In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his childhood and mentions the Canadian maid and her niece Adéle who had seen the Pope:
A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.
Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,
I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed
For everybody to be always well,
Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adéle
Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God. (ll. 79-85)
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
Pius X, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, 1835-1914; Pope 1903-1914. (note to Line 85)
At the beginning of his poem Zone that prefaces his collection Alcools ("Alcohols," 1913) Guillaume Apollinaire mentions Pope Pius X, "the most modern European:"
À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l’air d’être anciennes
La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion
Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation
Seul en Europe tu n’es pas antique ô Christianisme
L’Européen le plus moderne c’est vous Pape Pie X
Et toi que les fenêtres observent la honte te retient
D’entrer dans une église et de t’y confesser ce matin
Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut
Voilà la poésie ce matin et pour la prose il y a les journaux
Il y a les livraisons à 25 centimes pleines d’aventures policières
Portraits des grands hommes et mille titres divers
At last you're tired of this elderly world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up living with antiquity
Even the automobiles are antiques
Religion alone remains entirely new religion
Remains as simple as an airport hangar
In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old
The most modern European Pope Pius X it's you
The windows watch and shame has sealed
The confessionals against you this morning
Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud
Here's poetry this morning and for prose you're reading the tabloids
Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
Biographies of great men a thousand various titles
In his poem Apollinaire describes a dream-like walk through Paris that spans an entire day and compares the Eiffel Tower to a shepherdess and the bridges, to sheep. In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions a Zemblan herdsman who attaches his humble provisions and ragged blanket to the meekest of his cows when driving them up to the vebodar (upland pastures):
Line 137: lemniscate
"A unicursal bicircular quartic" says my weary old dictionary. I cannot understand what this has to do with bicycling and suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning. As other poets before him, he seems to have fallen here under the spell of misleading euphony.
To take a striking example: what can be more resounding, more resplendent, more suggestive of choral and sculptured beauty, than the word coramen? In reality, however, it merely denotes the rude strap with which a Zemblan herdsman attaches his humble provisions and ragged blanket to the meekest of his cows when driving them up to the vebodar (upland pastures).
While vebodar seems to hint at khlebodar (he who hands out bread), a word used by Leskov in his novel Gora (“The Mountain,” 1890), coramen blends gora (mountain) with simvolicheskiy “shelomen” sovremennosti (the symbolic "culmen" of modernity) mentioned by Andrey Bely in his essay Nastoyashchee i budushchee russkoy literartury (“The Present and the Future of Russian Literature,” 1907) included in his book Lug zelyonyi (“The Green Meadow,” 1910):
Есть прообраз русской литературы в русской литературе; его отделяет от нас почти тысячелетие. Я говорю о "Слове о полку Игореве". В этом воистину пророческом "Слове" -- альфа и омега литературы русской. "Слово" -- апокалипсис русского народа. Как оно близко от нас! Читаешь, и кажется, будто написано оно не тогда, а теперь...
Религиозная жажда освобождения глубоко иррациональна в литературе русской. Пусть Гоголь и Достоевский осознают эту борьбу как борьбу с чертом, а Некрасов и Глеб Успенский здесь видят иное: образы Гоголя, как и Некрасова, -- живые символы современности: это -- маяки, освещающие нам путь к будущему. Гоголь, Некрасов -- оба одинаково иррациональны; в том и другом тенденция -- лишь средство сказать несказанное, выразить невыразимое.
У Пушкина, как у Толстого, у Достоевского, как у Гоголя, как у Некрасова, сходственно отображается невыразимая тягость ночи, нависающая над низменностью российской. Барина у Толстого заметает снегом метель: русский народ еще доселе в пространствах умеет видеть нечистую силу: разные бесы бродят в холодных, голодных, в бесплодных наших степях. И степи наши -- чужие нам степи, половецкие. Мы, как древние витязи, боремся в этих степях с силой невидимой, где зори будто чарлёные половецкие щиты. Хочется крикнуть в степях пророческим возгласом "Слова": "О русская земля, за шеломенем еси".
Символический "шеломен" современности -- перевал к неизвестному; и лучшие образы литературы русской; именно образы литературного прошлого, ближе нам хулиганских выкриков современности: там, а не здесь встречает нас наша забота о будущем. Мы только сейчас, быть может, впервые доросли до понимания отечественной литературы. Пусть русская критика втиснула образы нашей литературы в узкие рамки преходящей догматики: мы не верим, не можем верить догматической указке прошлого. Сколько лет учили нас любить Некрасова и обходить Достоевского; потом нас учили обратному. А вот любим мы -- и того, и другого. Теперь общественные стремления кристаллизовались в определенных платформах; мы критически разбираем платформы; мы понимаем теперь -- не политика вовсе влечет нас к Некрасову, и вовсе не она отталкивает нас от Достоевского.
