At the end of 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) 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)
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 Eugene Onegin:
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.
In his poem The Age of Bronze (1823) Byron speaks of Napoleon's grave on St. Helena and mentions the better-seeing Shade:
Small care hath he of what his tomb consists,
Nought if he sleeps – no more if he exists –
Alike the better-seeing Shade will smile
On the rude cavern of the rocky Isle,
As if his ashes found their latest home
In Rome’s Pantheon, or Gaul’s mimic dome. (4: ll. 117-122)
Byron expects Napoleon to be buried in the Panthéon; in fact he is buried in the Invalides. In his commentary and index to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter:
The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
Mandevil, Baron Mirador, cousin of Radomir Mandevil (q. v.), experimentalist, madman and traitor, 171.
Mandevil, Baron Radomir, b .1925, man of fashion and Zemblan patriot; in 1936, K's throne page, 130; in 1958, disguised, 149. (Index)
The name Mandevil fuses together man and the devil and brings to mind a line in Byron’s Don Juan, “Man — and, as we would hope — perhaps the devil:”
But Time, which brings all beings to their level,
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last
Man — and, as we would hope — perhaps the devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:
While youth’s hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this — the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion. (Canto the Fourth, II)
A mad Mandevil's cousin, Baron Radomir, was the King's throne page:
Three hours later he trod level ground. Two old women working in an orchard unbent in slow motion and stared after him. He had passed the pine groves of Boscobel and was approaching the quay of Blawick; when a black police car turned out on a transverse road and pulled up next to him: "The joke has gone too far," said the driver. "One hundred clowns are packed in Onhava jail, and the ex-King should be among them. Our local prison is much too small for more kings. The next masquerader will be shot at sight. What's your real name, Charlie?"
"I'm British. I'm a tourist," said the King. "Well, anyway, take off that red fufa. And the cap. Give them here." He tossed the things in the back of the car and drove off.
The King walked on; the top of his blue pajamas tucked into his skiing pants might easily pass for a fancy shirt. There was a pebble in his left shoe but he was too fagged out to do anything about it.
He recognized the seashore restaurant where many years earlier he had lunched incognito with two amusing, very amusing, sailors. Several heavily armed Extremists were drinking beer on the geranium-lined veranda, among the routine vacationists, some of whom were busy writing to distant friends. Through the geraniums, a gloved hand gave the King a picture postcard on which he found scribbled: Proceed to R. C. Bon voyage! Feigning a casual stroll, he reached the end of the embankment.
It was a lovely breezy afternoon. with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing."
"War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at every now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon.
"All one could do at short notice," said Odon, plucking at his cheek to display how the varicolored semi-transparent film adhered to his face, altering its contours according to stress. "A polite person," he added, "does not, normally, examine too closely a poor fellow's disfigurement."
"I was looking for shpiks [plainclothesmen]" said the King. "All day," said Odon, "they have been patrolling the quay. They are dining at present."
"I'm thirsty and hungry," said the King. "That's young Baron Mandevil - chap who had that duel last year. Let's go now."
"Couldn't we take him too?"
"Wouldn't come - got a wife and a baby. Come on, Charlie, come on, Your Majesty."
"He was my throne page on Coronation Day."
Thus chatting, they reached the Rippleson Caves. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note. (note to Line 149)
At the end of Beppo (1817) Byron remarks that his pen is at the bottom of a page:
Whate'er his youth had suffer'd, his old age
With wealth and talking made him some amends;
Though Laura sometimes put him in a rage,
I've heard the Count and he were always friends.
