In a conversation at the Faculty Club 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) tells Professor Pardon that he is confusing him with some refugee from Nova Zembla:
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla” [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"]. (note to Line 894)
Prized for its gorgeous flowers and extreme cold hardiness, Rhododendron 'Nova Zembla' is a vigorous small evergreen shrub that produces large rounded trusses of brilliant red flowers. Rhododendron (1856) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (the poet who married Maria Botkin in 1857):
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Пышный цвет оранжереи,
Как хорош и как наряден
Ты в руках вертлявой феи!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Но в руках вертлявой феи
Хороши не только розы,
Хороши большие томы
И поэзии и прозы!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Хороши и все нападки
На поэтов, объявленья,
Хороши и опечатки,
Хороши и прибавленья!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Horoshi i opechatki (the misprints, too, are good), a line in the third stanza of Fet's poem, bring to mind the mountain-to-fountain misprint in Canto Three of Shade's poem and the English crown-crow-cow vs. the Russian korona-vorona-korova series in Kinbote's commentary.
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen quotes Aqua’s words to her doctor “I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago:”
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether.
But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.
my lad, my pretty, etc.: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.
ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
Aqua’s “pudendron” seems to blend pudenda (external genital organs, especially of a woman) with rhododendron (the Hairy Alpine Rose in Marina's herbarium is the plant Rhododendron hirsutum). "Through the gradual, gradual shade" brings to mind Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) and John Shade (the poet in Pale Fire). In 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette listen to a romance on Fet's poem Siyala noch' ("The Night was Radiant," 1869):
Here Van stood up again, as Ada, black fan in elegant motion, came back followed by a thousand eyes, while the opening bars of a romance (on Fet’s glorious Siyala noch’) started to run over the keys (and the bass coughed à la russe into his fist before starting).
A radiant night, a moon-filled garden. Beams
Lay at our feet. The drawing room, unlit;
Wide open, the grand piano; and our hearts
Throbbed to your song, as throbbed the strings in it...
Then Banoffsky launched into Glinka’s great amphibrachs (Mihail Ivanovich had been a summer guest at Ardis when their uncle was still alive — a green bench existed where the composer was said to have sat under the pseudoacacias especially often, mopping his ample brow):
Subside, agitation of passion!
Then other singers took over with sadder and sadder ballads — ‘The tender kisses are forgotten,’ and ‘The time was early in the spring, the grass was barely sprouting,’ and ‘Many songs have I heard in the land of my birth: Some in sorrow were sung, some in gladness,’ and the spuriously populist
There’s a crag on the Ross, overgrown with wild moss
On all sides, from the lowest to highest…
and a series of viatic plaints such as the more modestly anapestic:
In a monotone tinkles the yoke-bell,
And the roadway is dusting a bit…
And that obscurely corrupted soldier dit of singular genius
Nadezhda, I shall then be back
When the true batch outboys the riot…
and Turgenev’s only memorable lyrical poem beginning
Morning so nebulous, morning gray-drowning,
Reaped fields so sorrowful under snow coverings
and naturally the celebrated pseudo-gipsy guitar piece by Apollon Grigoriev (another friend of Uncle Ivan’s)
O you, at least, do talk to me,
My seven-stringed companion,
Such yearning ache invades my soul,
Such moonlight fills the canyon! (2.8)
Nadezhda, ya vernus' togda (Speranza, I’ll be coming back) is the first line of Bulat Okudzhava's Sentimental'nyi marsh ("A Sentimental Ballad," 1957). The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter who drowned in Lake Omega) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus. Nadezhda means “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.
Fet’s poem Izmuchen zhizn’yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy… (“By life tormented, and by cunning hope…” 1864) has the epigraph from Schopenhauer:
Die Gleichmäβigkeit des Laufes der Zeit it in allen Köpfen beweist mehr, als irgend etwas, das wir alle in denselben Traum versenkt sind, ja das es ein Wesen ist, welches ihn träumt.
The evenness of the passage of time in all heads demonstrates more clearly than anything else that we all are immersed in the same dream and that in fact it is one Being that dreams it.
