didactic katydid in Pale Fire

According to John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962), his daughter called her mother "a didactic katydid:"

 

                         She twisted words: pot, top

Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."

She called you a didactic katydid.

She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,

It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize

Ferociously our projects, and with eyes

Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed

Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head

With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,

Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll. 347-356)

 

In his essay The Poetic Principle (1850) E. A. Poe mentions the heresy of The Didactic:

 

While the epic mania — while the idea that, to merit in poetry, prolixity is indispensable — has, for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity — we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

 

In E. A. Poe’s story The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (1844) Thingum Bob mentions Mademoiselle Cribalittle’s Revolutionary Tale entitled ‘The York-Town Katy-Did, and the Bunker-Hill Katy-Did’nt:’

 

On the same afternoon in which I saw these notices in the “Owl,” the “Toad,” and the “Mole,” I happened to meet with a copy of the “Daddy-Long-Legs,” a periodical proverbial for the extreme extent of its understanding. And it was the “Daddy-Long-Legs” which spoke thus:

 

“The ‘Lollipop’!! This gorgeous Magazine is already before the public for October. The question of pre-eminence is forever put to rest, and hereafter it will be excessively preposterous in the ‘Hum-Drum,’ the ‘Rowdy-Dow,’ or the ‘Goosetherumfoodle,’ to make any farther spasmodic attempts at competition. These journals may excel the ‘Lollipop’ in outcry, but, in all other points, give us the ‘Lollipop!’ How this celebrated Magazine can sustain its evidently tremendous expenses, is past comprehension. To be sure it has a circulation of precisely half a million, and its subscription-list has increased seventy-five per cent. within the last couple of days; but then the sums it disburses, monthly, for contributions, are scarcely credible; we are cognizant of the fact, that Mademoiselle Cribalittle received no less than eighty-seven cents and a half for her late valuable Revolutionary Tale, entitled ‘The York-Town Katy-Did, and the Bunker-Hill Katy-Did’nt.’

 

In Canto Four Shade calls his poem “transparent thingum” and asks Shakespeare to help him find a title for it:

 

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
in that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 957-952)

 

At the beginning of Poe’s Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. the narrator mentions Shakespeare:

 

I am now growing in years, and – since I understand that Shakespeare and Mr. Emmons are deceased – it is not impossible that I may even die. It has occurred to me, therefore, that I may as well retire from the field of Letters and repose upon my laurels. But I am ambitious of signalizing my abdication of the literary sceptre by some important bequest to posterity; and, perhaps, I cannot do a better thing than just pen for it an account of my earlier career. My name, indeed, has been so long and so constantly before the public eye, that I am not only willing to admit the naturalness of the interest which it has everywhere excited, but ready to satisfy the extreme curiosity which it has inspired. In fact, it is no more than the duty of him who achieves greatness to leave behind him, in his ascent, such landmarks as may guide others to be great. I propose, therefore, in the present paper, (which I had some idea of calling “Memoranda to serve for the Literary History of America,”) to give a detail of those important, yet feeble and tottering first steps, by which, at length, I attained the high road to the pinnacle of human renown.

 

Thingum’s surname brings to mind “bad Bob,” as Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) calls his former roomer:

 

I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that had belonged to his aunt Maud (see line 86). I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised--not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture; and the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find that he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally, we separated at once, and through a chink in the window curtains I saw bad Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut, and shabby valise, and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything save treason. (Foreword)

 

In his poem To One in Paradise (1843) E. A. Poe mentions starry Hope and compares the Past to a dim gulf (Dim Gulf was Shade's first book):

 

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“On! on!”—but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

 

According to Shade, his daughter always nursed a small mad hope:

 

I think she always nursed a small mad hope. (Line 383)

 

At the end of Canto Three Shade mentions "faint hope:"

 

Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is
My firm conviction – "Darling, shut the door.
Had a nice trip?" Splendid – but what is more
I have returned convinced that I can grope
My way to some – to some – "Yes, dear?" Faint hope. (ll. 830-835)

 

In Shakespeare’s historical play Richard III (Act 5, scene 2) Richmond says:

 

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

 

In his Commentary Kinbote calls the poet’s wife “Sybil Swallow:”

 

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. (note to Line 275)

 

Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa seems to blend Leonardo's Mona Lisa with Desdemona, Othello’s wife in Shakespeare's Othello. In Shakespeare's play Othello mentions a two-hundred-year-old Egyptian sybil who gave his mother a magic handkerchief:

 

'Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.

