According to 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), in a conversation with him Shade complained that Russian intellectuals lack all sense of humor:
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 VN's novel Pnin (1957) Pnin tells Joan Clements (Pnin's landlady who tries to cheer her tenant up and shows him a cartoon with a mermaid) that he cannot understand American humour even when he is happy:
She sat down next to him and opened one of the magazines she had bought.
'We are going to look at some pictures, Timofey.'
'I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.'
'You just relax, Timofey, and I'll do the explaining. Oh, look--I like this one. Oh, this is very clever. We have here a combination of two ideas--the Desert Island and the Girl in the Puff. Now, look, Timofey--please'--he reluctantly put on his reading glasses--'this is a desert island with a lone palm, and this is a bit of broken raft, and this is a shipwrecked mariner, and this is the ship's cat he saved, and this here, on that rock--'
'Impossible,' said Pnin. 'So small island, moreover with palm, cannot exist in such big sea.'
'Well, it exists here.'
'Impossible isolation,' said Pnin.
'Yes, but--Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic.'
'I have reservations,' said Pnin. 'First of all, logic herself--'
'All right, I'm afraid we are wandering away from our little joke. Now, you look at the picture. So this is the mariner, and this is the pussy, and this is a rather wistful mermaid hanging around, and now look at the puffs right above the sailor and the pussy.'
'Atomic bomb explosion,' said Pnin sadly.
'No, not at all. It is something much funnier. You see, these round puffs are supposed to be the projections of their thoughts. And now at last we are getting to the amusing part. The sailor imagines the mermaid as having a pair of legs, and the cat imagines her as all fish.'
'Lermontov,' said Pnin, lifting two fingers, 'has expressed everything about mermaids in only two poems. I cannot understand American humour even when I am happy, and I must say--' He removed his glasses with trembling hands, elbowed the magazine aside, and, resting his head on his arm, broke into muffled sobs. (Chapter Two, 7)
Pnin has in mind Lermontov's poems Rusalka ("The Mermaid," 1832) and Morskaya tsarevna ("The Sea Princess," 1841). At the beginning of his essay Yumor Lermontova ("Lermontov's Humour") included in Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy (“The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909) Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909) compares Lermontov to Tolstoy:
Мечта Лермонтова не повторилась. Она так и осталась недосказанной. Может быть, даже бесследной, по крайней мере, поскольку Толстой, единственный, кто бы ещё мог её понять, рано пошёл своим и совсем другим путём.
Lermontov's dream never repeated. It remained unspoken. Perhaps, it did not even leave a trace, because Tolstoy, the only one who could understand it, too early went his own and quite different path.
In his essay Ob Annenskom (“On Annenski,” 1921) Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Ilyich Golovin (the main character in Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886) and points out that Annenski regarded his penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”) as a translation of Greek Outis, the pseudonym under which Odysseus conceals his identity from Polyphemus (the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey):
Чего не додумал Иван Ильич, то знал Анненский. Знал, что никаким директорством, никаким бытом и даже никакой филологией от смерти по-настоящему не загородиться. Она уничтожит и директора, и барина, и филолога. Только над истинным его "я", над тем, что отображается в "чувствах и мыслях", над личностью -- у неё как будто нет власти. И он находил реальное, осязаемое отражение и утверждение личности -- в поэзии. Тот, чьё лицо он видел, подходя к зеркалу, был директор гимназии, смертный никто. Тот, чьё лицо отражалось в поэзии, был бессмертный некто. Ник. Т-о -- никто -- есть безличный действительный статский советник, которым, как видимой оболочкой, прикрыт невидимый некто. Этот свой псевдоним, под которым он печатал стихи, Анненский рассматривал как перевод греческого "утис", никто, -- того самого псевдонима, под которым Одиссей скрыл от циклопа Полифема своё истинное имя, свою подлинную личность, своего некто. Поэзия была для него заклятием страшного Полифема -- смерти. Но психологически это не только не мешало, а даже способствовало тому, чтобы его вдохновительницей, его Музой была смерть.
