In his Commentary to Shade’s poem 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) quotes the first two lines of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) in Zemblan translation and mentions the ballad's broken rhythm:
Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind
This line, and indeed the whole passage (line 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. One cannot sufficiently admire the ingenious way in which Shade manages to transfer something of the broken rhythm of the ballad (a trisyllabic meter at heart) into his iambic verse:
662 Who rídes so láte in the níght and the wínd
663.....................................................................
664 .... Ít is the fáther with his chíld
Goethe's two lines opening the poem come out most exactly and beautifully, with the bonus of an unexpected rhyme (also in French: vent - enfant), in my own language:
Ret wóren ok spoz on nátt ut vétt?
Éto est vótchez ut míd ik détt.
Another fabulous ruler, the last king of Zembla, kept repeating these haunting lines to himself both in Zemblan and German, as a chance accompaniment of drumming fatigue and anxiety, while he climbed through the bracken belt of the dark mountains he had to traverse in his bid for freedom.
According to Goethe, "there is something magical in rhythm; it even makes us believe that we possess the sublime" (The Maxims and Reflections, 1833). In Canto One of his poem Shade describes a strange fainting fit he had had in his childhood and mentions the sublime blackness:
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. 141-156)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
Line 143: a clockwork toy
By a stroke of luck I have seen it! One evening in May or June I dropped in to remind my friend about a collection of pamphlets, by his grandfather, an eccentric clergyman, that he had once said was stored in the basement. I found him gloomily waiting for some people (members of his department, I believe, and their wives) who were coming for a formal dinner. He willingly took me down into the basement but after rummaging among piles of dusty books and magazines, said he would try to find them some other time. It was then that I saw it on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock. He, thinking I might think it had belonged to his dead daughter, hastily explained it was as old as he. The boy was a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow was now all bent and broken. He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a kind of memento mori - he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy. We were interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above; but never mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key.
Part Three of Lev Shestov's book Potestas Clavium (“Power of the Keys,” 1923) begins with an essay entitled Memento Mori. In Tysyacha i odna noch’ (“A Thousand and One Nights”), the Preface to Potestas clavium, Shestov says that mankind is plunged into a perpetual night – even in a thousand and one nights:
Человечество живёт не в свете, а во тьме, окутанное одною непрерывною ночью. Нет, не одной, и не двумя, и не десятью - а тысячью и одной ночью!
Mankind does not live in the light but in the bosom of darkness; it is plunged into a perpetual night. No! Not in one or two or ten but in a thousand and one nights! (4)
At the end of his poem Shade mentions some neighbor's gardener who goes by trundling an empty barrow up the lane:
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 985-999)
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”).
Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, Kinbote mentions a sublime relay race in which Shade passed to him the baton of life:
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)
In her memoirs Vtoraya kniga (“The Second Book,” 1983) Nadezhda Mandelshtam (the poet’s widow) says that madness is infectious – one madman simply passes the baton to another. The subject matter of a mania is changeable, but a light of madness is kept intact and continues to burn:
После смерти Хлебникова в Москве появился предстатель, обвинявший Маяковского в сплошном плагиате у Хлебникова. Он ходил из дома в дом и бессвязно кричал о плагиате. Мандельштам пытался разубедить и остановить, но убедился, что ничего втолковать ему нельзя, и просто выставил его. И мы тогда поняли, что безумие заразительно — один безумец попросту передаёт эстафету другому. Содержание бреда изменчиво, но огонёк безумия сохранён и продолжает гореть.
It seems that Nadezhda Mandelshtam's memoir essay on Khlebnikov (in which she says that one madman simply passes the baton to another) was published inTarusskie stranitsy (“The Tarusa Pages,” 1961), a collection to which she contributed her stuff under the penname N. Yakovleva (cf. Jakob Gradus, Shade's murderer).
In his poem "Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the birds' din" (1934) Mandelshtam mentions Goethe whistling on the winding path:
И Шуберт на воде, и Моцарт в птичьем гаме,
И Гете, свищущий на вьющейся тропе,
И Гамлет, мысливший пугливыми шагами,
Считали пульс толпы и верили толпе.
Быть может, прежде губ уже родился шопот
И в бездревесности кружилися листы,
И те, кому мы посвящаем опыт,
До опыта приобрели черты.
Schubert on the water, and Mozart in the birds' din,
And Goethe whistling on the winding path,
And Hamlet, who thought with fearful steps,
All felt the crowd's pulse and believed the crowd.
It's possible the whisper was born before the lips
And leaves were spiraling in treelessness,
And those to whom we dedicate our trials
Acquired their features before we tried.
At the end of Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four (1890) Sherlock Holmes quotes Goethe:
“Strange,” said I, “how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.”
“Yes,” he answered, “there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe,—
Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus Dir schuf,
Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff."
[Pity that Nature made of you only one person,
because there was material enough for a worthy man and a rogue.]
(Chapter XII "The The Strange Story of Jonathan Small")
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions "torquated beauty, sublimated grouse" and Sherlock Holmes:
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 Conan Doyle's novel Holmes calls himself "a very fine loafer." In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri calls Mozart gulyaka prazdnyi (an idle loafer):
Кто скажет, чтоб Сальери гордый был
Когда-нибудь завистником презренным,
Змеёй, людьми растоптанною, вживе
Песок и пыль грызущею бессильно?
Никто!.. А ныне — сам скажу — я ныне
Завистник. Я завидую; глубоко,
Мучительно завидую. — О небо!
Где ж правота, когда священный дар,
Когда бессмертный гений — не в награду
Любви горящей, самоотверженья,
Трудов, усердия, молений послан —
А озаряет голову безумца,
Гуляки праздного?.. О Моцарт, Моцарт!
Who'd say that proud Salieri would in life
Be a repellent envier, a serpent
Trampled by people, gnawing sand and dust
In impotence? No one! And now -- I'll say it --
I am an envier. I envy; sorely,
Profoundly now I envy. -- Pray, o Heaven!
Where, where is rightness? when the sacred gift,
Immortal genius, comes not in reward
For fervent love, for total self-rejection,
For work and for exertion and for prayers,
But casts its light upon a madman's head,
An idle loafer's brow... O Mozart, Mozart!
(Scene I, transl. G. Gurarie)
In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art.
(Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse. The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin's personality. 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.” There is 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.
Btw., in West-östlicher Divan (1819) Goethe says:
Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
Poetry if you would know,
To its country you must go;
If the poet you would know,
To the poet’s country go.