A sibyl, that had numbered in the world

The sun to course two hundred compasses,

In her prophetic fury sewed the work.

The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,

And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful

Conserved of maidens' hearts. (Act III, scene 4)

 

At the end of a draft (inserted by the Soviet editors in the gap in "The Egyptian Nights," 1835) Pushkin compares a poet to Desdemona who, without asking anybody, chooses kumir (the idol) for her heart:

 

Таков поэт: как Аквилон
Что хочет, то и носит он -
Орлу подобно, он летает
И, не спросясь ни у кого,
Как Дездемона избирает
Кумир для сердца своего.

 

In his poem Nadezhdoy sladostnoy mladencheski dysha... ("Breathing youthfully with sweet hope..." 1823) Pushkin says that, had he believed in his soul’s immortality, he would destroy life, urodlivyi kumir (an ugly idol):

 

Надеждой сладостной младенчески дыша,
Когда бы верил я, что некогда душа,
От тленья убежав, уносит мысли вечны,
И память, и любовь в пучины бесконечны, -
Клянусь! давно бы я оставил этот мир:
Я сокрушил бы жизнь, уродливый кумир,
И улетел в страну свободы, наслаждений,
В страну, где смерти нет, где нет предрассуждений,
Где мысль одна плывёт в небесной чистоте...

Но тщетно предаюсь обманчивой мечте;
Мой ум упорствует, надежду презирает...
Ничтожество меня за гробом ожидает...
Как, ничего! Ни мысль, ни первая любовь!
Мне страшно... И на жизнь гляжу печален вновь,
И долго жить хочу, чтоб долго образ милый
Таился и пылал в душе моей унылой.

 

Ot tlen'ya ubezhav (having fled decay) in the poem's third line brings to mind tlen'ya ubezhit ([my soul] will flee decay), a phrase used by Pushkin in his poem Exegi monumentum (1836). As VN points out in his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 310), in Exegi monumentum Pushkin parodies stanza for stanza Derzhavin’s poem Pamyatnik (“The Monument,” 1796). In his poem Lastochka (“The Swallow,” 1792-94) written after the death of ‘Plenyra’ (Derzhavin’s first wife) Derzhavin compares his soul to a swallow. In a letter of April 11, 1831, to Pletnyov (to whom Eugene Onegin is dedicated) Pushkin calls Pletnyov ten’ vozlyublennaya (the beloved shade) and asks Pletnyov (who did not respond to Pushkin’s letters for a long time), if he is already dead, to bow to Derzhavin and to embrace Delvig (who died at the beginning of 1831):

 

Воля твоя, ты несносен: ни строчки от тебя не дождёшься. Умер ты, что ли? Если тебя уже нет на свете, то, тень возлюбленная, кланяйся от меня Державину и обними моего Дельвига.

 

The author of Voskresshie bogi. Leonardo da Vinchi ("Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci," 1900), Merezhkovski in his poem Nadezhda ("Hope," 1894) compares Hope to izgnannaya doch’ velikogo tsarya (“the expelled daughter of a great king”):

 

Ты в рубище зимой встречалась мне порою
На снежных улицах, в мерцанье фонаря;
Как изгнанная дочь великого царя,
С очами гордыми, с протянутой рукою.

