At the end of his Commentary Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that he may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
At the end of his famous monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7) Jaques repeats the word “sans” four times:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
According to V. V. Mayakovski (VN’s “late namesake” who committed suicide in April 1930), all people are whores and the whole world is bardak (a brothel):
Все люди бляди,
Весь мир бардак!
Один мой дядя
И тот мудак.
All people are whores,
the whole world is a brothel!
Only my uncle…
but even he is a cretin.
In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor (the Ramsdale dentist). In an attempt to save his life Quilty tries to seduce Humbert Humbert with his collection of erotica and mentions the Bard (Shakespeare) and the Barda Sea:
“Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play - I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow -” (2.35)
There is Bard in Barda and Barda in bardak. "To borrow and to borrow and to borrow" is a play on "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," Macbeth's words in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act V, scene 5):
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
In his Sonet (“A Sonnet,” 1830) Pushkin says that tvorets Makbeta (the author of Macbeth) loved the sonnet’s play:
Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
Wordsworth
Суровый Дант не презирал сонета;
В нём жар любви Петрарка изливал;
Игру его любил творец Макбета;
Им скорбну мысль Камоэнс облекал.
И в наши дни пленяет он поэта:
Вордсворт его орудием избрал,
Когда вдали от суетного света
Природы он рисует идеал.
Под сенью гор Тавриды отдаленной
Певец Литвы в размер его стесненный
Свои мечты мгновенно заключал.
У нас ещё его не знали девы,
Как для него уж Дельвиг забывал
Гекзаметра священные напевы.
Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;
Into it Petrarch poured out the ardor of love;
Its play the creator of Macbeth loved;
With it Camoes clothed his sorrowful thought.
Even in our days it captivates the poet:
Wordsworth chose it as an instrument,
When far from the vain world
He depicts nature's ideal.
Under the shadow of the mountains of distant Tavrida
The singer of Lithuania in its constrained measure
His dreams he in an instant enclosed.
Here the maidens did not yet know it,
When for it even Delvig forgot
The sacred melodies of the hexameter.
(tr. Ober)
Seven sonneteers (Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Camoes, Wordsworth, Mickiewicz and Delvig) mentioned by Pushkin in his “Sonnet” bring to mind seven ages in Jaques’ monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. At the end of Lolita Humbert Humbert mentions prophetic sonnets:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
It seems that Humbert Humbert has in mind Shakespeare's Sonnet 14:
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive
If from thy self to store thou wouldst convert:
Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
From John Ray’s Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript we know that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita’s married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest North-west. Lolita outlives Humbert Humbert (who died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on Nov. 16, 1952) only by forty days. In his poem O net! ne raskolduesh’ serdtsa ty… (“Oh no! You cannot disenchant my heart…” 1912) Alexander Blok mentions his shade that will appear on the ninth and fortieth day after his death:
И тень моя пройдёт перед тобою
В девятый день, и в день сороковой —
Неузнанной, красивой, неживою.
Такой ведь ты искала? — Да, такой.
And suddenly you’ll see my shade appear
Before you on the ninth and fortieth day:
Unrecognized, uncomely, plain and drear,
The kind of shade you looked for, by the way!
According to G. Ivanov (the author of Rayon de rayonne), to his question “does a sonnet need coda” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. 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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Blok. In his diary (the entry of Aug. 30, 1918) Blok mentions dvoyniki (the doubles), drugoe ya (alter ego) and Botkinskiy period (the Botkin period) of his life:
К ноябрю началось явное мое колдовство, ибо я вызвал двойников ("Зарево белое...", "Ты - другая, немая...").
Любовь Дмитриевна ходила на уроки к М. М. Читау, я же ждал её выхода, следил за ней и иногда провожал её до Забалканского с Гагаринской - Литейной (конец ноября, начало декабря). Чаще, чем со мной, она встречалась с кем-то - кого не видела и о котором я знал.
Появился мороз, "мятель", "неотвязный" и царица, звенящая дверь, два старца, "отрава" (непосланных цветов), свершающий и пользующийся плодами свершений ("другое я"), кто-то "смеющийся и нежный". Так кончился 1901 год.
Тут - Боткинский период.
In his poem Ya – Gamlet. Kholodeet krov’… (“I’m Hamlet. Freezes blood…” 1914) Blok identifies himself with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and compares his wife to Ophelia. In his diary (the entry of Dec. 12, 1920) Blok lists all thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare and singles out four periods in Shakespeare’s creative life:
1591 или около: «Тит Андроник». «Король Генрих VI» (I часть). «Два веронца». «Комедия ошибок».
1592 — «Король Генрих VI» (II часть). «Бесплодные усилия любви». «Ромео и Джульетта». «Король-Генрих VI» (III часть).
1594 — «Усмирение строптивой». «Король Ричард III».
1595 — «Венецианский купец». «Сон в Иванову ночь».
1596 — «Король Джон». «Король Ричард II».
1597 — «Король Генрих IV» (I часть).
1598 или около — «Конец делу венец». «Король Генрих IV» (II часть).
1599 — «Много шуму из ничего». «Король Генрих V».
1600 — «Виндзорские кумушки».
1601 — «Двенадцатая ночь». «Как вам это нравится».
1602 — «Гамлет».
1603 — «Юлий Цезарь». «Мера за меру».
1604 — «Отелло».
1604–1605 — «Король Лир».
1606 — «Макбет».
1607 — «Тимон Афинский».
1608 — «Антоний и Клеопатра». «Перикл».
1609 — «Троил и Крессида». «Кориолан».
1610 — «Зимняя сказка». 1610–1611 — «Цимбелин».
1611 — «Буря».
1613 — «Король Генрих VIII».
Первый период: 1590–1594 — Подражательность и очарование жизнью (?).
