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) mentions the poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, and points out that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
Locock is 'the son of Luke.' On the other hand, Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames) would know that, according to a different version, Locock is derived from a diminutive form of the male personal name "Love" or "Low" a development of the Old English pre 7th Century "Lufa" from "lufa", love. It brings to mind Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), an English novelist and poet, a close friend of P. B. Shelley (the author of To a Skylark, 1820). Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, Kinbote mentions the green, gray, bluish mountains – Falkberg with its hood of snow, Mutraberg with the fan of its avalanche, Paberg (Mt. Peacock), and others:
Great fallen crags diversified the wayside. The nippern (domed hills or "reeks") to the south were broken by a rock and grass slope into light and shadow. Northward melted the green, gray, bluish mountains – Falkberg with its hood of snow, Mutraberg with the fan of its avalanche, Paberg (Mt. Peacock), and others – separated by narrow dim valleys with intercalated cotton-wool bits of cloud that seemed placed between the receding sets of ridges to prevent their flanks from scraping against one another. Beyond them, in the final blue, loomed Mt. Glitterntin, a serrated edge of bright foil; and southward, a tender haze enveloped more distant ridges which led to one another in an endless array, through every grade of soft evanescence. (note to Line 149)
Paberg seems to blend påfågel (Swedish for “peacock;” the Swedish word fågel corresponds to German Vogel and means “bird”) with Vilhelm Moberg (1898-1973), a Swedish author whose play Domaren (“The Judge,” 1957) was made into a film (that entered the 1961 Cannes Film Festival) by Alf Sjöberg (mo means in Swedish "sandy heath;" sjö is "sea, lake"). Abram Hannibal’s second wife, Christine Regina Sjöberg (1717-81) was Pushkin’s great-grandmother. In the Swedish word domaren there is Russian dom (house, home). Sumasshedshiy dom means "madhouse." The action in Moberg's play and in Sjöberg's film takes place in a madhouse. It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword to Shade's poem not "Cedarn, Utana" but in a madhouse near Quebec. Mutraberg seems to blend perlamutr (Russian for "mother of pearl"), a word that comes from German Perlmutter, with Berg (mountain in German). Perlamutrovka is Russian for "a tortoiseshell" (cf. peacock butterfly).