Word-play in Pale Fire

MISPRINT + ADAM/DAMA = MADMAN + SPIRIT

 

Misprints play a significant part in Chekhov's story Dushechka ("The Darling," 1899). In a letter of Apr. 23, 1890, to his sister Chekhov (who was on his way to Sakhalin) calls the cows on the green banks of the Volga klassnye damy (“class ladies,” school chaperons, whose duty was to sit in the classroom while the girls were receiving instruction from a master):

 

На берегу бродят классные дамы и щиплют зелёную травку, слышится изредка пастушеский рожок.

The class ladies wander about on the banks, nipping at the green grass. The shepherd’s horn can be heard now and then.

 

At the end of his story Dama s sobachkoy (“The Lady with the Dog,” 1899) Chekhov uses the phrase daleko-daleko (far, far away):

 

Потом они долго советовались, говорили о том, как избавить себя от необходимости прятаться, обманывать, жить в разных городах, не видеться подолгу. Как освободиться от этих невыносимых пут?

- Как? Как? - спрашивал он, хватая себя за голову. - Как?

И казалось, что ещё немного - и решение будет найдено, и тогда начнётся новая, прекрасная жизнь; и обоим было ясно, что до конца ещё далеко-далеко и что самое сложное и трудное только ещё начинается.

 

Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these intolerable fetters?

“How? How?” he repeated, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at A decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning. (chapter IV)

 

According to Kinbote, onhava-onhava means in Zemblan “far, far away:”

 

On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium - when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out - and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.

Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor - one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!

He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant “of the Umruds,” an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulated him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places -- Our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never -- was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumudrov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew - to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)

 

Kuprin’s story about a racehorse, Izumrud ("Emerald," 1907), is dedicated to the memory of Tolstoy’s Kholstomer (“Strider: the Story of a Horse”). Tolstoy is the author of the Afterword to Chekhov's “Darling.” In his review of Bely’s novel Peterburg (1914) Andrey Polyanin (the penname of Sofia Parnok) quotes Tolstoy’s words from his "Afterword" to Chekhov's story:

 

С благоговением вспоминается фраза Льва Толстого из чудесного его "Послесловия" к рассказу Чехова "Душечка:" "Любовь не менее свята, будет ли её предметом Кукин или Спиноза, Паскаль, Шиллер".

"Love is no less sacred whether its object is Kukin or Spinoza, Pascal, Schiller."

 

When Kukin dies, Olenka (the main character in "The Darling") receives the following telegram:

 

«Иван Петрович скончался сегодня скоропостижно сючала ждем распоряжений хохороны вторник».

"IVAN PETROVITCH DIED SUDDENLY TO-DAY. AWAITING IMMATE INSTRUCTIONS FUFUNERAL TUESDAY."

 

At the end of the first poem in her collection Loza (“The Vine,” 1922), Tam rodina moya, gde voskhodil moy dukh... ("My native land is there, where my spirit rose..."), Sofia Parnok mentions Sugdeyskaya Sibilla (“the Sugdeyan Sybil;” Sugdeya is the Greek name of Sudak, a place in the Crimea):

 

Там родина моя, где восходил мой дух,
Как в том солончаке лоза; где откипела
Кровь трудная моя, и окрылился слух,
И немощи своей возрадовалось тело.

Там музыкой огня звучал мне треск цикад
И шорохи земли, надтреснутой от зноя,
Там поднесла ты мне прохладный виноград
К губам обугленным - причастие святое... 

И если то был сон, то, чтобы я
Сна незабвенного вовеки не забыла,
О, восприемница прекрасная моя,
Хотя во снах мне снись, Сугдейская Сибилла!

 

The “real” name of both Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). Russian for "swallow," lastochka also brings to mind Life Everlasting.

 

In the first stanza of his last poem, On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year (1824), Byron says that he cannot be beloved:

 

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

 

In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron - o, bez sozhalen'ya... ("Like Byron to Greece, o without regret..." 1927) G. Ivanov mentions blednyi ogon' (pale fire). Sofia Parnok’s review of G. Ivanov's collection Veresk (“Heather,” 1916) begins as follows:

 

Вода не подражает небу, отражая его в себе, она ничего не делает для того, чтобы отражать, — она только пуста и прозрачна.

Water does not imitate the sky, reflecting it in itself, it does not do anything in order to reflect – it is only empty and transparent.

 

At the beginning of his poem Shade mentions the reflected sky:

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky (ll. 1-4)

 

The surname Parnok brings to mind Arnor, the society sculptor and poet who used Fleur de Fyler's breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam (note to Line 80).

 

The capital of Zembla, Onhava suggests “heaven.” In The Giaour (1813) Byron says:

 

Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)

 

Describing the King's escape from Zembla, Kinbote mentions the mainland of madness, Onhava and Yeslove:

 

The Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness), divides it into two parts, the flourishing eastern region of Onhava and other townships, such as Aros and Grindelwod, and the much narrower western strip with its quaint fishing hamlets and pleasant beach resorts. The two coasts are connected by two asphalted highways; the older one shirks difficulties by running first along the eastern slopes northward to Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla, and only then turning west at the northmost point of the peninsula; the newer one, an elaborate, twisting, marvelously graded road, traverses the range westward from just north of Onhava to Bregberg, and is termed in tourist booklets a "scenic drive." Several trails cross the mountains at various points and lead to passes none of which exceeds an altitude of five thousand feet; a few peaks rise some two thousand feet higher and retain their snow in midsummer; and from one of them, the highest and hardest, Mt. Glitterntin, one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east, beyond the Gulf of Surprise, a dim iridescence which some say is Russia. (note to Line 149)

 

In his Commentary Kinbote mentions the Bishop of Yeslove who tried to persuade the King to take a wife:

 

John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.

He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434).

After line 274 there is a false start in the draft:

 

I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...

 

One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)

 

At the beginning of Canto Eleven of Don Juan Byron mentions Bishop Berkeley and says that he would shatter gladly all matters down to stone or lead, or adamant, to find the World a spirit:

 

When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"

       And proved it—'twas no matter what he said:

They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,

       Too subtle for the airiest human head;

And yet who can believe it! I would shatter

       Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,

Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,

And wear my head, denying that I wear it.

 

The stanza’s last line brings to mind the English title of VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (1935), Invitation to a Beheading. The epigraph to IB is from the invented French thinker Delalande:

 

Comme un fou se croit Dieu

nous nous croyons mortels.

Delalande. Discours sur les ombres

 

As a madman believes that he is God,

we believe that we are mortal.

Delalande. "Conversations of the Shades"

 

According to Shade, he likes his name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man" in Spanish...

 

Let me use this opportunity to draw your attention to the updated version of my previous post, "Ubit' il' ne ubit', good night for mothing, Ember & Krug in Bend Sinister; Mr Arshin in Ada" (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35646)