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)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack and mentions Mars (the fourth planet of the Solar System):
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), during the reign of Charles the Beloved Mars (the ancient Roman god of war) never marred the record:
That King's reign (1936-1958) will be remembered by at least a few discerning historians as a peaceful and elegant one. Owing to a fluid system of judicious alliances, Mars in his time never marred the record. Internally, until corruption, betrayal, and Extremism penetrated it, the People's Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council. Harmony, indeed, was the reign's password. The polite arts and pure sciences flourished. Technicology, applied physics, industrial chemistry and so forth were suffered to thrive. A small skyscraper of ultramarine glass was steadily rising in Onhava. The climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer, and the rich a little poorer (in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote's Law). Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "back-draucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren. Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content - even the political mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented Sosed (Zembla's gigantic neighbor). But let us not pursue this tiresome subject. (note to Line 12)
A contented Sosed (Zembla's gigantic neighbor) is the Soviet Russia. On the other hand, Na zlo nadmennomu sosedu (To spite the arrogant neighbor) is a line in the Prologue to Pushkin's poem Mednyi vsadnik ("The Bronze Horseman," 1833):
И думал он:
Отсель грозить мы будем шведу,
Здесь будет город заложен
На зло надменному соседу.
And he [Peter I] thought:
"It’s here we’ll threaten the Swedes from,
where we’ll set our city’s first stones
to spite the arrogant neighbor."
There are Mars and strand in Marstrand, an island and sea resort in SW Sweden. The yearly Marstrand Regatta (a sailing event held in July) brings to mind a regatta mentioned by Kinbote when he describes his rented house:
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)
Marstrand brings to mind the narstran, a hellish hall in a Zemblan legend:
They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? (note to Lines 433-434)
Narstran seems to combine når (Norwegian for when) with strana (Russ., land, country). Når vi døde vågner (When We Dead Awaken, 1899) is the last play of Henrik Ibsen (a Norwegian playwright, 1828-1906). In Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (1867) von Eberkopf mentions his gigantic Fatherland (Germany):
PEER (after a short silence, leaning on a chair and assuming a dignified mien). Come, gentlemen, I think it best we part before the last remains of friendship melt away like smoke. Who nothing owns will lightly risk it. When in the world one scarce commands the strip of earth one’s shadow covers, one’s born to serve as food for powder. But when a man stands safely landed, as I do, then his stake is greater. Go you to Hellas. I will put you ashore, and arm you gratis too. The more you eke the flames of strife, the better will it serve my purpose. Strike home for freedom and for right! Fight! storm! make hell hot for the Turks;—and gloriously end your days upon the Janissaries’ lances.—But I—excuse me—(Slaps his pocket.) I have cash, and am myself, Sir Peter Gynt.
(Puts up his sunshade, and goes into the grove, where the hammocks are partly visible.)
TRUMPETERSTRALE. The swinish cur!
MONSIEUR BALLON. No taste for glory—!
MR. COTTON. Oh, glory’s neither here nor there; but think of the enormous profits we’d reap if Greece should free herself.
MONSIEUR BALLON. I saw myself a conqueror, by lovely Grecian maids encircled.
TRUMPETERSTRALE. Grasped in my Swedish hands, I saw the great, heroic spur-strap-buckles!
VON EBERKOPF. I my gigantic Fatherland’s culture saw spread o’er earth and sea—! (Act Four, scene 1)
The surname Eberkopf means in German "boar's head." Peer Gynt's goal is to be Emperor:
PEER. Well, first of all, I want to travel. You see, that’s why I shipped you four, to keep me company, at Gibraltar. I needed such a dancing-choir of friends around my gold-calf-altar—
VON EBERKOPF. Most witty!
MR. COTTON. Well, but no one hoists his sails for nothing but the sailing. Beyond all doubt, you have a goal; and that is—?
PEER. To be Emperor.
ALL FOUR. What?
PEER (nodding). Emperor!
THE FOUR. Where?
PEER. O’er all the world.
MONSIEUR BALLON. But how, friend—?
PEER. By the might of gold! That plan is not at all a new one; it’s been the soul of my career. Even as a boy, I swept in dreams far o’er the ocean on a cloud. I soared with train and golden scabbard,—and flopped down on all-fours again. But still my goal, my friends, stood fast.—There is a text, or else a saying, somewhere, I don’t remember where, that if you gained the whole wide world, but lost yourself, your gain were but a garland on a cloven skull. That is the text—or something like it; and that remark is sober truth.
VON EBERKOPF. But what then is the Gyntish Self?
PEER. The world behind my forehead’s arch, in force of which I’m no one else than I, no more than God’s the Devil.
TRUMPETERSTRALE. I understand now where you’re aiming!
MONSIEUR BALLON. Thinker sublime!
VON EBERKOPF. Exalted poet!
PEER (more and more elevated). The Gyntish Self—it is the host of wishes, appetites, desires,—the Gyntish Self, it is the sea of fancies, exigencies, claims, all that, in short, makes my breast heave, and whereby I, as I, exist. But as our Lord requires the clay to constitute him God o’ the world, so I, too, stand in need of gold, if I as Emperor would figure. (ibid.)
According to Kinbote, King Alfin's question "What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot:
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). King Alfin's absent-mindedness knew no bounds. He was a wretched linguist, having at his disposal only a few phrases of French and Danish, but every time he had to make a speech to his subjects - to a group of gaping Zemblan yokels in some remote valley where he had crash-landed - some uncontrollable switch went into action in his mind, and he reverted to those phrases, flavoring them for topical sense with a little Latin. Most of the anecdotes relating to his naïve fits of abstraction are too silly and indecent to sully these pages; but one of them that I do not think especially funny induced such guffaws from Shade (and returned to me, via the Common Room, with such obscene accretions) that I feel inclined to give it here as a sample (and as a corrective). One summer before the first world war, when the emperor of a great foreign realm (I realize how few there are to choose from) was paying an extremely unusual and flattering visit to our little hard country, my father took him and a young Zemblan interpreter (whose sex I leave open) in a newly purchased custom-built car on a jaunt in the countryside. As usual, King Alfin traveled without a vestige of escort, and this, and his brisk driving, seemed to trouble his guest. On their way back, some twenty miles from Onhava, King Alfin decided to stop for repairs. While he tinkered with the motor, the emperor and the interpreter sought the shade of some pines by the highway, and only when King Alfin was back in Onhava, did he gradually realize from a reiteration of rather frantic questions that he had left somebody behind ("What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot). Generally speaking, in respect of any of my contributions (or what I thought to be contributions) I repeatedly enjoined my poet to record them in writing, by all means, but not to spread them in idle speech; even poets, however, are human. (note to Line 71)
prostranstvo + vesi = vopros + stranstvie
prostranstvo - space
vesi - obs., villages
vopros - question
stranstvie - journey