According to Hodasevich, Annenski’s Muse was death. A few moments before Shade’s death Kinbote asks the poet if the muse has been kind to him:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head: "Exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here (indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth) practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God." (note to Line 991)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). 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") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski (a writer whom Shade listed among Russian humorists) and a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o:
Не я, и не он, и не ты,
И то же, что я, и не то же:
Так были мы где-то похожи,
Что наши смешались черты.
В сомненьи кипит ещё спор,
Но, слиты незримой четою,
Одной мы живём и мечтою,
Мечтою разлуки с тех пор.
Горячешный сон волновал
Обманом вторых очертаний,
Но чем я глядел неустанней,
Тем ярче себя ж узнавал.
Лишь полога ночи немой
Порой отразит колыханье
Моё и другое дыханье,
Бой сердца и мой и не мой…
И в мутном круженьи годин
Всё чаще вопрос меня мучит:
Когда наконец нас разлучат,
Каким же я буду один?
Not I, and not he, and not you,
Both what I am, and what I am not:
We were so alike somewhere
That our features got mixed.
……..
And, in the turbid whirling of years,
The question torments me ever more often:
When we will be separated at last,
What kind of person I will be alone?
Dvoynik (the double) rhymes with taynik (a hiding place), a word used by Annenski in his last poem Dal'nie ruki ("Distant Hands," 1909) included in Kiparisovyi larets ("The Cypress Box," 1910), a posthumous collection of poetry:
Как мускус мучительный мумий,
Как душный тайник тубероз,
И я только стеблем раздумий
К пугающей сказке прирос…
In his Index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions taynik and potaynik where the Zemblan crown jewels are hidden:
Crown Jewels, 130, 681; see Hiding Place.
Hiding place, potaynik (q. v.)
Potaynik; taynik (q. v.).
Taynik. Russ., secret place, see Crown Jewels.
In his poem To Walter de la Mare (the author of several poems about mermaids) T. S. Eliot mentions a desert island with a sandy cove (a hiding place, but very dangerous ground):
The children who explored the brook and found
A desert island with a sandy cove
(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,
For here the water buffalo may rove,
The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound
In the dark jungle of a mango grove,
And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree -
The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)
Recount their exploits at the nursery tea
And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn
Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,
At not quite time for bed?…
Or when the lawn
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;
When the familiar is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we yet have to learn,
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;
When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,
Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range
At witches' sabbath of the maiden aunts;
When the nocturnal traveller can arouse
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance
An empty face peers from an empty house;
By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?
By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practised with natural ease;
By the delicate, invisible web you wove -
The inexplicable mystery of sound.
In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote points out that T. S. Eliot is toilest in reverse. Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) is nikto b ('none would,' a phrase used by Mozart in Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri, 1830) backwards. In his essay Problema Gamleta (“The Problem of Hamlet”) included in The Second Book of Reflections Annenski mentions Pushkin's Mozart and says that Hamlet is not Salieri:
Видите ли: зависть художника не совсем то, что наша...
Для художника это - болезненное сознание своей ограниченности и желание делать творческую жизнь свою как можно полнее. Истинный художник и завистлив и жаден... я слышу возражение - пушкинский Моцарт. - Да! Но ведь Гамлет не Сальери. Моцарта же Пушкин, как известно, изменил: его короткая жизнь была отнюдь не жизнью праздного гуляки, а сплошным творческим горением. Труд его был громаден, не результат труда, а именно труд.
Hamlet and His Problems (1919) is an essay by T. S. Eliot (according to Eliot, Hamlet is "most certainly an artistic failure"). Timofey Pnin and a so-called Pink (as Kinbote calls a professor of physics who participates in a conversation at the Faculty Club) bring to mind Timothy and a nosegay of pinks in Walter de la Mare's poem Bunches of Grapes:
"BUNCHES of grapes," says Timothy;
"Pomegranates pink," says Elaine;
"A junket of cream and a cranberry tart
For me," says Jane.
"Love-in-a-mist," says Timothy;
"Primroses pale," says Elaine;
"A nosegay of pinks and mignonette
For me," says Jane.
