At the end of his short poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his Commentary John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions "the torments of a Tamerlane, the roar of tyrants torn in hell:"
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Describing his work on Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar, 1937) mentions Tamerlane (aka Timur, 1336-1405, a Turco-Mongol conqueror who founded the Timurid Empire in and around modern-day Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia):
Он живо чувствовал некий государственный обман в действиях "Царя-Освободителя", которому вся эта история с дарованием свобод очень скоро надоела; царская скука и была главным оттенком реакции. После манифеста, стреляли в народ на станции Бездна, - и эпиграмматическую жилку в Федоре Константиновиче щекотал бесвкусный соблазн, дальнейшую судьбу правительственной России рассматривать, как перегон между станциями Бездна и Дно.
Постепенно, от всех этих набегов на прошлое русской мысли, в нем развивалась новая, менее пейзажная, чем раньше, тоска по России, опасное желание (с которым успешно боролся), в чем-то ей признаться, и в чем-то ее убедить. И, нагромождая знания, извлекая из этой горы свое готовое творение, он еще кое что вспоминал: кучу камней на азиатском перевале, - шли в поход, клали по камню, шли назад, по камню снимали, а то, что осталось навеки - счет падшим в бою. Так в куче камней Тамерлан провидел памятник.
He clearly sensed a deception on a governmental scale in the actions of the “Tsar-Liberator,” who very soon got bored with all this business of granting freedoms; for it was the Tsar’s boredom that gave the chief hue to reaction. After the manifesto the police fired into the people at the station of Bezdna—and Fyodor’s epigrammatic vein was tickled by the tasteless temptation to regard the further fate of Russia’s rulers as the run between the stations Bezdna (Bottomless) and Dno (Bottom).
Gradually, as a result of all these raids on the past of Russian thought, he developed a new yearning for Russia that was less physical than before, a dangerous desire (with which he successfully struggled) to confess something to her and to convince her of something. And while piling up knowledge, while extracting his finished creation out of this mountain, he remembered something else: a pile of stones on an Asian pass; warriors going on a campaign each placed a stone there; on the way back each took a stone from the pile; that which was left represented forever the number of those fallen in battle. Thus in a pile of stones Tamerlane foresaw a monument. (Chapter Three)
Bezdna is Russian for "abyss." In The Gift (Dar's English version) Shirin's novel Sedina (The Gray Hair) becomes The Hoary Abyss:
Фёдор Константинович собрался было восвояси, когда его сзади окликнул шепелявый голос: он принадлежал Ширину, автору романа "Седина" (с эпиграфом из книги Иова), очень сочувственно встреченного эмигрантской критикой. ("Господи, отче -- --? По Бродвею, в лихорадочном шорохе долларов, гетеры и дельцы в гетрах, дерясь, падая, задыхаясь, бежали за золотым тельцом, который, шуршащими боками протискиваясь между небоскребами, обращал к электрическому небу изможденный лик свой и выл. В Париже, в низкопробном притоне, старик Лашез, бывший пионер авиации, а ныне дряхлый бродяга, топтал сапогами старуху-проститутку Буль-де-Сюиф. Господи отчего -- --? Из московского подвала вышел палач и, присев у конуры, стал тюлюкать мохнатого щенка: Махонький, приговаривал он, махонький... В Лондоне лорды и лэди танцевали джими и распивали коктейль, изредка посматривая на эстраду, где на исходе восемнадцатого ринга огромный негр кнок-оутом уложил на ковер своего белокурого противника. В арктических снегах, на пустом ящике из-под мыла, сидел путешественник Эриксен и мрачно думал: Полюс или не полюс?.. Иван Червяков бережно обстригал бахрому единственных брюк. Господи, отчего Вы дозволяете все это?"). Сам Ширин был плотный, коренастый человек, с рыжеватым бобриком, всегда плохо выбритый, в больших очках, за которыми, как в двух аквариумах, плавали два маленьких, прозрачных глаза, совершенно равнодушных к зрительным впечатлениям. Он был слеп как Мильтон, глух как Бетховен, и глуп как бетон. Святая ненаблюдательность (а отсюда – полная неосведомленность об окружающем мире -- и полная неспособность что-либо именовать) -- свойство, почему-то довольно часто встречающееся у русского литератора-середняка, словно тут действует некий благотворный рок, отказывающий безталанному в благодати чувственного познания, дабы он зря не изгадил материала. Бывает, конечно, что в таком темном человеке играет какой-то собственный фонарик, -- не говоря о том, что известны случаи, когда по прихоти находчивой природы, любящей неожиданные приспособления и подмены, такой внутренний свет поразительно ярок -- на зависть любому краснощекому таланту. Но даже Достоевский всегда как-то напоминает комнату, в которой днём горит лампа.
Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete uninformedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day. (Chapter Five)
The Haunted Barn investigated by Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) in Pale Fire brings to mind the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) in VN's novel Ada (1969). On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) electricity was banned after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century. Chronologically, the Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. On the day preceding Ada's sixteenth birthday (July 21, 1888) Greg Erminin gives Ada a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok:
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
In "The Life of Chernyshevski" Fyodor says that, reviewing a magazine, Chernyshevski decisively rejected as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel:”
Когда однажды, в 55 году, расписавшись о Пушкине, он захотел дать пример "бессмысленного сочетания слов", то привел мимоходом тут же выдуманное "синий звук", - на свою голову напророчив пробивший через полвека блоковский "звонко-синий час". "Научный анализ показывает вздорность таких сочетаний", - писал он, - не зная о физиологическом факте "окрашенного слуха". "Не всё ли равно, - спрашивал он (у радостно соглашавшегося с ним бахмучанского или новомиргородского читателя), - голубоперая щука или щука с голубым пером (конечно второе, крикнули бы мы, - так оно выделяется лучше, в профиль!), ибо настоящему мыслителю некогда заниматься этим, особенно если он проводит на народной площади больше времени, чем в своей рабочей комнате". Другое дело - "общий план". Любовь к общему (к энциклопедии), презрительная ненависть к особому (к монографии) и заставляли его упрекать Дарвина в недельности, Уоллеса в нелепости ("... все эти ученые специальности от изучения крылышек бабочек до изучения наречий кафрского языка"). У самого Чернышевского был в этом смысле какой-то опасный размах, какое-то разудалое и самоуверенное "всё сойдет", бросающее сомнительную тень на достоинства как раз специальных его трудов. "Общий интерес" он понимал, однако, по-своему: исходил из мысли, что больше всего читателя интересует "производительность". Разбирая в 55 году какой-то журнал, он хвалит в нем статьи "Термометрическое состояние земли" и "Русские каменноугольные бассейны", решительно бракуя, как слишком специальную, ту единственную, которую хотелось бы прочесть: "Географическое распространение верблюда".
Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.” (The Gift, Chapter Four)
The colorful world of Ada, Antiterra brings to mind antiiskusstvo (anti-art), which Chernyshevski combated:
Таким образом, борясь с чистым искусством, шестидесятники, и за ними хорошие русские люди вплоть до девяностых годов, боролись, по неведению своему, с собственным ложным понятием о нем, ибо точно также как двадцать лет спустя Гаршин видел "чистого художника" в Семирадском(!), - или как аскету снится пир, от которого бы чревоугодника стошнило, - так и Чернышевский, будучи лишен малейшего понятия об истинной сущности искусства, видел его венец в искусстве условном, прилизанном (т. е. в антиискусстве), с которым и воевал, - поражая пустоту. При этом не следует забывать, что другой лагерь, лагерь "художников", - Дружинин с его педантизмом и дурного тона небесностью, Тургенев с его чересчур стройными видениями и злоупотреблением Италией, - часто давал врагу как раз ту вербную халву, которую легко было хаять.
