Judge Goldsworth in Pale Fire; Judge Bald in Ada

In her note "Judge Goldsworth: Arcady's Arcane Landlord" in The Nabokovian (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35564) Mary Ross links Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote's landlord in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), to Saturn. In a canceled variant of Four: XLIII: 1-4 of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions lysoe Saturna temya (the bald pate of Saturn):

 

В глуши что делать в это время

Гулять? — Но голы все места

Как лысое Сатурна темя

Иль крепостная нищета.

 

In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 476) VN writes:

 

1-4 The fair copy reads:

 

What do then in the backwoods at that time?

Promenade? But all places are bare

as the bald pate of Saturn

or serfdom's destitution.

 

The draft (2370, f. 77v) is marked "2 genv. 1826."

Brodski, of course, makes a lot of this allusion to rural conditions before Lenin and Stalin.

There is a wonderful alliterative play on g and l:

 

V glushi chto delat' v eto vremya?

Gulyat'? No goly vse mesta,

Kak lysoe Saturna temya

Il' krepostnaya nishcheta.

 

Saturn is the ancient god of time or of seasons, and is usually represented as a grey-bearded old man with a bald pate and a scythe. He eats up his own children, "as revolutions eat up the liberties they engender" (as Vergniaud, the Girondist, said).

 

"The bald pate of Saturn" brings to mind Judge Bald mentioned by Van Veen (the narrator and main character) in VN's novel Ada (1969):

 

In those times, in this country’ incestuous’ meant not only ‘unchaste’ — the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics — but also implied (in the phrase ‘incestuous cohabitation,’ and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had long replaced appeals to ‘divine law’ by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, ‘incest’ could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate, stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples, weaklings, ‘muted mutates’ and, finally, to hopeless sterility. Now that smacked of ‘crime,’ and since nobody could be supposed to control judiciously orgies of indiscriminate inbreeding (somewhere in Tartary fifty generations of ever woolier and woolier sheep had recently ended abruptly in one hairless, five-legged, impotent little lamb — and the beheading of a number of farmers failed to resurrect the fat strain), it was perhaps better to ban ‘incestuous cohabitation’ altogether. Judge Bald and his followers disagreed, perceiving in ‘the deliberate suppression of a possible benefit for the sake of avoiding a probable evil’ the infringement of one of humanity’s main rights — that of enjoying the liberty of its evolution, a liberty no other creature had ever known. Unfortunately after the rumored misadventure of the Volga herds and herdsmen a much better documented fait divers happened in the U.S.A. at the height of the controversy. An American, a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk, described as an ‘habitually intoxicated laborer’ (‘a good definition,’ said Ada lightly, ‘of the true artist’), managed somehow to impregnate — in his sleep, it was claimed by him and his huge family — his five-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria Ivanov, and, then, five years later, also got Maria’s daughter, Daria, with child, in another fit of somnolence. Photographs of Maria, a ten-year old granny with little Daria and baby Varia crawling around her, appeared in all the newspapers, and all kinds of amusing puzzles were provided by the genealogical farce that the relationships between the numerous living — and not always clean-living — members of the Ivanov clan had become in angry Yukonsk. Before the sixty-year-old somnambulist could go on procreating, he was clapped into a monastery for fifteen years as required by an ancient Russian law. Upon his release he proposed to make honorable amends by marrying Daria, now a buxom lass with problems of her own. Journalists made a lot of the wedding, and the shower of gifts from well-wishers (old ladies in New England, a progressive poet in residence at Tennesee Waltz College, an entire Mexican high school, et cetera), and on the same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and demanded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course, only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long shadow upon the little matter of ‘favourable inbreeding.’ By mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols — ‘Peeping Pats,’ as the anti-Irish tabloids called them. (1.21)

 

Judge Bald reminds one of Lysevich, in Chekhov's story Bab'ye tsarstvo ("A Woman's Kingdom," 1894) Anna Akimovna's lawyer whose name comes from lysyi (bald). Albino is an anagram of Albion (the oldest known name of the island of Great Britain). Judge Goldsworth had gone on his Sabbatical to England. The main character in Chekhov’s story Doch’ Al’biona (“A Daughter of Albion,” 1883) is Wilka Charlesovna Fyce, the imperturbable English governess of an unceremonious Russian landowner’s children. Her patronymic brings to mind Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla (who lives in Judge Goldsworth's house).

