According to 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), Gradus (Shade's murderer) contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
In the last line of his Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1831) written "in the Italian meter" Shevyryov mentions vinograd (the vines):
Люблю, люблю, когда в тени густой
Чета младая предо мной мелькает
И руку верную с верной рукой,
Кольцо в кольцо, любовно соплетает.
Стремлюся к ним я сирою душой,
Но их душа чужое отвергает,
И взор, увлаженный горькой слезой,
Благословляя, в сень их провожает.
Стою один - и в сердце жмет тоска,
И по руке хлад пробегает скорый:
Чья обовьется вкруг нее рука?
Где опочиют ищущие взоры?
И долго ли мне жить без двойника,
Как винограду падать без опоры?
...And am I bound to live long without a double (bez dvoynika),
as the vines are bound to fall without support?
In sonet (sonnet) there are son (dream) and net (no). Son (1827) is a remarkable poem by Shevyryov. In Shevyryov's poem two suns rise in the sky, and nature breathes with a twofold life. Son i net ("A Dream and No") is a sonnet by Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909):
Нагорев и трепеща,
Сон навеяла свеча…
В гулко-каменных твердынях
Два мне грезились луча,
Два любимых, кротко-синих
Небо видевших луча
В гулко-каменных твердынях.
Просыпаюсь. Ночь черна.
Бред то был или признанье?
Путы жизни, чары сна
Иль безумного желанья
В тихий мир воспоминанья
Забежавшая волна?
Нет ответа. Ночь душна.
Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," Annenski's penname) is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1904):
Не я, и не он, и не ты,
И то же, что я, и не то же:
Так были мы где-то похожи,
Что наши смешались черты.
В сомненьи кипит ещё спор,
Но, слиты незримой четою,
Одной мы живём и мечтою,
Мечтою разлуки с тех пор.
Горячешный сон волновал
Обманом вторых очертаний,
Но чем я глядел неустанней,
Тем ярче себя ж узнавал.
Лишь полога ночи немой
Порой отразит колыханье
Моё и другое дыханье,
Бой сердца и мой и не мой…
И в мутном круженьи годин
Всё чаще вопрос меня мучит:
Когда наконец нас разлучат,
Каким же я буду один?
Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double (both Kinbote and Gradus were born on July 5, 1915; July 5 is also Shade's birthday, but Shade was born in 1898). 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”).
Shevyryov is the author of Petrograd (1829), a poem about the quarrel between the Sea and the tsar Peter I (the founder of St. Petersburg). In 1914 VN's (and, presumably, Vsevolod Botkin's) home city was renamed Petrograd. Ten years later, in 1924, Petrograd became Leningrad. In his Commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus:"
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill things. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
and points out that Leningrad used to be Petrograd:
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft—and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:
Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of “Tanagra” and the first three letters of “dust” form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. “Leningrad used to be Petrograd?” “A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?”
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem. (note to Line 596)
Btw., a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms that will hug Gradus from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze make one think of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter I that haunts poor Eugene in Pushkin's poem Mednyi vsadnik ("The Bronze Horseman," 1833). In his poem Pushkin calls St. Petersburg "Petrograd:"
Над омраченным Петроградом
Дышал ноябрь осенним хладом.
Плеская шумною волной
В края своей ограды стройной,
Нева металась, как больной
В своей постеле беспокойной.
Уж было поздно и темно;
Сердито бился дождь в окно,
И ветер дул, печально воя.
В то время из гостей домой
Пришел Евгений молодой...
Мы будем нашего героя
Звать этим именем. Оно
Звучит приятно; с ним давно
Мое перо к тому же дружно.
Прозванья нам его не нужно,
Хотя в минувши времена
Оно, быть может, и блистало
И под пером Карамзина
В родных преданьях прозвучало;
Но ныне светом и молвой
Оно забыто. Наш герой
Живет в Коломне; где-то служит,
Дичится знатных и не тужит
Ни о почиющей родне,
Ни о забытой старине.
Above the darkening Peter’s city
November breathed its chill – no pity.
And lapping with its noisy wave
At edges of its graceful fences,
The Neva like a patient gave
Herself to restless, numbing senses.
It was already dark and late;
Beat rain on pane in horrid spate,
And wind was howling, sadly blowing.
Just then from party, happy game,
The young Evgeny home he came…
Yes, that’s the name by which he’s going
Carousing hero suits it well.
It has a pretty ring; my quill
Has known it too in past endeavour.
A surname we won’t need, however,
Although in long past former days
Perhaps was told a tale of honour,
In Karamzin perhaps did blaze
The bluster of familial banner,
And yet by light and hearsay now
It is unknown. But I’ll allow
Kolomna’s where our desk-bound hero
Resides. He’s shy of toffs and so no
Regret he wastes on forebears past,
At their affairs he’s not aghast.
(Part I, transl. R. Moreton)
Vinograd ("The Grapes," 1824) is a poem by Pushkin:
Не стану я жалеть о розах,
Увядших с легкою весной;
Мне мил и виноград на лозах,
В кистях созревший под горой,
Краса моей долины злачной,
Отрада осени златой,
Продолговатый и прозрачный,
Как персты девы молодой.
I won't regret about roses
that withered with the light spring.
The grapes on the vines that in bunches
ripened at the hillside are also dear to me.
The beauty of my lush valley,
the joy of the golden autumn,
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.