In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of afterlife and mentions the Turk's delight:
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why
Scorn a hereafter none can verify:
The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks
With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks,
The seraph with his six flamingo wings,
And Flemish hells with porcupines and things?
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost. (ll. 221-230)
Turkish delight or lokum (in Russian we call it rakhat-lukum) is a family of confections based on a gel of starch and sugar. In VN's novel Ada (1969) Van Veen says that in later years he had never been able to reread Proust (the author of In Search of Lost Time) and mentions the perfumed gum of Turkish paste:
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left hanging:
A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.
Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand). (1.1)
Van's, Ada's and Lucette's great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski is a namesake of Botkin's wife. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became 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 after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) also seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Botkin is one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear. In his famous soliloquy in Shakespeare's play (3.1) Hamlet mentions a bare bodkin and, in the next scene, two Provincial roses on his razed shoes:
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers—if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me—with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players? (3.2)
'Turn turk' in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. In VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) Krug's friend Ember (a Shakespeare scholar) offers his Russian version of Hamlet's words to his friend Horatio:
Ne dumaete-li Vy, sudar', shto vot eto (the song about the wounded deer), da les per'ev na shliape, da dve kamchatye rozy na proreznykh bashmakakh, mogli by, kol' fortuna zadala by mne turku, zasluzhit' mne uchast'e v teatralnoy arteli; a, sudar'? (Chapter 7)
Sudar' (sir) brings to mind Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius mentioned by Kinbote in his commentary and index to Shade's poem:
He [Charles Xavier Vseslav] awoke to find her [Fleur de Fyler] standing with a comb in her hand before his—or, rather, his grandfather’s—cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young—little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
On the other hand, Sudarg makes one think of gosudar’ (sovereign). Gosudar’ is the Russian title of Machiavelli’s Il Principe (“The Prince,” 1532). In VN's novel Pnin (1957) Joan Clements tells Pnin that she remembers the Turkish word for 'water,' and Pnin (a linguist by necessity) says that water in Turkish is su. Sudarg = su + darg (a day's work). Su is us (Russ., whisker), darg is grad (archaic form of gorod, city; hailstones) in reverse.
In Ada, water is the element that destroys Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic). At the end of their long lives (even in the last day of their lives) Van and Ada translate Shade's poem into Russian:
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)