In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead parents and mentions a preterist (one who collects cold nests):
I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests. (ll. 71-80)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and says that it missed what mostly interests the preterist:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato. I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber). You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state.
I love great mountains. From the iron gate
Of the ramshackle house we rented there
One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair,
That one could only fetch a sigh, as if
It might assist assimilation. Iph
Was a larvorium and a violet:
A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget. (ll. 501-524)
Preterism is a Christian eschatological view or belief that interprets some (partial preterism) or all (full preterism) prophecies of the Bible as events which have already been fulfilled in history. On the other hand, Shade's preterist seems to hint at Praeterita (1885–89), John Ruskin's autobiography and his last major work. Unfinished, shamelessly partial (it omits, for example, all mention of his marriage), and chronologically untrustworthy, it provides a subtle and memorable history of the growth of Ruskin’s distinctive sensibility. John Ruskin (1819-1900) is the author of The Eagle's Nest (1872), Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art. The first two lectures are entitled "The Function in Art of the Faculty Called by the Greeks σοφία" and "The Function in Science of the Faculty Called by the Greeks σοφία." Sophia is Greek for "wisdom." The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochka is Russian for "swallow." In Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873) Ruskin describes a swallow as follows: “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.” (Lecture II. The Swallow)
In Modern Painters (Vol. III, Part 4, Chap. 16) Ruskin says: ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.’ In her memoir essay Stevenson's Two Mothers (1913) Evelyn Blantyre Simpson (1855-1920) quotes Ruskin's words and cites R. L. Stevenson's poem (included in A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885) Happy Thought:
They taught him despite the many months his feeble health held him captive in the house, to see, for as Ruskin says, "Thousands can think for one who can see; to see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, all in one:"
"The world is so full of a number of things
I am sure we should all be happy as kings."
he wrote in after life, which was a sentiment he learned when he was a light-hearted ruler of the nursery realm, cheerful if autocratic.
Shade’s mad commentator, Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla (a distant northern land). In Canto One of his poem Shade says that, when he was a child, all colors made him happy, even gray:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves. (ll. 29-40)
In his essay An Apology for Idlers (1877) R. L. Stevenson (who studied law) says "I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime:"
4 If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truancy that you regret; you would rather cancel some lacklustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.
Hazel Shade (the poet's dead daughter) had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character:
She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force
Of character - as when she spent three nights
Investigating certain sounds and lights
In an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top,
Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."
She called you a didactic katydid.
She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll.344-356)
According to Kinbote, it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest:”
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet's expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips," and "T.S. Eliot," "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. (note to Lines 347-348)
Toilest is the archaic second-person singular simple present indicative of toil. In his Sonnet VII ("The strong man’s hand, the snow-cool head of age") R. L. Stevenson mentions the narrowing toil and strange fear:
The strong man’s hand, the snow-cool head of age,
The certain-footed sympathies of youth—
These, and that lofty passion after truth,
Hunger unsatisfied in priest or sage
Or the great men of former years, he needs
That not unworthily would dare to sing
(Hard task!) black care’s inevitable ring
Settling with years upon the heart that feeds
Incessantly on glory. Year by year
The narrowing toil grows closer round his feet;
With disenchanting touch rude-handed time
The unlovely web discloses, and strange fear
Leads him at last to eld’s inclement seat,
The bitter north of life—a frozen clime.
R. L. Stevenson is the author of New Arabian Nights (1882), a collection of short stories, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886). Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski, a writer whom, according to Kinbote, Shade listed among Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski twice uses the word gradus (degree). Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915):
A formidable thunderstorm had greeted Gradus in New York on the night of his arrival from Paris (Monday, July 20). The tropical rainfall flooded basements and subway tracks: Kaleidoscopic reflections played in the riverlike streets. Vinogradus had never seen such a display of lightning, neither had Jacques d'Argus - or Jack Grey, for that matter (let us not forget Jack Grey!). He put up in a third-class Broadway hotel and slept soundly, lying belly up on the bedclothes, in striped pajamas - the kind that Zemblans call rusker sirsusker ("Russian seersucker suit") - and retaining as usual his socks: not since July 11, when he had visited a Finnish bathhouse in Switzerland, had he seen his bare feet.