 

In his essay Pushkin (1896) Merezhkovski mentions neyasnyi shyopot Sibilly (the unclear whisper of the Sybil) in Baratynski's verses and quotes Pushkin's poem Ne day mne Bog soyti s uma... ("The Lord Forbid my Going Mad…" 1833):

 

Наконец сомнения в благах западной культуры - неясный шёпот сибиллы у Баратынского - Лев Толстой превратил в громовый воинственный клич; любовь к природе Лермонтова, его песни о безучастной красоте моря и неба - в "четыре упряжки", в полевую работу; христианство Достоевского и Гоголя, далекое от действительной жизни, священный огонь, пожиравший их сердца, - в страшный циклопический молот, направленный против главных устоев современного общества. Но всего замечательнее, что это русское возвращение к природе - русский бунт против культуры, первый выразил Пушкин, величайший гений культуры среди наших писателей:

 

Когда б оставили меня
На воле, как бы резво я
Пустился в тёмный лес!

Я пел бы в пламенном бреду,
Я забывался бы в чаду
Нестройных, чудных грез,

И силен, волен был бы я,
Как вихорь, роющий поля,
Ломающий леса.

И я б заслушивался волн,
И я глядел бы, счастья полн,
В пустые небеса.

 

At the end of his poem Eyo glaza (“Her Eyes,” 1828) Pushkin says that, when Annette Olenin raises her eyes, “Raphael’s angel thus contemplates divinity.” In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet Mercutio mentions Benvolio’s hazel eyes:

 

Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. (Act III, scene 1)

 

In a letter of May 21, 1830, to Pushkin Pletnyov mentions Mercutio and Benvolio (the unceremonious friends):

 

Хотелось бы мне, чтоб ты ввернул в трактат о Шекспире любимые мои две идеи: 1) Спрашивается, зачем перед публикой позволять действующим лицам говорить непристойности? Отвечается: эти лица и не подозревают о публике; они решительно одни, как любовник с любовницей, как муж с женой, как Меркутио с Бенволио (нецеремонные друзья). Пракситель, обделывая формы статуи, заботится об истине всех частей её (вот его коран!), а не о тех, кто будет прогуливаться мимо выставленной его статуи. 2) Для чего в одном произведении помещать прозу, полустихи (т. е. стихи без рифм) и настоящие стихи (по понятию простонародному)? Потому, что в трагедии есть лица, над которыми все мы смеялись бы, если бы кто вздумал подозревать, что они способны к поэтическому чувству; а из круга людей, достойных поэзии, иные бывают на степени поэзии драматической, иные же, а иногда и те же, на степени поэзии лирической: там дипломатическая музыка, а здесь военная.

 

In the same letter Pletnyov tells Pushkin about the birth of his daughter:

 

Не дивись, милый, что аккуратный человек так неаккуратно тебе отвечает: у меня на неделе столкнулись разные хлопоты. Теперь, слава богу, всё пришло, кажется, в свою колею. Родилась у меня дочь, которая теперь стала у нас известна под именем Ольги. Её привели сегодня в христианскую веру. Пройдет ещё денька два — и надеюсь, жена подымется на ноги: тогда опять я сделаюсь твоим аккуратнейшим корреспондентом. К делу!

 

The “real” name of Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter who called her mother a didactic katydid) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. Sybil Shade's and Queen Disa's "real" name is Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Fet (who was married to Maria Botkin) and a poem (1895) by Merezhkovski. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet’s murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter. There is nadezhda (a hope) that, when 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 (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.

 

Polu-milord, polu-kupets (half-milord, half-merchant) brings to mind pol-tsarstva za konya (half of my kingdom for a horse), King Richard’s words “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III, Act V, scene 4) in a classical Russian translation. In a letter of June 11, 1831, to Vyazemski Pushkin asks Vyazemski if Sofia Karamzin (the historian's daughter) reigns on the saddle and quotes King Richard's words (the epigraph to Vyazemski's poem Progulka v stepi, "A Ride in the Steppe," 1831):

 

Что Софья Николаевна? царствует на седле? A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!

 

Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. (Kinbote calls the grotesque figure of Gradus “a cross between bat and crab.” The characters of The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. include Mr. Crab, the editor of the “Lollipop.”) 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 its finished form Shade’s poem has thus as many lines as there are stories in A Thousand and One Nights. E. A. Poe is the author of The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845), with an old saying for epigraph: “truth is stranger than fiction.”