 

In Chekhov’s story Ionych (1898) Ivan Petrovich Turkin (a jovial punster) mentions rimskoe pravo (Roman law):

 

-- Здравствуйте пожалуйста, -- сказал Иван Петрович, встречая его на крыльце. -- Очень, очень рад видеть такого приятного гостя. Пойдёмте, я представлю вас своей благоверной. Я говорю ему, Верочка, -- продолжал он, представляя доктора жене, -- я ему говорю, что он не имеет никакого римского права сидеть у себя в больнице, он должен отдавать свой досуг обществу. Не правда ли, душенька?

   -- Садитесь здесь, -- говорила Вера Иосифовна, сажая гостя возле себя. -- Вы можете ухаживать за мной. Мой муж ревнив, это Отелло, но ведь мы постараемся вести себя так, что он ничего не заметит.

 

"How do you do, if you please?" said Ivan Petrovich, meeting him on the steps. "Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verochka," he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife --"I tell him that he has no human right* to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society. Oughtn't he, darling?"

"Sit here," said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her. "You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous -- he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing." (chapter I)

 

*“he has no Roman law/right” in the original (in Russian pravo means “law” and “right”)

 

According to Kinbote, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman law:

 

The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade's. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows. (note to Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith)

 

In a letter of May 7, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that psychology is not nauka (a science) and compares it to alchemy:

 

Я прочёл «Ученика» Бурже в Вашем изложении и в русском переводе («Северный вестник»). Дело мне представляется в таком виде. Бурже талантливый, очень умный и образованный человек. Он так полно знаком с методом естественных наук и так его прочувствовал, как будто хорошо учился на естественном или медицинском факультете. Он не чужой в той области, где берётся хозяйничать, — заслуга, которой не знают русские писатели, ни новые, ни старые. Что же касается книжной, учёной психологии, то он её так же плохо знает, как лучшие из психологов. Знать её всё равно, что не знать, так как она не наука, а фикция, нечто вроде алхимии, которую пора уже сдать в архив.

 

I have read Bourget’s “Disciple” in the Russian translation. This is how it strikes me. Bourget is a gifted, very intelligent and cultured man. He is as thoroughly acquainted with the method of the natural sciences, and as imbued with it as though he had taken a good degree in science or medicine. He is not a stranger in the domain he proposes to deal with — a merit absent in Russian writers both new and old. As to the bookish, scientific psychology, he knows it as badly as the best among the psychologists. To know it is the same as not to know, because it is not a science but a fiction, something like alchemy which it is time to leave out of account.

 

In Pushkin’s Stsena iz Fausta (“A Scene from Faust,” 1825) Mephistopheles says that he is a psychologist and exclaims: o, vot nauka! (“ah, that is a science!”). The title character of a tragedy (1808) by Goethe, Doctor Faust was a legendary alchemist. In Goethe’s tragedy Mephistopheles calls the Witch who makes a potion for Faust treffliche Sibylle (“excellent Sibyl”) and refers to Faust as ein Mann von vielen Graden (“a man of manifold degrees”):

 

Mephistopheles:

Genug, genug, o treffliche Sibylle!
Gib deinen Trank herbei, und fülle
Die Schale rasch bis an den Rand hinan;
Denn meinem Freund wird dieser Trunk nicht schaden:
Er ist ein Mann von vielen Graden,
Der manchen guten Schluck getan. (Hexenküche)

 

Mephistopheles:

O Sibyl excellent, enough of adjuration!
But hither bring us thy potation,
And quickly fill the beaker to the brim!
This drink will bring my friend no injuries:
He is a man of manifold degrees,
And many draughts are known to him. (VI, “Witches’ Kitchen”)

 

While treffliche Sibylle brings to mind Sybil Shade (the poet's wife), ein Mann von vielen Graden reminds one of Gradus (the poet's murderer).

 

Pora sdat' v arkhiv (it is time to leave out of account), a phrase used by Chekhov in his letter to Suvorin, brings to mind v arkhivakh ada (in the archives of hell), a phrase used by Pushkin at the end of his poem O vy, kotorye lyubili… (“O you, who loved…” 1821):


О вы, которые любили
Парнаса тайные цветы
И своевольные мечты
Вниманьем слабым наградили,
Спасите труд небрежный мой
Под сенью покрова —
От рук невежества слепого,
От взоров зависти косой.
Картины, думы и рассказы
Для вас я вновь перемешал,
Смешное с важным сочетал
И бешеной любви проказы
В архивах ада отыскал...

