountain," 1865) is a poem by Tyutchev. During his heart attack Shade saw a tall white fountain (Mrs. Z., during her heart attack, saw a tall white mountain). In P. B. Shelley’s poem To a Skylark “fountains” rhymes with “mountains:”
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
P. B. Shelley is the author of Prometheus Unbound (1820), a four-act lyrical drama. In his poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote in his commentary Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity," which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead--who knows?--
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
The first two lectures in Ruskin's The Eagle's Nest are entitled "The Function in Art of the Faculty Called by the Greeks σοφία" and "The Function in Science of the Faculty Called by the Greeks σοφία." Sophia means "wisdom." 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. Lastochka is Russian for "swallow." In Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873) Ruskin describes a swallow as follows: “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.” (Lecture II. The Swallow)
The tender domestication of a trout brings to mind a domestic ghost mentioned by Shade in Canto Two of his poem:
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)