 

One of Pushkin’s sonnets, Madonna (1830), is addressed to his bride, Natalia Goncharov:

 

Не множеством картин старинных мастеров
Украсить я всегда желал свою обитель,
Чтоб суеверно им дивился посетитель,
Внимая важному сужденью знатоков. 

В простом углу моём, средь медленных трудов,
Одной картины я желал быть вечно зритель,
Одной: чтоб на меня с холста, как с облаков,
Пречистая и наш божественный спаситель –

 Она с величием, он с разумом в очах –
Взирали, кроткие, во славе и в лучах,
Одни, без ангелов, под пальмою Сиона.

 Исполнились мои желания. Творец
Тебя мне ниспослал, тебя, моя Мадонна,
Чистейшей прелести чистейший образец.

 

Not by old masters, rich on crowded walls,
My house I ever sought to ornament,
That gaping guests might marvel while they bent
To connoisseurs with condescending drawls.

Amidst slow labors, far from garish halls,
Before one picture I would fain have spent
Eternity: where the calm canvas thralls
As though the Virgin and our Saviour leant

From regnant clouds, the Glorious and the Wise,
The meek and hallowed, with unearthly eyes,
Beneath the palm of Zion, these alone. . . .

My wish is granted: God has shown thy face
To me; here, my Madonna, thou shalt throne:
Most pure exemplar of the purest grace.

(transl. Deutsch & Yarmolinski)

 

In his Sonnet – Silence (1840) E. A. Poe mentions shade:

 

There are some qualities – some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence – sea and shore –
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

 

“Rote” being the sound of waves breaking on the shore, Night Rote (Shade’s second book) seems to hint at “sea and shore” mentioned by E. A. Poe in his sonnet (that has fifteen lines). Poe’s Silence brings to mind Tyutchev’s Silentium! (1830). In the last stanza of his poem Vesennyaya groza (“The Spring Thunderstorm,” 1828) Tyutchev mentions frivolous Hebe spilling on Earth (na zemlyu) her thunder-boiling cup:

 

Ты скажешь: ветреная Геба,
Кормя Зевесова орла,
Громокипящий кубок с неба,
Смеясь, на землю пролила.

 

You'd say: the frivolous Hebe,
feeding Zeus' eagle,
has spilled on Earth, laughing,
the thunder-boiling cup.

 

Hebe's Cup is Shade's final float in that damp carnival. In E. A. Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado (1846) the action takes place in Italy during a carnival. In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the Italian sonnetto colla coda (sonnet with a coda).

 

A katydid is a cricket or grasshopper. On the Grasshopper and Cricket (1816) is a sonnet by Keats. Kuznechik-pouchitel' (as in her Russian translation of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov renders "a didactic katydid") brings to mind Polonski's poem Kuznechik-muzykant ("The Grasshopper Musician," 1859). In Polonski's poem the grasshopper falls in love with a pretty butterfly. In Canto Two and then again at the end of his poem Shade mentions a Vanessa butterfly:

 

Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

My Admirable butterfly! Explain

How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,

Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade

Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade? (ll. 269-274)

 

A dark Vanessa with a crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly -

Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 993-999)

 

In his Commentary Kinbote writes:

 

One minute before his death, as we were crossing from his demesne to mine and had begun working up between the junipers and ornamental shrubs, a Red Admirable (see note to line 270) came dizzily whirling around us like a colored flame. Once or twice before we had already noticed the same individual, at that same time, on that same spot, where the low sun finding an aperture in the foliage splashed the brown sand with a last radiance while the evening's shade covered the rest of the path. One's eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its setting upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next morning sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banister on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it. (note to Lines 993-995)

 

The word "demesne" used by Kinbote occurs in Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer:

 

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

Describing Aunt Maud's room, Shade mentions Chapman's Homer:

 

I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,

A poet and a painter with a taste

For realistic objects interlaced

With grotesque growths and images of doom.