It was now July 21. At eight in the morning New York roused Gradus with a bang and a roar. As usual he started his blurry daily existence by blowing his nose. Then he took out of its nightbox of cardboard and inserted into his Comus-mask mouth an exceptionally large and fierce-looking set of teeth: the only bad flaw really in his otherwise harmless appearance. This done, he fished out of his briefcase two petit-beurres he had saved and an even older but still quite palatable small, softish, near-ham sandwich, vaguely associated with the train journey from Nice to Paris last Saturday night: not so much thriftiness on his part (the Shadows had advanced him a handsome sum, anyway), but an animal attachment to the habits of his frugal youth. After breakfasting in bed on these delicacies, he began preparations for the most important day in his life. He had shaved yesterday - that was out of the way. His trusty pajamas he stuffed not into his traveling bag but into the briefcase, dressed, unclipped from the inside of his coat a cameo-pink, interdentally clogged pocket comb, drew it through his bristly hair, carefully donned his trilby, washed both hands with the nice, modern liquid soap in the nice, modern, almost odorless lavatory across the corridor, micturated, rinsed one hand, and feeling clean and neat, went out for a stroll.
He had never visited New York before; but as many near-cretins, he was above novelty. On the previous night he had counted the mounting rows of windows in several skyscrapers, and now, after checking the height of a few more buildings, he felt that he knew all there was to know. He had a brimming cup and a half a saucerful of coffee at a crowded and wet counter and spent the rest of the smoke-blue morning moving from bench to bench and paper to paper in the Westside alleys of Central Park.
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vi nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smmashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkum ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder. (note to Line 949)
Rusker sirsusker and "just to annoy the Ruskers" bring to mind Ruskin. The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). 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.
In Slovo o polku Igoreve (“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”), an anonymous Russian epic of the 12th century, Buy Tur Vsevolod (Wild Bull Vsevolod) is Igor’s brother. A character in Slovo, Svyatoslav (Igor's father, the great Prince of Kiev) addresses Vsevolod, the great prince of Vladimir surnamed Bolshoe Gnezdo (the Big Nest):
Великый княже Всеволоде!
Не мыслию ти прелетети издалеча,
отня злата стола поблюсти?
Ты бо можеши Волгу веслы раскропити,
а Донъ шеломы выльяти!
Аже бы ты былъ,
то была бы чага по ногате,
а кощей по резане.
Ты бо можеши посуху
живыми шереширы стреляти -
удалыми сыны Глебовы.
Great prince Vsevolod!
Do you not think of flying here from afar
to safeguard the paternal golden throne?
For you can with your oars
scatter in drops the Volga,
and with your helmets
scoop dry the Don.
If you were here,
a female slave would fetch
one nogata,
and a male slave,
one rezana;
for you can shoot on land live bolts —
[these are] the bold sons of Gleb! (ll. 497-510)
Describing the battle of Poltava in Canto Three of his poem Poltava (1828), Pushkin mentions ptentsy gnezda Petrova (the fledglings of Peter's nest):
И он промчался пред полками,
Могущ и радостен, как бой.
Он поле пожирал очами.
За ним вослед неслись толпой
Сии птенцы гнезда Петрова -
В пременах жребия земного,
В трудах державства и войны
Его товарищи, сыны:
И Шереметев благородный,
И Брюс, и Боур, и Репнин,
И, счастья баловень безродный,
Полудержавный властелин.
He tore ahead of all the ranks,
Enraptured, mighty as the battle.
His eyes devoured the martial field.
The fledglings of Peter's nest
Surged after him, a loyal throng-
Through all the shifts of worldly fate,
In trials of policy and war,
These men, these comrades, were like sons:
The noble Sheremetev,
And Bryus, and Bour, and Repnin,
And, fortune's humble favorite,
The mighty half-sovereign.
(trans. Ivan Eubanks)
One of the fledglings of Peter's nest, Repnin is the ancestor of Ivan Pnin (1773-1805), a poet and president of The Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences and Arts (an illegitimate son of Prince Nikolay Repnin). Na smert' Pnina ("On the Death of Pnin," 1805) is a poem by Batyushkov, the author of Besedka muz ("The Bower of Muses," 1818) who went mad. Shade embowers his muse between Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth ("the two masters of the heroic couplet"):
Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith
The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade's. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows.
The "real" name of Samuel Shade (the poet's father), King Alfin (the father of Charles the Beloved) and Martin Gradus (the father of Shade's murderer) seems to be Pyotr Botkin. Professor Botkin's full name is thus Vsevolod Petrovich Botkin.