lady in lilac with fan in Despair

Iron corsets are not numbered, of course. A bare birch tree with forked trunk that appears familiar to Hermann (see a quote in my post "young crows, ninth of May & April 1 in Despair:" https://thenabokovian.org/node/35773) makes him look at the number on the streetlamp, that's all. Btw., the forked birch tree in Despair brings to mind forked lightning mentioned by Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) in his poem "The Nature of Electricity:"

The dead, the gentle dead--who knows?--
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell. (Kinbote's note to Line 347)

In its unfinished form Shade's poem Pale Fire has 999 lines. 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”).

In Despair Hermann kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. Describing his last New Year party, Hermann calls himself chelovek-molniya (the Human Lightning):

В таком приблизительно расположении духа я встретил Новый год, – помню эту черную тушу ночи, дуру-ночь, затаившую дыхание, ожидавшую боя часов, сакраментального срока. За столом сидят Лида, Ардалион, Орловиус и я, неподвижные и стилизованные, как зверьё на гербах: Лида, положившая локоть на стол и настороженно поднявшая палец, голоплечая, в пёстром, как рубашка игральной карты, платье; Ардалион, завернувшийся в плед (дверь на балкон открыта), с красным отблеском на толстом львином лице; Орловиус – в черном сюртуке, очки блестят, отложной воротничок поглотил края крохотного черного галстука; – и я, человек-молния, озаривший эту картину. Кончено, разрешаю вам двигаться, скорее сюда бутылку, сейчас пробьют часы. Ардалион разлил по бокалам шампанское, и все замерли опять. Боком и поверх очков Орловиус глядел на старые серебряные часы, выложенные им на скатерть: ещё две минуты. Кто-то на улице не выдержал – затрещал и лопнул, – а потом снова – напряжённая тишина. Фиксируя часы, Орловиус медленно протянул к бокалу старческую, с когтями грифона, руку.

It was more or less in such a frame of mind that I met New Year’s Eve; I remember the black carcass of that night, that half-witted hag of a night, holding her breath and listening for the stroke of the sacramental hour. Disclosed, sitting at the table: Lydia, Ardalion, Orlovius, and I, quite still and blazon-stiff like heraldic creatures. Lydia with her elbow on the table, her index finger raised watchfully, her shoulders naked, her dress as variegated as the back of a playing card; Ardalion swathed in a laprobe (because of the open balcony door), with a red sheen upon his fat leonine face; Orlovius in a black frock coat, his glasses gleaming, his turned-down collar swallowing the ends of his tiny black tie; and I, the Human Lightning, illuminating that scene.

Good, now you may move again, be quick with that bottle, the clock is going to strike. Ardalion poured out the champagne, and we were all dead-still once more. Askance and over his spectacles, Orlovius looked at his old silver turnip that lay on the tablecloth; still two minutes left. Somebody in the street was unable to hold out any longer and cracked with a loud report; and then again that strained silence. Staring at his watch, Orlovius slowly extended toward his glass a senile hand with the claws of a griffin. (Chapter Six)

Hopkins' sonnet that you quoted to the waist ends as follows:

He! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;

And, blazoned in however bold the name,        

Man Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.

And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,

That … in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame

My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.

Man Jack brings to mind Jakob Gradus (alias Jack Degree), a Jack of small trades and a killer (Shade's murderer).

In his note to Line 149 (one foot upon a mountain) of Shade's poem Kinbote mentions "a flash of lightning:"

A handshake, a flash of lightning. As the King waded into the damp, dark bracken, its odor, its lacy resilience, and the mixture of soft growth and steep ground reminded him of the times he had picnicked hereabouts - in another part of the forest but on the same mountainside, and higher up, as a boy, on the boulderfield where Mr. Campbell had once twisted an ankle and had to be carried down, smoking his pipe, by two husky attendants. Rather full memories, on the whole. Wasn't there a hunting box nearby - just beyond Silfhar Falls? Good capercaillie and woodcock shooting - a sport much enjoyed by his late mother, Queen Blenda, a tweedy and horsy queen. Now as then, the rain seethed in the black trees, and if you paused you heard your heart thumping, and the distant roar of the torrent. What is the time, kot or? He pressed his repeater and, undismayed, it hissed and tinkled out ten twenty-one.

"a tawny angel," "a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins" (cf. "groundlong childhood" in Hopkins' sonnet) and "the local shepherds:"

A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: "Garh! Garh!" Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father's wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan.

