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 glimpsed a tall white fountain ["fountain" turns out to be a misprint of "mountain"] during her heart attack:
It was a story in a magazine
About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been
Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.
She told her interviewer of "The Land
Beyond the Veil" and the account contained
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained
Windows, and some soft music, and a choice
Of hymnal items, and her mother's voice;
But at the end she mentioned a remote
Landscape, a hazy orchard - and I quote:
"Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke
I glimpsed a tall white fountain - and awoke."
"The Land Beyond the Veil" of which Mrs. Z. told her interviewer brings to mind Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877), a book by Helena Blavatsky (a Russian and American mystic, 1831-1891, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society). In his book on Madame Blavatsky, Sovremennaya zhritsa Izidy ("The Modern Priestess of Isis," 1892), Vsevolod Solovyov (a Russian writer, 1849-1903) mentions Mrs. X., Mrs. Y. and Z. (a male person). The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus, seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Vsevolod Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevold 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. In a conversation with Shade Mrs. Z. mentioned Shade's poem about Mon Blon:
"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 his commentary Kinbote writes:
An image of Mont Blanc's "blue-shaded buttresses and sun-creamed domes" is fleetingly glimpsed through the cloud of that particular poem which I wish I could quote but do not have at hand. The "white mountain" of the lady's dream, caused by a misprint to tally with Shade's "white fountain," makes a thematic appearance here, blurred as it were by the lady's grotesque pronunciation. (note to Line 782)
In his essay Sud’ba Pushkina (“The Fate of Pushkin,” 1897) Vladimir Solovyov (Vsevolod's younger brother) quotes Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1828) and the lines from Byron’s Manfred (1816-17), in which Mont Blanc (“the monarch of mountains”) is mentioned:
Уже в сонете "Поэту" высота самосознания смешивается с высокомерием и требование бесстрастия - с обиженным и обидным выражением отчуждения.
Ты - царь, живи один!
Это взято, кажется, из Байрона: the solitude of kings. Но ведь одиночество царей состоит не в том, что они живут одни,- чего, собственно, и не бывает,- а в том, что они среди других имеют единственное положение. Это есть одиночество горных вершин.
Монблан - монарх соседних гор:
Они его венчали.
("Манфред" Байрона). (chapter VII)
Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crown'd him long ago (Manfred, Act One, scene 1).
A Russian philosopher and poet, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) is the author of a doctrine about the Divine Sophia. Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (a Russian poet, aka Shenshin, 1820-1892). In his poem Nilskaya delta (“The Nile Delta,” 1898) Vladimir Solovyov mentions Izida tryokhvenechnaya (three-crowned Isis):
Золотые, изумрудные,
Черноземные поля...
Не скупа ты, многотрудная,
Молчаливая земля!
Это лоно плодотворное,–
Сколько дремлющих веков,–
Принимало, всепокорное,
Семена и мертвецов.
Но не всё тобою взятое
Вверх несла ты каждый год:
Смертью древнею заклятое
Для себя весны всё ждет.
Не Изида трехвенечная
Ту весну им приведет,
А нетронутая, вечная
«Дева Радужных Ворот» *
* Гностический термин. (Примеч. Вл. Соловьева.)
In Vladimir Solovyov’s Tri razgovora o voyne, progresse i kontse vsemirnoy istorii, so vklyucheniem kratkoy povesti ob Antikhriste (Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History, Including a Short Tale of the Antichrist, 1900) one of the interlocutors (who espresses Leo Tolstoy's ideas) is Mr. Z.
Isis (Ancient Egyptian: Aset) was a premier goddess in Egyptian mythology, revered as the goddess of magic, motherhood, healing, and fertility. As the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, she was a central figure in the Osirian myth, resurrecting her husband and protecting her son, symbolizing the ideal mother and devoted wife.