Второй период: 1594–1601 — Беззаботность. «Фальстафовский».
Третий период: 1601–1609 — «Душевный мрак» (?). «Гамлетовский».
Четвёртый период: 1609–1616 — Примирённость (!).
In his note to Line 172 (“books and people”) Kinbote mentions Prof. Botkin (who taught in another department and was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist," Prof. Pnin). Netochka (Dr Oscar Nattochdag, the head of Kinbote’s department) brings to mind Dostoevski’s unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). In the fall of 1849 Dostoevski (who was imprisoned in the St. Petersburg Peter-and-Paul Fortress) avidly read Shakespeare. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski twice repeats the word gradus (degree). According to Professor Pardon (American History), he was under the impression that Kinbote was born in Russia and that his name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine (note to Line 894).
Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name seems to be Botkin. 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). In Shakespeare's 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)
Nadezhda is Russian for “hope.” According to Shade, his daughter “always nursed a small mad hope” (Line 383). In Shakespeare’s 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.
Kinbote calls the poet’s wife (née Irondell) “Sybil Swallow.” Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to blend Leonardo's Mona Lisa with Desdemona (Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello). The "real" name of both Sybil Shade and Queen Disa seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Fet (who was married to Maria Botkin). Afanasiy Fet was a son of Afanasiy Shenshin (a Russian landowner) and Charlotte Becker. The maiden name of Lolita's mother is Charlotte Becker. Mona Dahl (Lolita's friend at Beardsley) brings to mind Leonardo's Mona Lisa.
In VN’s novel Podvig (“Glory,” 1932) Martin Edelweiss (the novel's main character whose mother’s name-and-patronymic is Sofia Dmitrievna) is in love with Sonya (a diminutive of Sofia) Zilanov. Martin’s and Sonya’s Zoorland resembles Kinbote’s Zembla. Jakob Gradus (the poet’s murderer) is the son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga.
There is 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.
boroda + vinograd + sud = Borodino + Gradus + dva = dobro/Bordo + vino/voin/ovin + grad + us + ad/da
boroda - beard; Kinbote is bearded; at The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a hostess mentions Miss Beard (1.28)
vinograd - vine; grapes; a poem (1824) by Pushkin
sud - court, law-court; trial, legal procedings
Borodino - a poem (1837) by Lermontov; General Bagration (cf. infolio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss) was felled in the battle of Borodino (1812)
dva - two
dobro - good (a noun, as opposed to zlo, “evil”)
Bordo - Bordeaux (a city in SW of France and red wine) in Russian spelling
vino - wine
voin - warrior, soldier
ovin - barn
grad - hail; obs., city
us - moustache hair; whisker; antenna (of an insect), etc.
ad - hell
da - yes
Describing Gradus’ suicide in prison, Kinbote says “Exit Jack Grey:”
Because of these machinations I was confronted with nightmare problems in my endeavors to make people calmly see - without having them immediately scream and hustle me - the truth of the tragedy - a tragedy in which I had been not a "chance witness" but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim. The hullabaloo ended by affecting the course of my new life, and necessitated my removal to this modest mountain cabin; but I did manage to obtain, soon after his detention, an interview, perhaps even two interviews, with the prisoner. He was now much, more lucid than when he cowered bleeding on my porch step, and he told me all I wanted to know. By making him believe I could help him at his trial I forced him to confess his heinous crime - his deceiving the police and the nation by posing as Jack Grey, escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there. A few days later, alas, he thwarted justice by slitting his throat with a safety razor blade salvaged from an unwatched garbage container. He died, not so much because having played his part in the story he saw no point in existing any longer, but because he could not live down this last crowning botch - killing the wrong person when the right one stood before him. In other words, his life ended not in a feeble splutter of the clockwork but in a gesture of humanoid despair. Enough of this. Exit Jack Grey. (note to Line 1000)
Kinbote finishes his Foreword to Shade's poem on Oct. 19, 1959. Immediately after writing down "Cedarn, Utana" Kinbote makes his exit, too. In "Cedarn" there is cedar. In Shakespeare’s Tempest (5.1) Prospero mentions Jove’s stout oak, the pine and cedar:
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war—to th' dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt;
the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.
According to Kinbote, at Wordsmith University there is the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare (note to Lines 47-48). In Canto Three of his poem Shade calls 1958 "a year of Tempests" and mentions Hurricane Lolita that 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)
"Utana" (the last word written by Kinbote) blends Utah with Montana. In his Foreword Kinbote describes his lodgings as "my cave in Cedarn:"
Instead of answering a month-old letter from my cave in Cedarn, listing some of my most desperate queries, such as the real name of "Jim Coates" etc., she suddenly shot me a wire, requesting me to accept Prof. H. (!) and Prof. C (!!) as coeditors of her husband's poem. How deeply this surprised and pained me! Naturally, it precluded collaboration with my friend's misguided widow.
Describing his last journey with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert mentions Magic Cave and Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo:
I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spannedTennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska - ah, that first whiff of the West! We traveled very leisurely, having more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to see he Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo. (2.16)
According to Kinbote, of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method:
I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred such sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gentle--not fall, not jump--but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off--farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one's eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one's liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality. (Note to Line 493)
Felis tigris goldsmithi mentioned by Humbert Humbert brings to mind Shade's frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith. Goldsworth + Wordsmith = Goldsmith + Wordsworth
Like Gradus, Humbert Humbert dies in legal captivity. It seems that, like Kinbote, he commits suicide after finishing his manuscript ("coronary thrombosis," the official cause of Humbert Humbert's death, is a common euphemism).
Let me draw your attention to the expanded version of my previous post, "Arthur in Afterword to Lolita" (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35609).