My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which being finish'd, here the story ends;
'Tis to be wish'd it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun. (XCIX)
In the first stanza of his last poem, On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year (1824), Byron says that he cannot be beloved anymore:
Tis time the heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
In a letter of February 20, 1816, to John Murray (Byron's publisher) Byron mentions his Gradus:
Dear Sir, — To return to our business — your epistles are vastly agreeable. With regard to the observations on carelessness, etc., I think, with all humility, that the gentle reader has considered a rather uncommon, and designedly irregular versification for haste and negligence. The measure is not that of any of the other poems, which (I believe) were allowed to be tolerably correct, according to Byshe and the fingers — or ears — by which bards write, and readers reckon. Great part of The Siege is in (I think) what the learned call Anapests, (though I am not sure, being heinously forgetful of my metres and my Gradus) and many of the lines intentionally longer or shorter than its rhyming companion ; and the rhyme also occurring at greater or less intervals of caprice or convenience.
I mean not to say that this is right or good, but merely that I could have been smoother, had it appeared to me of advantage; and that I was not otherwise without being aware of the deviation, though I now feel sorry for it, as I would undoubtedly rather please than not. My wish has been to try at something different from my former efforts ; as I endeavoured to make them differ from each other. The versification of The Corsair is not that of Lara ; nor The Giaour that of The Bride; Childe Harold is again varied from these; and I strove to vary the last somewhat from all of the others. Excuse all this damned nonsense and egotism. The fact is, that I am rather trying to think on the subject of this note, than really thinking on it. I did not know you had called ; you are always admitted and welcome when you choose.
Yours, etc., etc.,
Bn.
Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 7/19, 1824. Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron za blednym ognyom (Like Byron to Greece for a pale fire) is a line in G. Ivanov's poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron - o bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece - o without regret," 1927). In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions “gradual Gradus:”
Gradus never became a real success in the glass business to which he turned again and again between his wine-selling and pamphlet-printing jobs. He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He also worked as teazer, and later as flasher, at governmental factories – and was, I believe, more or less responsible for the remarkably ugly red-and-amber windows in the great public lavatory at rowdy but colorful Kalixhaven where the sailors are. He claimed to have improved the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d'alarme used by grape growers and orchardmen to scare the birds. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time. (note to Line 171)
In a letter of June 24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin says that Byron’s genius blednel (paled) with his youth and that there was no postepennost’ (graduality) in Byron:
Я ждал отъезда Трубецкого, чтоб написать тебе спустя рукава. Начну с того, что всего ближе касается до меня. Я поссорился с Воронцовым и завел с ним полемическую переписку, которая кончилась с моей стороны просьбою в отставку. Но чем кончат власти, еще неизвестно. Тиверий рад будет придраться; а европейская молва о европейском образе мыслей графа Сеяна обратит всю ответственность на меня. Покамест не говори об этом никому. А у меня голова кругом идет. По твоим письмам к княгине Вере вижу, что и тебе и кюхельбекерно и тошно; тебе грустно по Байроне, а я так рад его смерти, как высокому предмету для поэзии. Гений Байрона бледнел с его молодостию. В своих трагедиях, не выключая и Каина, он уже не тот пламенный демон, который создал «Гяура» и «Чильд Гарольда». Первые две песни «Дон-Жуана» выше следующих. Его поэзия видимо изменялась. Он весь создан был навыворот; постепенности в нем не было, он вдруг созрел и возмужал — пропел и замолчал; и первые звуки его уже ему не возвратились — после 4-ой песни Child-Harold Байрона мы не слыхали, а писал какой-то другой поэт с высоким человеческим талантом. Твоя мысль воспеть его смерть в 5-ой песне его Героя прелестна — но мне не по силам — Греция мне огадила. О судьбе греков позволено рассуждать, как о судьбе моей братьи негров, можно тем и другим желать освобождения от рабства нестерпимого. Но чтобы все просвещенные европейские народы бредили Грецией — это непростительное ребячество. Иезуиты натолковали нам о Фемистокле и Перикле, а мы вообразили, что пакостный народ, состоящий из разбойников и лавочников, есть законнорожденный их потомок и наследник их школьной славы. Ты скажешь, что я переменил свое мнение. Приехал бы ты к нам в Одессу посмотреть на соотечественников Мильтиада и ты бы со мною согласился. Да посмотри, что писал тому несколько лет сам Байрон в замечаниях на Child Harold — там, где он ссылается на мнение Фовеля, французского консула, помнится, в Смирне.— Обещаю тебе, однако ж, вирши на смерть его превосходительства.