According to Kinbote, Shade kept a clockwork toy (a tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy) as a kind of memento mori:

By a stroke of luck I have seen it! One evening in May or June I dropped in to remind my friend about a collection of pamphlets, by his grandfather, an eccentric clergyman, that he had once said was stored in the basement. I found him gloomily waiting for some people (members of his department, I believe, and their wives) who were coming for a formal dinner. He willingly took me down into the basement but after rummaging among piles of dusty books and magazines, said he would try to find them some other time. It was then that I saw it on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock. He, thinking I might think it had belonged to his dead daughter, hastily explained it was as old as he. The boy was a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow was now all bent and broken. He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a kind of memento mori - he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy. We were interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above; but never mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key. (note to Line 143)

Part Three of Lev Shestov's Potestas clavium. Vlast’ klyuchey (“Power of the Keys,” 1923) consists of three essays the first of which is entitled Memento mori. In his book Shestov quotes Martin Luther (1483-1546), a leader of the Protestant Reformation who mentions fidei summus gradus (the highest degree of faith) in De servo arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will,” 1525), Luther’s reply to Erasmus of Rotterdam (the author De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, 1524):

Лютер опытом своей жизни был приведён к такому признанию, которое для нашего уха звучит, как кощунственный парадокс: "Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo is Deus sit misericors et justus, qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide" (De servo arbitrio, Вейм. изд., т. XVIII, 633 стр.), т. е.: высшая степень веры - верить, что тот милосерд, кто столь немногих спасает и столь многих осуждает, что тот справедлив, кто, по своему решению, сделал нас преступными, так что, выражаясь словами Эразма, кажется, что он радуется мукам несчастных и скорей достоин ненависти, чем любви. Если бы своим разумом я мог бы понять, как такой Бог может быть справедливым и милосердным, не было бы нужды в вере. Я не могу здесь приводить дальнейших признаний Лютера, но тот, кто поймёт весь ужас человека, приведённого к таким признаниям, поймёт и смысл католического potestas clavium.

Luther's own experience forced him to that confession which resounds in our ears like a blasphemous paradox: Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur possem ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo si Deus sit misericors et justus qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide (Deservo arbitrio, ed. Weimar, I, XVIII, p. 633). That is, "the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and damns so many men, that He is righteous who by His own will has necessarily made us guilty so that, according to Erasmus, it seems that He rejoices in the suffering of the miserable and is more worthy of being hated than loved. If I could understand with my reason how such a God can be righteous and merciful, faith would not be necessary." I cannot here quote other confessions of Luther's, but he who has understood the horror that a man
forced to such confessions must have felt will also understand the meaning of Catholicism's potestas clavium. (Part One, 4)

Jakob Gradus is a son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga (note to Line 17). A poet who mentions memento mori in his sonnet "The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns...", Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was a Jesuit priest.

In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) mentions "stippled Hopkins:"

And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:

“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)

In his poem Pied Beauty Hopkins mentions "rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim" and "áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim:"

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Hopkins' poem "The Leaden Echo" begins:

How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,... from vanishing away?

and ends:

Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

Hopkins' "Leaden Echo" and "Golden Echo" bring to mind "Echo's fey child" (as Shade calls the consonne d'appui):

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon

A feeling of fantastically planned,

Richly rhymed life. (ll. 967-970)

I know Hopkins only slightly, but I notice that one of his "sonnets" is entitled Spelt from Sybil's Leaves:

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,

Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite

Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now. Heart, you round me right

With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.es

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,

Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ' upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

In his poem Epithalamion Hopkins mentions "the dogeared hazels in the cover"

We are there, when we hear a shout

That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover

Makes dither, makes hover

And the riot of a rout

Of, it must be, boys from the town

Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.

In my post "Sybil Swallow & Hazel Shade in Pale Fire" (https://www.google.ru/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiqzJuCparkAhVRAxAIHeziDJsQFjAAegQIAhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fthenabokovian.org%2Fnode%2F35437&usg=AOvVaw0sCr1v604kEvZk5mE4KAtP) I suggest that the names of Shade's wife and daughter were borrowed from Shakespeare's Othello and Romeo and Juliet.

In the Russian version of Lolita "shorn Baudelaire" is britaya golova Bodlera (Baudelaire's shaven head). La Chevelure ("Head of Hair") is a poem from Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal.

In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade menitons poor Baudelaire:

Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire

Kinbote is afraid that the dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name).