Николай Гаврилович казнил "чистую поэзию" где только ни отыскивал ее, - в самых неожиданных закоулках. Критикуя на страницах "Отечественных Записок" (54 год) какой-то справочный словарь, он приводит список статей, по его мнению слишком длинных: Лабиринт, Лавр, Ланкло, - и список статей, слишком кратких: Лаборатория, Лафайет, Лен, Лессинг. Красноречивое притязание! Эпиграф ко всей умственной жизни его! Из олеографических волн "поэзии" рождалось (как мы уже видели) пышногрудая "роскошь"; "фантастическое" принимало грозный экономический оборот. "Иллюминации... Конфеты, сыплющиеся на улицы с аэростатов, - перечисляет он (речь идет о праздниках и подарках по случаю крестин сына Людовика Наполеона), - колоссальные бонбоньерки, спускающиеся на парашютах...". А какие вещи у богатых: "кровати из розового дерева... шкапы с пружинами и выдвижными зеркалами... штофные обои...! А там, бедный труженик...". Связь найдена, антитеза добыта: с большой обличительной силой и обилием предметов обстановки, Николай Гаврилович вскрывает всю их безнравственность. "Мудрено ли, что при хорошенькой наружности швея, ослабляя мало по малу свои нравственные правила... Мудрено ли, что, променяв дешевую, сто раз мытую кисею на алансонские кружева и бессонные ночи за тусклым огарком и работой на бессонные ночи в оперном маскараде или загородной оргии, она... несясь" и т. д. (и, подумавши, он разгромил поэта Никитина, но не потому, собственно, что тот слагал стихи дурно, а за то, что он, воронежский житель, не имел ровно никакого права писать о мраморах и парусах).
Thus in denouncing “pure art” the men of the sixties, and good Russian people after them right up to the nineties, were denouncing—in result of misinformation—their own false conception of it, for just as twenty years later the social writer Garshin saw “pure art” in the paintings of Semiradski (a rank academician)—or as an ascetic may dream of a feast that would make an epicurean sick—so Chernyshevski, having not the slightest notion of the true nature of art, saw its crown in conventional, slick art (i.e., anti-art), which he combated —lunging at nothing. At the same time one must not forget that the other camp, the camp of the “aesthetes”—the critic Druzhinin with his pedantry and tasteless lambency, or Turgenev with his much too elegant “visions” and misuse of Italy—often provided the enemy with exactly that cloying stuff which it was so easy to condemn.
Nikolay Gavrilovich castigated “pure poetry” wherever he found it—in the most unexpected byways. Criticizing a reference book in the pages of The Contemporary (1854), he quoted a list of entries which in his opinion were too long: Labyrinth, Laurel, Lenclos (Ninon de)—and a list of entries which were too short: Laboratory, Lafayette, Linen, Lessing. An eloquent cavil! A motto that fits the whole of his intellectual life! The oleographic billows of “poetry” gave birth (as we have seen) to full-bosomed “luxury”; the “fantastic” took a grim economic turn. “Illuminations… Confetti fluttering down to the streets from balloons,” he enumerates (the subject is the festivities and gifts occasioned by the christening of Louis Napoleon’s son), “colossal bonbonnières descending on parachutes….” And what things the rich have: “Beds of rosewood… wardrobes with hinges and sliding mirrors… damask hangings… And over there the poor toiler….” The link has been found, the antithesis obtained; with tremendous accusatory force and an abundance of articles of furniture, Nikolay Gavrilovich exposes all their immorality. “Is it surprising that the seamstress endowed with good looks little by little slackens her moral principles… Is it surprising that, having changed her cheap muslin dress, washed a hundred times, for Alençon lace, and her sleepless nights of work by a bit of gutting candle for other sleepless nights at a public masquerade or at a suburban orgy she… whirling …” etc. (and, having thought it over, he demolished the poet Nikitin, not because the latter versified badly, but because being an inhabitant of the Voronezh backwoods he had no right whatever to be talking about marble colonnades and sails). (Chapter Four)
“Colossal bonbonnières descending on parachutes” make one think of the disguised king arrival in America in Pale Fire:
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 Lucette (in Ada, Van's and Ada's half-sister), in her Tobakoff suite there hangs a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up:’
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain! (3.5)
In his essay The Texture of Time (1924) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) quotes Shade's words "Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears." In their old age (even on the last day of their long lives) Van and Ada translate Shade's poem into Russian:
‘Yes,’ said Ada (aged eleven and a great hair-tosser), ‘yes — but take a paralytic who forgets the entire past gradually, stroke by stroke, who dies in his sleep like a good boy, and who has believed all his life that the soul is immortal — isn’t that desirable, isn’t that a quite comfortable arrangement?’
‘Cold comfort,’ said Van (aged fourteen and dying of other desires). ‘You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.’
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
...Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
(...We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another...)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three ‘boths’ had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)