In his Commentary to Shade's poem 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) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the king’s uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
In his sonnet Natur und Kunst ("Nature and Art," 1800) Goethe famously says In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister (It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself):
Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen
Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden;
Der Widerwille ist auch mir verschwunden,
Und beide scheinen gleich mich anzuziehen.
Es gilt wohl nur ein redliches Bemühen!
Und wenn wir erst in abgemeßnen Stunden
Mit Geist und Fleiß uns an die Kunst gebunden,
Mag frei Natur im Herzen wieder glühen.
So ists mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Höhe streben.
Wer Großes will, muß sich zusammenraffen;
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
Nature and art, they seem to shun each other
Yet in a trice can draw back close once more;
The aversion’s gone too that I felt before,
Both equally attract me, I discover.
An honest effort’s all that we require!
Only when we’ve assigned art clear-cut hours,
With full exertion of our mental powers,
Is nature free our hearts once more to inspire.
Such is the case with all forms of refinement:
In vain will spirits lacking due constraint
Seek the perfection of pure elevation.
He who’d do great things must display restraint;
The master shows himself first in confinement,
And law alone can grant us liberation.
(tr. John Irons)
The Goetheanum, located in Dornach, in the canton of Solothurn, Switzerland, is the world center for the anthroposophical movement. The building was designed by Rudolf Steiner and named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The First Goetheanum, a timber and concrete structure designed by Rudolf Steiner, was one of seventeen buildings Steiner designed between 1908 and 1925. It was intended as a Gesamtkunstwerk (the synthesis of diverse artistic media and sensory effects), infused with spiritual significance. Begun in 1913 to house the annual summer theater events of the Anthroposophical Society, it rapidly became the center of a small colony of spiritual seekers located in Dornach and based around Steiner. Numerous visual artists contributed to the building: architects created the unusual double-dome wooden structure over a curving concrete base, stained glass windows added color into the space, painters decorated the ceiling with motifs depicting the whole of human evolution, and sculptors carved huge column bases, capitals, and architraves with images of metamorphoses. Die Verwandlung ("The Metamorphosis," 1912) is a story by Franz Kafka, an Austrian writer who met Steiner. An Austrian occultist and architect, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) brings to mind a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) mentioned by Kinbote when he describes the King's flight:
He was still chuckling over the wench's discomfiture when he came to the tremendous stones amassed around a small lake which he had reached once or twice from the rocky Kronberg side many years ago. Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but; oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulderblades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on. But his heart was a conical ache poking him from below in the throat, and after a while he stopped again to take stock of conditions and decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks. He elected the second route and in due course reached the pass. (note to Line 149)
In 1914-16 Andrey Bely (the author of Peterburg, 1913) participated in the construction of the Goetheanum as a woodcarver. In the penultimate line of his Sonnett (1800) Goethe says that he loves to carve out of solid wood:
Sich in erneutem Kunstgebrauch zu üben,
Ist heilge Pflicht, die wir dir auferlegen.
Du kannst dich auch, wie wir, bestimmt bewegen
Nach Tritt und Schritt, wie es dir vorgeschrieben.
Denn eben die Beschränkung läßt sich lieben,
Wenn sich die Geister gar gewaltig regen;
Und wie sie sich denn auch gebärden mögen,
Das Werk zuletzt ist doch vollendet blieben.
So möcht ich selbst in künstlichen Sonetten,
In sprachgewandter Mühe kühnem Stolze,
Das Beste, was Gefühl mir gäbe, reimen;
Nur weiß ich hier mich nicht bequem zu betten.
Ich schneide sonst so gern aus ganzem Holze,
Und müßte nun doch auch mitunter leimen.
According to Goethe, he does not know how to bed down comfortably in a sonnet. The German verb betten (to bed down) has one more 't' in the middle than beten (to pray). De profundis [clamavi ad te, Domine] is a Catholic prayer of a sinner, trusting in the mercies of God. De Profundis is the title of Oscar Wilde's letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written during Wilde's imprisonment in Reading Gaol. In Oscar Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying: an Observation (1889) Vivian quotes Goethe's words In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister (It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself):
‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says, somewhere—
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style. However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism. The Tempest is the most perfect of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing. As a method, realism is a complete failure.'
In his poem Humanitad (1881) Oscar Wilde mentions the marble architrave on which the Grecian boys die smiling:
Still what avails it that she sought her cave
That murderous mother of red harlotries?
At Munich on the marble architrave
The Grecian boys die smiling, but the seas
Which wash AEgina fret in loneliness
Not mirroring their beauty; so our lives grow colourless...
Humanitad is Latin for "in mankind." Oscar Wilde famously said "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different." In a conversation with Shade Kinbote mentions Original Sin ("what we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete") and Shade says that when he was small he thought it meant Cain killing Abel. On Conmal's splendid painted bed ceil there are reproductions of Altamira animals (the Cave of Altamira in Cantabria, Spain, is renowned for prehistoric cave art featuring charcoal drawings and polychrome paintings of contemporary local fauna and human hands):
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)
Describing the last moments of Shade's life, Kinbote mentions the treeman and the caveman:
Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (note to Line 991)
The Grave of Keats (1877) is a sonnet by Oscar Wilde:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Wilde calls Keats "poet-painter of our English Land." Shade's dear bizarre Aunt Maud is a poet and a painter with a taste for realistic objects interlaced with grotesque growths and images of doom:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
According to Oscar Wilde, as a method, realism is a complete failure. A realibus ad realiora ("From what is real to what is more real") was the motto of Vyacheslav Ivanov (the Russian Goetheaner). The author of Rimskie sonety ("The Roman Sonnets," 1925), a cycle of nine sonnets, Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) spent the last years of his life and died in Rome. In his fragment Rim ("Rome," 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана,
придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: "Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!"
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
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”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski, a poem (1862) by Polonski, a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o (I. Annenski's penname, "Mr. Nobody"), a poem (1906) by Vyacheslav Ivanov and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. According to Georgiy Ivanov, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda" Blok (the author of “Italian Verses,” 1909) replied that he did not know what a coda is. Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but also Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.