The three main characters of VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), 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, seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. 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 Nikolaevna (1885) is a short novel by Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888), a writer who in March 1888 committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell. Garshin is the author of Lyagushka-puteshestvennitsa ("The Traveling Frog," 1887). It tells the story of a clever frog who decides to fly to warm lands with wild ducks. In Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1907) Nils, after being shrunk by a magical tomte (gnome), clings to the neck of Martin, the farm's white goose who decides to join the wild geese flying south. Shade’s murderer, Jakob Gradus is the son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga:
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. (Kinbote's note to Line 17)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his daughter and says:
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. (ll. 318-319)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
A pretty conceit. The wood duck, a richly colored bird, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, with black and white markings, is incomparably more beautiful than the much-overrated swan, a serpentine goose with a dirty neck of yellowish plush and a frogman's black rubber flaps.
Incidentally, the popular nomenclature of American animals reflects the simple utilitarian minds of ignorant pioneers and has not yet acquired the patina of European faunal names. (note to Line 319)
Shade's reverts the transformation that takes place in Hans Andersen's fairy tale The Ugly Duckling. Garshin's story The Traveling Frog brings to mind "An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed" (a line in Canto Two of Shade's poem):
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
Espied on a pine’s bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song. (ll. 235-244)
In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet Mercutio mentions Benvolio’s hazel eyes:
Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. (Act III, scene 1)
In Garshin's story, the frog flies south by hanging on a twig that two ducks hold in their bills. Hazel is a large shrub and a deciduous tree of the genus Corylus. There is a hazel-brush in Aschenputtel (Brothers Grimm’s German version of the fairy tale about Cinderella). The title of Brothers Grimm's fairy tale brings to mind Dr Herbert Ashe, a character in J. L. Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940). The name of a fictitious planet, Tlön rhymes with klyon (Russian for maple tree). The maple tree is the national arboreal emblem of Canada. It seems that Kinbote writes his commentary, index and foreword to Shade's poem not in Cedarn, Utana, but in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) writes his poem "Wanted."