According to Professor Hurley (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, the Head of the English Department at Wordsmith University), Samuel Shade (the poet's father) had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (Kinbote's note to Line 71)
A namesake of Samuel Johnson (an English writer, 1709-84), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain's real name), Samuel Butler (an English poet and satirist, 1613-80, the author of Hudibras, 1663) and another Samuel Butler (an English novelist and critic, 1835-19o2, best known for his satirical utopian novel Erewhon, 1872), Samuel Shade brings to mind Lemuel Gulliver, the fictional protagonist and narrator of Gulliver's Travels (1726), a novel by Jonathan Swift (an Anglo-Irish writer, 1667-1745). Gulliver supposedly studied for three years (c. 1675–1678) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, leaving to become an apprentice to an eminent London surgeon; after four years (c. 1678–1682), he left to study at the University of Leiden, a prominent Dutch university and medical school. He also educated himself in navigation and mathematics, leaving the university around 1685. At the beginning of his novel Besy (“The Possessed,” 1872) Dostoevski compares Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenski to Swift’s Gulliver:
Скажу прямо: Степан Трофимович постоянно играл между нами некоторую особую и, так сказать, гражданскую роль и любил эту роль до страсти, — так даже, что, мне кажется, без неё и прожить не мог. Не то чтоб уж я его приравнивал к актёру на театре: сохрани боже, тем более что сам его уважаю. Тут всё могло быть делом привычки, или, лучше сказать, беспрерывной и благородной склонности, с детских лет, к приятной мечте о красивой гражданской своей постановке. Он, например, чрезвычайно любил своё положение «гонимого» и, так сказать, «ссыльного». В этих обоих словечках есть своего рода классический блеск, соблазнивший его раз навсегда, и, возвышая его потом постепенно в собственном мнении, в продолжение столь многих лет, довёл его наконец до некоторого весьма высокого и приятного для самолюбия пьедестала. В одном сатирическом английском романе прошлого столетия некто Гулливер, возвратясь из страны лилипутов, где люди были всего в какие-нибудь два вершка росту, до того приучился считать себя между ними великаном, что, и ходя по улицам Лондона, невольно кричал прохожим и экипажам, чтоб они пред ним сворачивали и остерегались, чтоб он как-нибудь их не раздавил, воображая, что он всё еще великан, а они маленькие. За это смеялись над ним и бранили его, а грубые кучера даже стегали великана кнутьями; но справедливо ли? Чего не может сделать привычка? Привычка привела почти к тому же и Степана Трофимовича, но ещё в более невинном и безобидном виде, если можно так выразиться, потому что прекраснейший был человек.
Я даже так думаю, что под конец его все и везде позабыли; но уже никак ведь нельзя сказать, что и прежде совсем не знали. Бесспорно, что и он некоторое время принадлежал к знаменитой плеяде иных прославленных деятелей нашего прошедшего поколения, и одно время, — впрочем, всего только одну самую маленькую минуточку, — его имя многими тогдашними торопившимися людьми произносились чуть не наряду с именами Чаадаева, Белинского, Грановского и только что начинавшего тогда за границей Герцена. Но деятельность Степана Трофимовича окончилась почти в ту же минуту, как и началась, — так сказать от «вихря сошедшихся обстоятельств». И что же? Не только «вихря», но даже и «обстоятельств» совсем потом не оказалось, по крайней мере в этом случае. Я только теперь, на днях, узнал, к величайшему моему удивлению, но зато уже в совершенной достоверности, что Степан Трофимович проживал между нами, в нашей губернии, не только не в ссылке, как принято было у нас думать, но даже и под присмотром никогда не находился. Какова же после этого сила собственного воображения! Он искренно сам верил всю свою жизнь, что в некоторых сферах его постоянно опасаются, что шаги его беспрерывно известны и сочтены и что каждый из трех сменившихся у нас в последние двадцать лет губернаторов, въезжая править губернией, уже привозил с собою некоторую особую и хлопотливую о нем мысль, внушенную ему свыше и прежде всего, при сдаче губернии. Уверь кто-нибудь тогда честнейшего Степана Трофимовича неопровержимыми доказательствами, что ему вовсе нечего опасаться, и он бы непременно обиделся. А между тем это был ведь человек умнейший и даровитейший, человек, так сказать, даже науки, хотя, впрочем, в науке… ну, одним словом, в науке он сделал не так много и, кажется, совсем ничего. Но ведь с людьми науки у нас на Руси это сплошь да рядом случается.
