In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood fit and says that he felt distributed through space and time: one foot upon a mountaintop, one hand under the pebbles of a panting strand, one ear in Italy, one eye in Spain:
A thread of subtle pain,
Tugged at by playful death, released again,
But always present, ran through me. One day,
When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy -
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy -
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone. (ll. 139-156)
Kinbote's note to Line 149, in which Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) describes the king's escape from Zembla, is headed by the line's beginning: "one foot upon a mountain" (sic). One foot upon a mountain makes one think of Nogoyu tvyordoy stat' pri more (Put down a firm foot by the sea), a line in the Prologue to Pushkin's poem Mednyi vsadnik ("The Bronze Horseman," 1833):
На берегу пустынных волн
Стоял он, дум великих полн,
И вдаль глядел. Пред ним широко
Река неслася; бедный чёлн
По ней стремился одиноко.
По мшистым, топким берегам
Чернели избы здесь и там,
Приют убогого чухонца;
И лес, неведомый лучам
В тумане спрятанного солнца,
Кругом шумел. И думал он:
Отсель грозить мы будем шведу,
Здесь будет город заложен
На зло надменному соседу.
Природой здесь нам суждено
В Европу прорубить окно,1
Ногою твердой стать при море.
Сюда по новым им волнам
Все флаги в гости будут к нам,
И запируем на просторе.
On the banks of a wilderness of water
one man stood, brimming with thoughts,
as his eyes advanced to the horizon.
The breadth of the river surged forward,
and a single, ramshackle canoe sped by.
Along the moss-ruled, swampy shores
he saw the dark and scattered huts
of the godforsaken Finns;
and the forest, foreign to the sun,
sounded around him.
And he thought:
It’s here we’ll threaten the Swedes from,
where we’ll set our city’s first stones
to spite our power-drunk neighbours.
We’ll make a slave of nature,
hack a window through to Europe
and by this sea put down firm feet.
All flags will find their way
across these waves, to our feast
out here in these wastes.
(tr. Alistair Noon)
1. Algarotti says somewhere: «Pétersbourg est la fenêtre par laquelle la Russie regarde en Europe». (Pushkin's note)
Geographically, the Zemblan peninsula seems to correspond to Zemlandskiy poluostrov, the Russian name of Samland (or Sambia) Peninsula (now Kaliningrad Peninsula) northwest of Kaliningrad, on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Kaliningrad's old name, Königsberg means in German king's mountain. Immanuel Kant's home city, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946, after the World War II. At the end of his long note to Line 149 Kinbote mentions a Russian tourist and his faded wife who says that war is an awful thing:
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.
In Pushkin's Bronze Horseman poor Eugene goes mad after the disastrous Neva flood of 1824 in which his betrothed died and is pursued by the ghost of Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter I. Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, Kinbote compares himself to a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava (the capital of Zembla):
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life.
One of the bullets that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart. His presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my balance, and, simultaneously, to complete the farce of fate, my gardener's spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow on the pate, felling him and sending his weapon flying from his grasp. Our savior retrieved it and helped me to my feet. My coccyx and right wrist hurt badly but the poem was safe. John, though, lay prone on the ground, with a red spot on his white shirt. I still hoped he had not been killed. The madman sat on the porch step, dazedly nursing with bloody hands a bleeding head. Leaving the gardener to watch over him I hurried into the house and concealed the invaluable envelope under a heap of girls' galoshes, furred snowboots and white wellingtons heaped at the bottom of a closet, from which I exited as if it had been the end of the secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to this Arcady. I then dialed 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage. The poor poet had now been turned over and lay with open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening azure. The armed gardener and the battered killer were smoking side by side on the steps. The latter, either because he was in pain, or because he had decided to play a new role, ignored me as completely as if I were a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava; but the poem was safe.
The gardener took the glass of water I had placed near a flowerpot beside the porch steps and shared it with the killer, and then accompanied him to the basement toilet, and presently the police and the ambulance arrived, and the gunman gave his name as Jack Grey, no fixed abode, except the Institute for the Criminal Insane, ici, good dog, which of course should have been his permanent address all along, and which the police thought he had just escaped from.
"Come along, Jack, we'll put something on that head of yours," said a calm but purposeful cop stepping over the body, and then there was the awful moment when Dr. Sutton's daughter drove up with Sybil Shade. (note to Line 1000)
Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd) Vinogradus and Leningradus:
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was a member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages - not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
VN's home city, St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924 (a year marked by another large Neva flood). In the Prologue to The Bronze Horseman Pushkin says that one hundred years have passed since the city was founded by Peter I and calls St. Petersburg yunyi grad (the young city):
Прошло сто лет, и юный град,
Полнощных стран краса и диво,
Из тьмы лесов, из топи блат
Вознесся пышно, горделиво;
Где прежде финский рыболов,
Печальный пасынок природы,
Один у низких берегов
Бросал в неведомые воды
Свой ветхой невод, ныне там
По оживленным берегам
Громады стройные теснятся
Дворцов и башен; корабли
Толпой со всех концов земли
К богатым пристаням стремятся;
В гранит оделася Нева;
Мосты повисли над водами;
Темно-зелеными садами
Ее покрылись острова,
И перед младшею столицей
Померкла старая Москва,
Как перед новою царицей
Порфироносная вдова.
One hundred years have passed,
and the young city’s become the marvel
of the midnight regions, has risen
from the dark forests, from the sweat
of the marsh, luxuriant and confident.
Where nature’s neglected stepson,
the Finnish angler, sat by himself
on low banks to cast a fraying net
into unplumbed depths, now
the stern hulks of palaces and towers
crowd shores busy with life,
and ships from all ends of the earth
jostle towards rich jetties;
the Neva is draped in granite,
bridges raised across its waters,
islands wearing the warmth
of green gardens; in the glow
of a capital still in its youth,
old Moscow now seems
fainter, a purple-clad widow
stood before a new tsarina.
VN was born in 1899, one hundred years after Pushkin's birth.