The list of the things that Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) loathes ends with sharks:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 901-930)
At the end of Chekhov's story Gusev (1890) set in the Indian Ocean a shark appears:
После этого показывается другое темное тело. Это акула. Она важно и нехотя, точно не замечая Гусева, подплывает под него, и он опускается к ней на спину, затем она поворачивается вверх брюхом, нежится в теплой, прозрачной воде и лениво открывает пасть с двумя рядами зубов. Лоцмана в восторге; они остановились и смотрят, что будет дальше. Поигравши телом, акула нехотя подставляет под него пасть, осторожно касается зубами, и парусина разрывается во всю длину тела, от головы до ног; один колосник выпадает и, испугавши лоцманов, ударивши акулу по боку, быстро идет ко дну. А наверху в это время, в той стороне, где заходит солнце, скучиваются облака; одно облако похоже на триумфальную арку, другое на льва, третье на ножницы... Из-за облаков выходит широкий зеленый луч и протягивается до самой средины неба; немного погодя рядом с этим ложится фиолетовый, рядом с ним золотой, потом розовый... Небо становится нежно-сиреневым. Глядя на это великолепное, очаровательное небо, океан сначала хмурится, но скоро сам приобретает цвета ласковые, радостные, страстные, какие на человеческом языке и назвать трудно.
After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.
Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors. . . . From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured. . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech. (Chapter V)
A cloud that looks like a pair of scissors brings to mind Shade's little scissors with which he pares his nails:
The little scissors I am holding are
A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.
I stand before the window and I pare
My fingernails and vaguely am aware
Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,
Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum
College astronomer Starover Blue;
The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;
The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;
And little pinky clinging to her skirt.
And I make mouths as I snip off the thin
Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin." (ll. 183-194)
Later in Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his marriage. Star in Shade's dazzling synthesis of sun and star seems to be the planet Venus, zvezda stydlivaya lyubvi (the shy star of love) which is eclipsed by solntse braka (the sun of marriage) in Pushkin's epistle To Rodzyanko (1825). In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack and mentions Hurriacane Lolita that swept from Florida to Maine and the planet Mars:
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. 679-682)
The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Shirley Holmes (the headmistress of Camp Q) and her son Charlie (Lolita's first lover who gets killed in Korea). In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes and the fellow whose tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints.
In Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892) James Ryder fed the gem to a goose that his sister, Mrs Oakshott, had promised him as a Christmas gift, but had confused the bird with another. The surname Gusev comes from gus' (goose), a bird mentioned by Pushkin in Canto Four (XLII: 9) of Eugene Onegin:
И вот уже трещат морозы
И серебрятся средь полей...
(Читатель ждет уж рифмы розы;
На, вот возьми ее скорей!)
Опрятней модного паркета
Блистает речка, льдом одета.
Мальчишек радостный народ24
Коньками звучно режет лед;
На красных лапках гусь тяжелый,
Задумав плыть по лону вод,
Ступает бережно на лед,
Скользит и падает; веселый
Мелькает, вьется первый снег,
Звездами падая на брег.
And now the frosts already crackle
and silver 'mid the fields
(the reader now expects the rhyme “froze-rose” —
here, take it quick!).
Neater than modish parquetry,
the ice-clad river shines.
The gladsome crew of boys24
cut with their skates resoundingly the ice;
a heavy goose with red feet, planning
to swim upon the bosom of the waters,
steps carefully upon the ice,
slidders, and falls. The gay
first snow flicks, whirls,
falling in stars upon the bank.
24 “This signifies,” remarks one of our critics, “that the urchins are skating.” Right. (Pushkin's note)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade describes the tragic death of his daughter (who drowned in Lake Omega) and mentions zesty skaters who crossed the lake from Exe to Wye:
People have thought she tried to cross the lake
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
Others supposed she might have lost her way
By turning left from Bridgeroad; and some say
She took her poor young life. I know. You know. (ll.488-493)
In his Commentary and Index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Colonel Peter Gusev, King Alfin's "aerial adjutant:"
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Oleg, Duke of Rahl, 1916-1931, son of Colonel Gusev, Duke of Rahl (b. 1885, still spry); K.'s beloved playmate, killed in a toboggan accident, 130. (Index)
King Alfin (the father of Charles the Beloved) and Alphina (the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters) bring to mind the Alpha Inn where geese are purchased in Conan Doyle's story. The Blue Carbuncle makes one think of some old barracks in Kobaltana (cobalt blue is a blue pigment), the hiding place of the Zemblan crown jewels mentioned by Kinbote in his Index to Shade's poem:
Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks, now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text.
King Alfin's "aerial adjutant," Colonel Gusev makes one think of Iago, Othello's adjutant (and the main antagonist) in Shakespeare's Othello. Duchess of Payn, of Great Paym and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's play. Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) 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 a letter of Oct. 9, 1888, to Mme Lintvaryov (the owner of a farm in Ukraine where Chekhov spent the previous summer) Chekhov (who just received the Pushkin Prize, 500 rubles) says that the prize award will be officially announced at the Academy on October 19 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum):
Получил я известие, что Академия наук присудила мне Пушкинскую премию в 500 р. Это, должно быть, известно уже Вам из газетных телеграмм. Официально объявят об этом 19-го октября в публичном заседании Академии с подобающей случаю классической торжественностью. Это, должно быть, за то, что я раков ловил.
