In Canto Two (begun "early in the morning" on July 5, 1959) of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says "Today I'm sixty-one:"
And finally there was the sleepless night
When I decided to explore and fight
The foul, the inadmissible abyss,
Devoting all my twisted life to this
One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings
Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings. (ll. 177-182)
At the beginning of his Vospominaniya ("Memoirs"), written in 1911 and brought out in 1923 by the Russian Berlin-based publishing house Slovo, Count Sergey Yulievich Witte (a Russian statesman who served as the first prime minister of the Russian Empire, replacing the emperor as head of government, 1849-1915) says: Mne 62 goda ("I'm sixty-two"):
Mне 62 года, я родился в Тифлисе в 1849 году.
Отец мой, Юлий Федорович Витте, был директором департамента государственных имуществ на Кавказе. Мать моя - Екатерина Андреевна Фадеева, дочь члена Главного Управления наместника кавказского Фадеева. Фадеев был женат на княжне Елене Павловне Долгорукой, которая была последней из старшей отрасли князей Долгоруких, происходящей от Григория Федоровича Долгорукова, сенатора при Петре I, брата знаменитого Якова Федоровича Долгорукова. Мой дед приехал на Кавказ при наместнике светлейшем князе Воронцове, который положил прочное гражданское основание управлению Кавказом. Ранее дед управлял иностранными колониями в Новороссийском крае, когда светлейший князь Воронцов был Новороссийским генерал-губернатором, а еще ранее этого мой дед Фадеев был губернатором в Саратове. У моего деда было три дочери и один сын. Старшая дочь, довольно известная писательница времен Белинского, которая писала под псевдонимом "Зинаида Р.", была замужем за полковником Ганом. (Chapter I "About my Ancestors")
When Witte (who was born on June 29, 1849, in Tiflis) died (on February 28, 1915, in Petrograd), the emperor Nicholas II (who called Witte's death znak Bozhiy, "God's sign") felt relief and Maurice Paléologue (the French ambassador to the Russian Empire in 1914-1917) could not conceal his joy (Witte consistently advocated against war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, preferring peaceful economic expansion to maintain the Russian Empire's stability). Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus's birthday. While Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and Gradus (Shade's murderer) were born in 1915 (the year of Witte's death). On the black granite slab of Witte's grave, in addition to the usual dates of birth and death, another date was carved: 17 October 1905, the date he presented the Manifesto “On the state order perfection” that granted full civil freedoms, including freedom of speech, assembly, the press and a parliament known as the Duma. Describing the disguised king's arrival in America, Kinbote remarks that Shade’s heart attack took place on October 17, 1958:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements. (note to Line 691)
According to Witte, his maternal grandfather Fadeyev came to the Caucasus when its namestnik (governor) was Prince Mikhail Vorontsov (1782-1856). Pushkin's boss in Odessa in 1824, Vorontsov is the target of the poet's famous epigram:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there's a hope
That he will be a full one at last.
Kinbote's foreword to Shade's poem is dated Oct. 19, 1959. On this day (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum) Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide. There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name that means in Russian "hope").