 

...I have mixed up for you again

the pictures, thoughts and stories,

combined the funny with the serious

and in the archives of hell discovered

the pranks of frenzied love.

 

Pushkin described the pranks of frenzied love in his frivolous poem Gavriiliada (“The Gabrieliad,” 1821) written in Kishinev and first published only in 1918. In his EO Commentary (vol. III, pp. 205-206) VN mentions a frank letter that Pushkin wrote the tsar on Oct. 2, 1828, acknowledging his authorship of the Gabriel poem:

 

Anagrams in French of “Annette Olénine” blossom here and there in the margins of Pushkin’s manuscripts. One finds it written backward in the drafts of Poltava (2371, f. 11v; first half of October, 1828): ettenna eninelo; and the earnestness of his hopes is reflected in "Annette Pouchkine" jotted among the drafts of the first canto of Poltava, apparently on the very day that the repentant letter about the Gabriel poem was written to the tsar.

 

Some time in the winter of 1828-29 Pushkin proposed to Annette Olenin and was refused. Kinbote is an anagram of Botkine (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name in French spelling; cf. "Annette Olénine"). In a conversation at the Faculty Club Professor Pardon mentions Judge Goldsworth and asks Kinbote if his name is an anagram of Botkin or Botkine:

 

Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"

"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."

Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a "sympathetic ruler" had probably perished in prison.

A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."

Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."

"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.

Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"

"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.

"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."

"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.

"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon - American History - "that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."

"I hear," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -"

"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere -"

"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.

Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"

Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].

"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.

"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).

Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"

"Oxford, 1956," I replied.

"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to - what's his name - oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].

Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].

Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."

Shade: "Why, Sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].

"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."

"Aren't we, too, trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.

In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.

"Well, said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor). "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."

"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."

"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.

"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."

"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.

Gerald Emerald extended his hand - which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)

 

In the first of the two stanzas of his poem On Translating "Eugene Onegin" (1955) written after the meter and rhyme scheme of the EO stanza VN mentions the parasites who are pardoned, if he (VN) has Pushkin’s pardon:

 

What is translation? On a platter
A poets pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
the parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

 

According to Kinbote, Sybil Shade used to call him “the monstrous parasite of a genius:”

 

From the very first I tried to behave with the utmost courtesy toward my friend's wife, and from the very first she disliked and distrusted me. I was to learn later that when alluding to me in public she used to call me "an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius." I pardon her--her and everybody. (note to Line 247)

 

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 of Kinbote's Commentary). There is a hope that, after Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov ("half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again. In Chapter Five (VII) of EO Pushkin describes divination and mentions nadezhda (hope) that lies to old age with its childish lisp:

 

Что ж? Тайну прелесть находила
И в самом ужасе она:
Так нас природа сотворила,
К противуречию склонна.
Настали святки. То-то радость!
Гадает ветреная младость,
Которой ничего не жаль,
Перед которой жизни даль
Лежит светла, необозрима;
Гадает старость сквозь очки
У гробовой своей доски,
Всё потеряв невозвратимо;
И всё равно: надежда им
Лжёт детским лепетом своим.

 

Yet — in her very terror

she found a secret charm:

thus has created us

nature, inclined to contradictions.

Yuletide is here. Now that is joy!

Volatile youth divines —

who nought has to regret,

in front of whom the faraway of life

extends luminous, boundless;

old age divines, through spectacles,

at its sepulchral slab,

all having irrecoverably lost;

nor does it matter: hope to them

lies with its childish lisp.

 

In the preceding stanza (Five: VI: 9) Pushkin mentions chyornyi monakh (a black monk). Chyornyi monakh ("The Black Monk," 1894) is a story by Chekhov. In the next stanza of EO (Five: VIII: 8-10) Pushkin quotes a ditty of the ancient days about the rich countrymen who heap up silver by the spadeful. Balthasar, Prince of Loam (Kinbote's black gardener) hits Gradus with his spade:

 

One of the bullet that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart. His presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my
balance, and, simultaneously, to complete the farce of fate, my gardener's spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow to the pate, felling him and sending his weapon flying from his grasp. Our savior retrieved it and helped me to my feet. (note to Line 1000)

 

According to Kinbote, he cannot write out the odd dark word his gardener employed:

 