Премия, телеграммы, поздравления, приятели, актёры, актрисы, пьесы — всё это выбило меня из колеи. Прошлое туманится в голове, я ошалел; тина и чертовщина городской, литераторской суеты охватывают меня, как спрут-осьминог. Всё пропало! Прощай лето, прощайте раки, рыба, остроносые челноки, прощай моя лень, прощай голубенький костюмчик.
Прощай, покой, прости, мое довольство!
Всё, всё прости! Прости, мой ржущий конь,
И звук трубы, и грохот барабана,
И флейты свист, и царственное знамя,
Все почести, вся слава, всё величье
И бурные тревоги славных войн!
Простите вы, смертельные орудья,
Которых гул несется по земле,
Как грозный гром бессмертного Зевеса!
Если когда-нибудь страстная любовь выбивала Вас из прошлого и настоящего, то то же самое почти я чувствую теперь. Ах, нехорошо всё это, доктор, нехорошо! Уж коли стал стихи цитировать, то, стало быть, нехорошо!
Chekhov quotes Othello’s speech in Shakespeare’s Othello (3.3) in Veynberg’s translation:
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove's dead clamours counterfeit,
Farewell!
Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on Oct. 19, 1959. There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus's "real" name), like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant," etc.), will be full again. 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 in Russian “hope.” In Shakespeare’s history play Richard III Richmond says that true hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings. (Act V, scene 2)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and says that IPH snubbed gods, including the big G:
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)
In Ilf and Petrov's novel Zolotoy telyonok ("The Golden Calf," 1931) old Sinitski composes a charade with industrializatsiya (industrialization) as its solution (industrializatsiya = indus + 3 + Ali* + za...) and looks for a rhyme of predlog (propostion):
Четвёртый слог поможет Бог
узнать, что это есть предлог.
God will help you to find out
that the fourth syllable is a preposition.
Indus (the beginning of industrializatsiya) means "a Hindu."
Sinitski's grand-daughter Zosya protests saying that for an atheist newspaper Bog (God) is unacceptable. She suggests that Bog should be replaced with rok (Fate). But the poor frightened composer of charades and rebusus rejects it as mysticism also prohibited in Soviet press:
Зося заглянула в старческие каракули и сейчас же крикнула:
- Что ты тут написал? Что это такое? "Четвертый слог поможет бог узнать, что это есть предлог". Почему бог? Ведь ты сам говорил, что в редакции теперь не принимают шарад с церковными выражениями.
Синицкий ахнул. Крича: "Где бог, где? Там нет бога", он дрожащими руками втащил на нос очки в белой оправе и ухватился за листок.
- Есть бог, - промолвил он печально. - Оказался... Опять маху дал. Ах, жалко! И рифма пропадает хорошая.
- А ты вместо "бог" поставь "рок", - сказала Зося.
Но испуганный Синицкий отказался от "рока".
- Это тоже мистика. Я знаю. Ах, маху дал! Что же это будет, Зосенька?
Зося равнодушно посмотрела на деда и посоветовала сочинить новую шараду.
- Всё равно, - сказала она, - слово с окончанием "ция" у тебя не выходит. Помнишь, как ты мучился со словом "теплофикация"?
- Как же, - оживился старик, - я ещё третьим слогом поставил "кац" и написал так: "А третий слог, досуг имея, узнает всяк фамилию еврея". Не взяли эту шараду. Сказали: "Слабо, не подходит". Маху дал!
И старик, усевшись за свой стол, начал разрабатывать большой, идеологически выдержанный ребус. Первым долгом он набросал карандашом гуся, держащего в клюве букву "Г", большую и тяжелую, как виселица. Работа ладилась. (Chapter IX "A Crisis of Genre Again")
In Sinitski's new rebus the goose holds in its beak the letter G, "big and heavy as the gallows." According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
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)
"Shark" Dodson is the main character in O. Henry's story The Roads We Take (1910). The story ends in Dodson's words "Bolivar cannot carry double." In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Onegin wears shirokiy bolivar (a top hat with wide rims à la Bolivar). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski, a poem (1862) by Yakov Polonski, a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," I. Annenski's penname) and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. 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”).
O. Henry (the penname of William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910) is an American humorist. O. Henry is the author of The Prisoner of Zembla (1912), “a rather silly lampoon of medievalism” unearthed by A. Dolinin (The Nabokovian No. 56). Its title brings to mind The Prisoner of Zenda (1884), a novel by Antony Hope. In O. Henry's story the king exclaims "Ods Bodkins!" ('God's dear body!'):
The knights mounted and rode in a line past the grandstand, and the king stopped the poor student, who had the worst horse and the poorest caparisons of any of the knights and said:
"Sir Knight, prithee tell me of what that marvellous shacky and rusty-looking armor of thine is made?"
"Oh, king," said the young knight, "seeing that we are about to engage in a big fight, I would call it scrap iron, wouldn't you?"
"Ods Bodkins!" said the king. "The youth hath a pretty wit."