"Chariots of gold," says Timothy;
"Silvery wings," says Elaine;
"A bumpity ride in a wagon of hay
For me," says Jane.
Shade's murderer, Gradus contends that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
Martin Gradus (the father of Shade's murderer) and "a regular martinet in regard to his underlings" (as Kinbote calls Pnin) bring to mind a copy of Jack London's novel Martin Eden (1909) that Pnin wants to give Victor Wind (the son of Eric Wind and Liza Bogolepov):
On the eve of the day on which Victor had planned to arrive, Pnin entered a sport shop in Waindell's Main Street and asked for a football. The request was unseasonable but he was offered one.
'No, no,' said Pnin, 'I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!'
And with wrists and palms he outlined a portable world. It was the same gesture he used in class when speaking of the 'harmonical wholeness' of Pushkin.
The salesman lifted a finger and silently fetched a soccer ball.
'Yes, this I will buy,' said Pnin with dignified satisfaction.
Carrying his purchase, wrapped in brown paper and Scotch-taped, he entered a bookstore and asked for Martin Eden.
'Eden, Eden, Eden,' the tall dark lady in charge repeated rapidly, rubbing her forehead. 'Let me see, you don't mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?'
'I mean,' said Pnin, 'a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London.'
'London, London, London,' said the woman, holding her temples.
Pipe in hand, her husband, a Mr Tweed, who wrote topical poetry, came to the rescue. After some search he brought from the dusty depths of his not very prosperous store an old edition of The Son of the Wolf.
'I'm afraid,' he said, 'that's all we have by this author.'
'Strange!' said Pnin. 'The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody--little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates--everybody read and re-read him. This is not his best book but O. K., O. K., I will take it.'
On coming home to the house where he roomed that year, Professor Pnin laid out the ball and the book on the desk of the guest room upstairs. Cocking his head, he surveyed these gifts. The ball did not look nice in its shapeless wrapping; he disrobed it. Now it showed its handsome leather. The room was tidy and cosy. A schoolboy should like that picture of a snowball knocking off a professor's top hat. The bed had just been made by the cleaning woman; old Bill Sheppard, the landlord, had come up from the first floor and had gravely screwed a new bulb into the desk lamp. A warm humid wind pressed through the open window, and one could hear the noise of an exuberant creek that ran below. It was going to rain. Pnin closed the window.
In his own room, on the same floor, he found a note. A laconic wire from Victor had been transmitted by phone: it said that he would be exactly twenty-four hours late. (Chapter Four, 6)
Martin reminds one of Martynov, Lermontov's adversary in his fatal duel (July 15, 1841). Waindell College in Pnin makes one think of Sybil Irondell (the maiden name of the poet's wife). According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), the surname Irondell comes from hirondelle (swallow in French). Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (who married Maria Botkin in August 1857). Sybil Shade 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. In his poem Net, ne tebya tak pylko ya lyublyu… (“No, it is not you I love so ardently…” 1841) Lermontov addresses a young woman and says that he loves in her a past suffering and his perished youth:
Нет, не тебя так пылко я люблю,
Не для меня красы твоей блистанье;
Люблю в тебе я прошлое страданье
И молодость погибшую мою.
Когда порой я на тебя смотрю,
В твои глаза вникая долгим взором:
Таинственным я занят разговором,
Но не с тобой я сердцем говорю.
Я говорю с подругой юных дней,
В твоих чертах ищу черты другие,
В устах живых уста давно немые,
В глазах огонь угаснувших очей.
No, it is not you I love so ardently,
And the splendor of your beauty is not for me:
I love in you a past suffering
And my perished youth.
When at times I look at you,
Penetrating your eyes with a long stare:
Secretly, I am occupied in conversation,
But it is not with you that I speak with my heart.
I converse with a friend of my youth;
In your features I seek the features of another;
In your living lips I seek lips long mute,
In your eyes I seek the fire of extinguished eyes.
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) that ends in the line Ya - ili Bog - ili nikto (Myself - or God - or none at all) Lermontov compares his soul to the ocean in which nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) lies:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я — или Бог — или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Gloomy ocean, who can
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) 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. There is nadezhda (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.