She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room

We've kept intact. Its trivia create

A still life in her style: the paperweight

Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,

The verse book open at the Index (Moon,

Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,

The human skull; and from the local Star

A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4

On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)

 

"Doom" is "mood," "room" is "Moor" and "Star" is "rats" in reverse. "Homer" (a baseball term) comes from "home." Russian for "home," dom is Mod (the name Maud in Russian spelling) and mod (Gen. pl. of moda, "fashion") backward. Pushkin's epistle to Prince Gorchakov (Pushkin's schoolmate at the Lyceum) begins: Pitomets mod, bol'shogo sveta drug... ("A nursling of fashions, beau monde's friend..." 1819). 5 + 4 = 9. In its unfinished form Shade's poem has 999 lines.

 

In a footnote to her Russian translation of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov points out that Krylov translated Lafontaine’s fable La Cigale et la Fourmi as Strekoza i muravey (“The Dragonfly and the Ant”). One of Krylov’s most famous fables is Kvartet (“The Quartet”). As pointed out by J. B. Foster in “Nabokov's Art of Memory,” the words grimpen, chthonic and sempiternal (whose meaning Shade's daughter wanted to know) occur in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

 

According to Kinbote, it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest:”

 

One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet's expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips," and "T.S. Eliot," "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. (note to Lines 347-348)

 

In Gerontion (1920) T. S. Eliot mentions a wilderness of mirrors and the spider:

 

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors.  What will the spider do

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

 

In his poem T. S. Eliot mentions Fräulein von Kulp “who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.” Describing his years in Paris, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes one of his pastiches:

 

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:

 

... Fräulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull. (1.5)

 

In Canto Two of his poem Shade mentions “the poor sea gulls:”

 

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Anonymous.

                           Espied on a pine's bark,

As we were walking home the day she died,

An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,

Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,

A gum-logged ant.

                                      That Englishman in Nice,

A proud and happy linguist: je nourris

Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he

Fed the poor sea gulls!

                                               Lafontaine was wrong:

Dead is the mandible, alive the song.

 And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear

Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear. (ll. 236-246)

 

In Canto Three Shade mentions Hurricane Lolita swept from Florida to Maine:

 

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)

 

According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Shade’s heart attack almost coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America:

 

John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. (note to Line 691)

 

The Colonel’s name seems to hint at Montague, Romeo’s family name in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Describing his visit to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions roly-poly Romeo:

 

Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever – and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room – all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that "snow" and "joy juice"). (2.22)

 

In the Elphinstone chapter of Lolita Humbert mentions Dr. Blue and a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:

 

Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a hetero­sexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the low­land side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again.

 

One of the leitmotifs in Shade’s poem is the beginning of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782):

 

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.

 

Who rides so late through the windy night?
The father holding his young son so tight.

 

Dr. Blue brings to mind the great Starover Blue (nicknamed Colonel Starbottle by the students) mentioned by Shade in Canto Three of his poem:

 

The great Starover Blue reviewed the role

Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.

The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese

Discanted on the etiquette at teas

With ancestors, and how far up to go.

I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,

And dealt with childhood memories of strange

Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 627-634)

 

Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh is practically a namesake of E. A. Poe's Annabel Lee. The elder sister of Humbert's mother, Aunt Sybil brings to mind Sybil Shade and Aunt Maud in Pale Fire. In The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. the narrator wonders what is the meaning of modo:

 

I was much affected by the kindness of feeling towards me personally, which was evinced in this excellent advice of Mr. Crab, and I did not fail to profit by it forthwith. The result was, that I got rid of the old bore, and began to feel a little independent and gentleman-like. The want of money, however, was, for a few weeks, a source of some discomfort; but at length, by carefully putting to use my two eyes, and observing how matters went just in front of my nose, I perceived how the thing was to be brought about. I say “thing” — be it observed — for they tell me the Latin for it is rem. By the way, talking of Latin, can any one tell me the meaning of quocunque — or what is the meaning of modo?

 

There is modo in Quasimodo, the hunchback in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). The characters of Hugo’s novel include the gypsy girl Esmeralda. A young instructor at Wordsmith University whom Kinbote mercifully calls Gerald Emerald and "bad Bob" seem to be one and the same person.