Describing the forty days after the death of his mother, Queen Blenda, 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) mentions a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland:
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur's naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland. (note to Line 80)
A mountain in the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines, Monte Falterona brings to mind La Falterona, the main character (the opera singer) of Somerset Maugham's story The Voice Of The Turtle (1935). There is Falter (moth in German) in Falterona. Adam Ilyich Falter is a character (Sineusov's former tutor who became the owner of a hotel on the French Riviera and who suddently went mad one starry night and became a medium) in VN's story Ultima Thule (1942) intended to serve as the first chapter of VN's unfinished Russian-language novel Solus Rex. According to Kinbote, he suggested to Shade Solus Rex as a good title for his poem:
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title - the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?
Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. (note to Line 1000)
In Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919), the Hôtel de la Fleur is the inn on Tahiti where the narrator stays and where the troubled painter Charles Strickland spent his final period. The story of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist is, in part, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-1898) is a painting by Gauguin created in Tahiti.
On the other hand, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland mentioned by Kinbote in his commentary brings to mind the mountain-to-fountain misprint mentioned by Shade in Canto Three of his poem:
I also called on Coates.
He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
He took his article from a steel file:
"It's accurate. I have not changed her style.
There's one misprint - not that it matters much:
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."
Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But a topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (ll. 797-815)