I will say at once that Stepan Trofimovich had always filled a particular role among us, that of the progressive patriot, so to say, and he was passionately fond of playing the part—so much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it. Not that I would put him on a level with an actor at a theatre, God forbid, for I really have a respect for him. This may all have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest years for indulging in an agreeable day-dream in which he figured as a picturesque public character. He fondly loved, for instance, his position as a “persecuted” man and, so to speak, an “exiling.” There is a sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his own opinion, raised him in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity. In an English satire of the last century, Gulliver, returning from the land of the Lilliputians where the people were only three or four inches high, had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that as he walked along the streets of London he could not help crying out to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they were little and he was still a giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough coachmen even lashed at the giant with their whips. But was that just? What may not be done by habit? Habit had brought Stepan Trofimovich almost to the same position, but in a more innocent and inoffensive form, if one may use such expressions, for he was a most excellent man.
I am even inclined to suppose that towards the end he had been entirely forgotten everywhere; but still it cannot be said that his name had never been known. It is beyond question that he had at one time belonged to a certain distinguished constellation of celebrated leaders of the last generation, and at one time—though only for the briefest moment—his name was pronounced by many hasty persons of that day almost as though it were on a level with the names of Chaadaev, of Belinsky, of Granovsky, and of Herzen, who had only just begun to write abroad. But Stepan Trofimovich's activity ceased almost at the moment it began, owing, so to say, to a “vortex of combined circumstances.” And would you believe it? It turned out afterwards that there had been no “vortex” and even no “circumstances,” at least in that connection. I only learned the other day to my intense amazement, though on the most unimpeachable authority, that Stepan Trofimovich had lived among us in our province not as an “exile” as we were accustomed to believe, and had never even been under police supervision at all. Such is the force of imagination! All his life he sincerely believed that in certain spheres he was a constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was watched and noted, and that each one of the three governors who succeeded one another during twenty years in our province came with special and uneasy ideas concerning him, which had, by higher powers, been impressed upon each before everything else, on receiving the appointment. Had anyone assured the honest man on the most irrefutable grounds that he had nothing to be afraid of, he would certainly have been offended. Yet Stepan Trofimovich was a most intelligent and gifted man, even, so to say, a man of science, though indeed, in science. . . well, in fact he had not done such great things in science. I believe indeed he had done nothing at all. But that's very often the case, of course, with men of science among us in Russia. (Part One, chapter I)
According to Kinbote, Shade listed Dostoevski 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)
Doctor Anton Chekhov's humorous story Letayushchie ostrova ("The Flying Islands," 1882) bring to mind Laputa, a flying island in Gulliver's Travels. The characters in Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836) include Luka Lukich Khlopov, the Inspector of Schools. The author of Ob'yasnenie assiriyskikh imyon ("The Interpretation of Assyrian Names," 1868), Platon Lukashevich (1809-1887) was Gogol's schoolmate at the Nezhin Lyceum. According to Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames), Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich.
The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) 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 Petrovich Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Sergey Petrovich Botkin (1832-1889) and his son Eugene (1865-1918), who was executed with the family of the last Russian tsar, were celebrated physicians.
An American writer, Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the author of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). In Canto One of his poem Shade describes Aunt Maud's room and mentions from the local Star a curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 on Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
In his sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) John Keats (an English poet, 1895-1821, who studied medicine) mentions stout Cortez:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was a Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century. Samuel Shade is the author of The Birds of Mexico.