Shade's poem is divided into four cantos. According to Pushkin, after the fourth Canto of Childe Harold we did not hear Byron, but some other poet with a lofty human gift wrote. In his tragedies Byron is not that fiery demon anymore who created The Giaour and Childe Harold. “The first two Cantos of Don Juan are artistically superior to the next.” In Chapter Seven (XXII: 5) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions “the singer of the Giaour and Juan:”
Хотя мы знаем, что Евгений
Издавна чтенье разлюбил,
Однако ж несколько творений
Он из опалы исключил:
Певца Гяура и Жуана
Да с ним ещё два-три романа,
В которых отразился век
И современный человек
Изображён довольно верно
С его безнравственной душой,
Себялюбивой и сухой,
Мечтанью преданной безмерно,
С его озлобленным умом,
Кипящим в действии пустом.
Although we know that Eugene
had long ceased to like reading,
still, several works
he had exempted from disgrace:
the singer of the Giaour and Juan
and, with him, also two or three novels
in which the epoch is reflected
and modern man rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul, selfish and dry,
to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action.
In Chapter Three (XII: 14) of EO Pushkin mentions beznadyozhnyi egoizm (hopeless egotism) that Byron draped in woebegone romanticism:
А нынче все умы в тумане,
Мораль на нас наводит сон,
Порок любезен — и в романе,
И там уж торжествует он.
Британской музы небылицы
Тревожат сон отроковицы,
И стал теперь ее кумир
Или задумчивый Вампир,
Или Мельмот, бродяга мрачный,
Иль Вечный жид, или Корсар,
Или таинственный Сбогар.19
Лорд Байрон прихотью удачной
Облек в унылый романтизм
И безнадежный эгоизм.
But nowadays all minds are in a mist,
a moral brings upon us somnolence,
vice is attractive in a novel, too,
and there, at least, it triumphs.
The fables of the British Muse
disturb the young girl's sleep,
and now her idol has become
either the pensive Vampyre,
or Melmoth, gloomy vagabond,
or the Wandering Jew, or the Corsair,
or the mysterious Sbogar.19
Lord Byron, by an opportune caprice,
in woebegone romanticism
draped even hopeless egotism.
19. The Vampyre, a short novel incorrectly attributed to Lord Byron; Melmoth, a work of genius, by Maturin; Jean Sbogar, the well-known romance by Charles Nodier. (Pushkin's note)
In one of the next stanzas of EO (Three: XXII: 10) Pushkin mentions Hell's inscription (in Dante's Inferno), Ostav' nadezhdu navsegda! (“Abandon hope for evermore!”):
Я знал красавиц недоступных,
Холодных, чистых, как зима,
Неумолимых, неподкупных,
Непостижимых для ума;
Дивился я их спеси модной,
Их добродетели природной,
И, признаюсь, от них бежал,
И, мнится, с ужасом читал
Над их бровями надпись ада:
Оставь надежду навсегда.20
Внушать любовь для них беда,
Пугать людей для них отрада.
Быть может, на брегах Невы
Подобных дам видали вы.
I've known belles inaccessible,
cold, winter-chaste;
inexorable, incorruptible,
unfathomable by the mind;
I marveled at their modish morgue,
at their natural virtue,
and, to be frank, I fled from them,
and I, meseems, with terror read
above their eyebrows Hell's inscription:
“Abandon hope for evermore!”20
To inspire love is bale for them,
to frighten folks for them is joyance.
Perhaps, on the banks of the Neva
similar ladies you have seen.
20. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. Our modest author has translated only the first part of the famous verse. (Pushkin's note)
The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. 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, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant," etc.), will be full again.