Bely quotes the author of Slovo o polku Igoreve (“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”) who several times exclaims: O russkaya zemlya, za shelomenem esi! (“O Russian land, you are already behind the culmen!”). According to Bely, the prophetic Slovo is the alpha and omega of Russian literature. Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) drowned in Lake Omega. In a poem addressed to Valeriy Bryusov (in reply to Bryusov’s collection Ozimya, “Winter Crops”) Sergey Solovyov (Bely’s close friend) says that, in the book of Russian verse, Pushkin is alpha and Bryusov, omega:
Прах, вспоенный влагой снега,
Режет гения соха.
Звука Пушкинского нега!
Пушкин – альфа, ты – омега
В книге русского стиха.
One of Bryusov's collections of poetry is entitled Zerkalo teney ("The Mirror of Shadows," 1912). Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius:
He [Charles Xavier] 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)
Coeur couronne et miroir ("Heart, Crown and Mirror," 1918) is a poem (calligram) by Apollinaire:
Mon Coeur pareil a une flamme renversee
Les rois qui meurent tour a tour
Reanaissent au couer des poets
Dans ce miroir je suis enclos vivant et vrai
Comme on imagine les anges
Et non comme sont les reflets
My heart is like an inverted flame
The kings who have died one by one
Are reborn in poets' hearts
In this mirror I am captured alive and true
The way you imagine angels
And not only as a reflection.
Couronne (Crown) brings to mind the Zemblan crown jewels and the korona-vorona-korova misprint mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
Translators of Shade's poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of "mountain" into "fountain": it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words. However! There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words are involved. The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocryphal). A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically "corrected," it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation. (note to Line 803)
In a newspaper account of the coronation of Nicholas II, the word korona was misprinted at first vorona and then korova. At the end of his poem Nash tsar’ (“Our Tsar,” 1907) written for the tenth anniversary of the coronation of Nicholas II Balmont (the author of a modernized version of Slovo) says that he who started reigning with Hodynka (the Khodynka tragedy, a human stampede that occurred on 30 May, 1896, on Khodynski Field in Moscow, during the festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II) will finish standing at the scaffold:
Наш царь - Мукден, наш царь - Цусима,
Наш царь - кровавое пятно,
Зловонье пороха и дыма,
В котором разуму - темно...
Наш царь - убожество слепое,
Тюрьма и кнут, подсуд, расстрел,
Царь-висельник, тем низкий вдвое,
Что обещал, но дать не смел.
Он трус, он чувствует с запинкой,
Но будет, час расплаты ждёт.
Кто начал царствовать - Ходынкой,
Тот кончит - встав на эшафот.
Our tsar is Mukden, tsar - Tsushima,
Our tsar is the stain of blood,
The stench of gunpowder and reek smoke,
In which the intellect feels - dark...
Our tsar is a blind-sighted squalor,
prison and whip, the judge, the shoot,
The king - the gallows, double low,
And what he promised, he dared not.
He is a coward, fumble feeling,
But hour of reckoning will come.
Who started reigning with - Hodynka,
will finish - at the scaffold stand.
In his Commentary Kinbote mentions the Russian adventurer Hodinski, Queen Yaruga’s goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, who is said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste, generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century:
When I was a child, Russia enjoyed quite a vogue at the court of Zembla but that was a different Russia--a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations. We may add that Charles the Beloved could boast of some Russian blood. In medieval times two of his ancestors had married Novgorod princesses. Queen Yaruga (reigned 1799-1800) his great-great-granddam, was half Russian; and most historians believe that Yaruga's only child Igor was not the son of Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) but the fruit of her amours with the Russian adventurer Hodinski, her goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste, generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century. (note to Line 681)
Hodinski is also known as Hodyna:
Hodinski, Russian adventurer, d .1800, also known as Hodyna, 681; resided in Zembla 1778-1800; author of a celebrated pastiche and lover of Princess (later Queen) Yaruga (q. v.), mother of Igor II, grandmother of Thurgus (q. v.). (Index)
At the end of Slovo a bard named Hodyna is mentioned:
Рекъ Боянъ и Ходына Святъславля, песнотворца стараго времени Ярославля: «Ольгова коганя хоти! Тяжко ти головы кроме плечю, зло и телу кроме головы», — Руской земли безъ Игоря!
Said Boyan, song-maker of the times of old, [of the campaigns] of the kogans -- Svyatoslav, Yaroslav, Oleg: "Hard as it is for the head to be without shoulders bad it is for the body to be without head," -- for the Russian land to be without Igor. (834-841)
Apollinaire's poem Zone brings to mind two silent time zones mentioned by Kinbote when he describes the last day of Shade's life and Gradus' day in New York:
Thus, some time in the morning of July 21, the last day of his life, John Shade began his last batch of cards (seventy-seven to eighty). Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch. (note to Line 949)