You will chide me, my modest man, for writing so much about you in this note, but I feel I must pay you this tribute. After all, you saved my life. You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as; you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood - (Superstitiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.) (note to Line 998)

 

Like Kinbote, Pushkin's Tatiana is superstitious:

 

Татьяна верила преданьям
Простонародной старины,
И снам, и карточным гаданьям,
И предсказаниям луны.
Ее тревожили приметы;
Таинственно ей все предметы
Провозглашали что-нибудь,
Предчувствия теснили грудь.
Жеманный кот, на печке сидя,
Мурлыча, лапкой рыльце мыл:
То несомненный знак ей был,
Что едут гости. Вдруг увидя
Младой двурогий лик луны
На небе с левой стороны,

 

Она дрожала и бледнела.
Когда ж падучая звезда
По небу тёмному летела
И рассыпалася, — тогда
В смятенье Таня торопилась,
Пока звезда ещё катилась,
Желанье сердца ей шепнуть.
Когда случалось где-нибудь
Ей встретить чёрного монаха
Иль быстрый заяц меж полей
Перебегал дорогу ей,
Не зная, что начать со страха,
Предчувствий горестных полна,
Ждала несчастья уж она.

 

Tatiana credited the lore

of plain-folk ancientry,

dreams, cartomancy,

prognostications by the moon.

Portents disturbed her:

mysteriously all objects

foretold her something,

presentiments constrained her breast.

The mannered tomcat sitting on the stove,

purring, would wash his muzzlet with his paw:

to her 'twas an indubitable sign

that guests were coming. Seeing all at once

the young two-horned moon's visage

in the sky on her left,

 

she trembled and grew pale.

Or when a falling star

along the dark sky flew

and dissipated, then

in agitation Tanya hastened

to whisper, while the star still rolled,

her heart's desire to it.

When anywhere she happened

a black monk to encounter,

or a swift hare amid the fields

would run across her path,

so scared she knew not what to undertake,

full of grievous forebodings,

already she expected some mishap. (EO, Five: V-VI)

 

In Chekhov's play Chayka ("The Seagull," 1896) Treplev says that his mother (the ageing actress Arkadina) is superstitious and mentions durman (the intoxicant):

 

Психологический курьёз - моя мать. Бесспорно талантлива, умна, способна рыдать над книжкой, отхватит тебе всего Некрасова наизусть, за больными ухаживает, как ангел; но попробуй похвалить при ней Дузе! Ого-го! Нужно хвалить только её одну, нужно писать о ней, кричать, восторгаться её необыкновенною игрой в "La dame aux camelias" или в "Чад жизни", но так как здесь, в деревне, нет этого дурмана, то вот она скучает и злится, и все мы - её враги, все мы виноваты. Затем она суеверна, боится трёх свечей, тринадцатого числа.

 

My mother is a curious psychological case. She may be talented, and sensitive and if you’re sick she’s like an angel of mercy; but don’t you dare praise another actress in her presence! Did I mention that she’s competitive? That only she can be applauded, or written about, or raved over. She doesn’t get any of that out here. There’s no that intoxicative praise here in the country, so she gets grumpy and bad-tempered. Then she thinks we’re all out to get her, and claims, “everything’s our fault”. Neurotic and incredibly superstitious. She flips out if someone lights up three cigarettes with one match, or if she realizes it’s Friday the thirteenth, or if someone utters Macbeth backstage. (Act One)

 

In Ada Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette are the children of Marina Durmanov (la Durmanska). The last note of Marina's poor mad twin sister Aqua was signed "My sister's sister who teper' iz ada (now is out of hell," 1.3). Chekhov’s story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p’yanitsy (“Woman as Seen by a Drunkard,” 1885), in which girls under sixteen are compared to aqua distillatae (the distilled water), is signed Brat moego brata (“My brother’s brother”). In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov calls Suvorin gor’kiy p’yanitsa (“a hard drinker”), complains that modern art, and literature in particular, lacks the alcohol that would intoxicate the reader and modestly compares his story Palata №. 6 (“Ward No. 6,” 1892) to sweet lemonade:

 