The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus are immersed in the same dream and one Being that dreams it is Botkin. Shade borrowed the title of his poem, Pale Fire, from Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens. In Moi vospominaniya (“My Reminiscences,” 1890) Afanasiy Fet speaks of the three Tolstoy brothers (Nikolay, Sergey and Leo) and mentions skhodstvo s Timonom Afinskim (a resemblance to Timon of Athens):
...я убеждён, что основной тип всех трёх братьев Толстых тождествен, как тождествен тип кленовых листьев, невзирая на всё разнообразие их очертаний. И если бы я задался развить эту мысль, то показал бы, в какой степени у всех трёх братьев присуще то страстное увлечение, без которого в одном из них не мог бы проявиться поэт Л. Толстой. Разница их отношений к жизни состоит в том, с чем каждый из них уходил от неудавшейся мечты. Николай охлаждал свои порывы скептической насмешкой, Лев отходил от несбывшейся мечты с безмолвным укором, а Сергей - с болезненной мизантропией. Чем больше у подобных характеров первоначальной любви, тем сильнее хотя на время сходство с Тимоном Афинским.
In the same conversation at the Faculty Club Kinbote says that the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya (earth, land), but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers." According to Fet, the basic type of all three brothers Tolstoy is identical, just as the type of maple leaves, despite all variety of their outlines, is identical. Describing the campus of Wordsmith University, Kinbote mentions the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare:
After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction through a beautifully sprayed and irrigated residential section with variously graded lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield; the other continues to the campus. Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnificent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quadrangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, Spencer House and its lily pond, the Chapel, New Lecture Hall, the Library, the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices (to be called from now on Shade Hall), the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (note to Lines 47-48)
'William Shakespeare' is an English rose. The Wars of the Roses (1455–85) is a series of dynastic civil wars between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne. The wars were named for the emblems of the two houses, the white rose of York and the red of Lancaster. Seven years after the end of the Wars of the Roses, in 1492, Columbus discovered America. Kinbote's interlocutor in a conversation at the Faculty Club, Professor Pardon is a specialist in the American History.
In his Commentary Kinbote several times mentions the Black Rose Paladins:
This tremendous company consisted of two main groups: ignorant, ferocious-looking but really quite harmless conscripts from Thule, and taciturn, very polite Extremists from the famous Glass Factory where the revolution had flickered first. One can now reveal (since he is safe in Paris) that this contingent included at least one heroic royalist so virtuosically disguised that he made his unsuspecting fellow guards look like mediocre imitators. Actually Odon happened to be one of the most prominent actors in Zembla and was winning applause in the Royal Theater on his off-duty nights. Through him the King kept in touch with numerous adherents, young nobles, artists, college athletes, gamblers, Black Rose Paladins, members of fencing clubs, and other men of fashion and adventure. Rumors rumbled. It was said that the captive would soon be tried by a special court; but it was also said that he would be shot while ostensibly being transported to another place of confinement. Although flight was discussed daily, the schemes of the conspirators had more aesthetic than practical value. A powerful motorboat had been prepared in a coastal cave near Blawick (Blue Cove) in western Zembla, beyond the chain of tall mountains which separated the city from the sea; the imagined reflections of the trembling transparent water on the rock wall and boat were tantalizing, but none of the schemers could suggest how the King could escape from his castle and pass safely through its fortifications. (note to Line 130)
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title - the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?
Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. (note to Line 1000)
In his poem V restorane ("At the Restaurant," 1910) Alexander Blok mentions a black rose in a goblet of Ay (champagne), golden as the sky:
Я сидел у окна в переполненном зале.
Где-то пели смычки о любви.
Я послал тебе чёрную розу в бокале
Золотого, как нёбо, аи.
I sat by the window in a crowded room.
Distant bows were singing of love.
I sent you a black rose in a goblet
Of Ay, golden as the sky.
In 'Ursus' Van, Ada and Lucette drink the Ay:
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.
Ne zatem velichal ya sebya paladinom… (“Not for that I called myself a paladin,” 1908) is a poem by Alexander Blok:
Не затем величал я себя паладином,
Не затем ведь и ты приходила ко мне,
Чтобы только рыдать над потухшим камином,
Чтобы только плясать при умершем огне!
Или счастие вправду неверно и быстро?
Или вправду я слаб уже, болен и стар?
Нет! В золе ещё бродят последние искры,
Есть огонь, чтобы вспыхнул пожар!