Вас нетрудно понять, и Вы напрасно браните себя за то, что неясно выражаетесь. Вы горький пьяница, а я угостил Вас сладким лимонадом, и Вы, отдавая должное лимонаду, справедливо замечаете, что в нём нет спирта. В наших произведениях нет именно алкоголя, который бы пьянил и порабощал, и это Вы хорошо даёте понять. Отчего нет? Оставляя в стороне «Палату № 6» и меня самого, будем говорить вообще, ибо это интересней. Будем говорить об общих причинах, коли Вам не скучно, и давайте захватим целую эпоху. Скажите по совести, кто из моих сверстников, т. е. людей в возрасте 30--45 лет, дал миру хотя одну каплю алкоголя? Разве Короленко, Надсон и все нынешние драматурги не лимонад? Разве картины Репина или Шишкина кружили Вам голову? Мило, талантливо, Вы восхищаетесь и в то же время никак не можете забыть, что Вам хочется курить. Наука и техника переживают теперь великое время, для нашего же брата это время рыхлое, кислое, скучное, сами мы кислы и скучны, умеем рождать только гуттаперчевых мальчиков, и не видит этого только Стасов, которому природа дала редкую способность пьянеть даже от помоев. Причины тут не в глупости нашей, не в бездарности и не в наглости, как думает Буренин, а в болезни, которая для художника хуже сифилиса и полового истощения. У нас нет "чего-то", это справедливо, и это значит, что поднимите подол нашей музе, и Вы увидите там плоское место. Вспомните, что писатели, которых мы называем вечными или просто хорошими и которые пьянят нас, имеют один общий и весьма важный признак: они куда-то идут и Вас зовут туда же, и Вы чувствуете не умом, а всем своим существом, что у них есть какая-то цель, как у тени отца Гамлета, которая недаром приходила и тревожила воображение. У одних, смотря по калибру, цели ближайшие -- крепостное право, освобождение родины, политика, красота или просто водка, как у Дениса Давыдова, у других цели отдалённые -- бог, загробная жизнь, счастье человечества и т. п. Лучшие из них реальны и пишут жизнь такою, какая она есть, но оттого, что каждая строчка пропитана, как соком, сознанием цели, Вы, кроме жизни, какая есть, чувствуете ещё ту жизнь, какая должна быть, и это пленяет Вас.

 

It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside "Ward No. 6" and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let us discuss the general causes, if that won't bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

 

Kinbote asks Shade if the muse (embowered by Shade between Goldsmith and Wordsworth, "the two masters of the heroic couplet") has been kind to him:

 

Through the trees I distinguished John's white shirt and gray hair; he sat in his Nest (as he called it), the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note to lines 47-48. I could not keep from advancing a little nearer - oh, discreetly, almost on tiptoe; but then I noticed he was resting, not writing, and I openly walked up to his porch or perch. His elbow was on the table, his fist supported his temple, his wrinkles were all awry, his eyes moist and misty; he looked like an old tipsy witch. He lifted his free hand in greeting without changing his attitude, which although not unfamiliar to me struck me this time as more forlorn than pensive.

"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"

"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."

The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.

"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).

"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."

"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."

"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.

"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"

"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)

 

The Tarot cards (mentioned by Mary Ross in her note) are used for divination. The personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables, Marie Anne Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as the Tarot cards. The epigraph to Pushkin's story Pikovaya dama ("The Queen of Spades," 1833) is "The queen of spades denotes hidden ill-will." It seems that Sybil Shade can be linked to the old Countess (who sixty years ago was known in Paris as la Vénus muscovite and who tells Hermann the secret of three cards) in Pushkin's "Queen of Spades." In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 97) VN points out that de la Motte Fouqué’s Pique-Dame (“Reports from the Madhouse. From the Swedish,” 1826) was known to Pushkin when he wrote “The Queen of Spades.” In Pushkin’s story Hermann becomes a lunatic and ends up in a madhouse where he occupies Ward Seventeen:

 

Германн сошёл с ума. Он сидит в Обуховской больнице в 17-м нумере, не отвечает ни на какие вопросы и бормочет необыкновенно скоро: «Тройка, семёрка, туз! Тройка, семёрка, дама!..»

 

Herman became a lunatic. He was confined in Ward Seventeen of the Obukhov hospital, where he spoke to no one, but kept constantly murmuring in a monotonous tone: “The tray, seven, ace! The tray, seven, queen!”

 

The Russian Revolution (that was to eat up the liberties it engendered) took place in 1917. It seems that Botkin writes Pale Fire in a madhouse.

 

 

Let me draw your attention to the expanded version of my previous post, "low hum of harmony in Pale Fire, Desdemonia in Ada."