VN’s novel Podvig (“Glory,” 1932) begins as follows:
Эдельвейс, дед Мартына, был, как это ни смешно, швейцарец, - рослый швейцарец с пушистыми усами, воспитывавший в шестидесятых годах детей петербургского помещика Индрикова и женившийся на младшей его дочери. Мартын сперва полагал, что именно в честь деда назван бархатно-белый альпийский цветок, баловень гербариев. Вовсе отказаться от этого он и позже не мог. Деда он помнил ясно, но только в одном виде, в одном положении: старик, весь в белом, толстый, светлоусый, в панамской шляпе, в пикейном жилете, богатом брелоками (из которых самый занимательный – кинжал с ноготок), сидит на скамье перед домом, в подвижной тени липы. На этой скамье дед и умер, держа на ладони любимые золотые часы, с крышкой как золотое зеркальце. Апоплексия застала его на этом своевременном жесте, и стрелка, по семейному преданию, остановилась вместе с его сердцем.
Funny as it may seem, Martin’s grandfather Edelweiss was a Swiss—a robust Swiss with a fluffy mustache, who in the 1860’s had been tutor to the children of a St. Petersburg landowner named Indrikov, and had married his youngest daughter. Martin assumed at first that the velvety white Alpine flower, that pet of herbariums, had been named in honor of his grandfather. Even later he could not fully relinquish this notion. He remembered his grandfather distinctly, but only in one form and position: a corpulent old man, dressed completely in white, fair-whiskered, wearing a Panama hat and a piqué waistcoat rich in breloques (the most amusing of which was a dagger the size of a fingernail), sitting on a bench in front of the house in a linden’s mobile shade. It was on this very bench that his grandfather had died, holding in the palm of his hand his beloved gold watch, whose lid was like a little golden mirror. Apoplexy overtook him during this timely gesture and, according to family legend, the hands stopped at the same moment as his heart. (chapter 1)
The maiden name of Martin’s grandmother, Indrikov, comes from Indrik (a legendary animal of Russian fairy tales, unicorn). At the end of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions ivory unicorns:
It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebony fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king;
Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high-
Flying airplane to plummet from the sky
And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys,
Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
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. 816-835)
In a letter of Feb. 12, 1958, to Hans Bender C. G. Jung speaks of synchronicity and mentions the accompanying phenomena in cases of death:
Your prefatory note on synchronicity is perfectly adequate up to the point where you speak of the “synchronistic effect that was sought.”
This effect was, if I may be permitted the remark, not sought at all but found, and it was found probably because the experiment was so arranged that the restrictions were reduced to a minimum;in other words, wide room was left for the play of chance.
If you give the “synchronistic arrangement” the smallest possible play, the play of chance is obviously restricted and the synchronistic “effect” thereby hindered.
The synchronistic phenomenon in my experiment consists in the fact that the classical expectations of astrology were confirmed in all three batches [of marriage horoscopes], which is extremely improbable although taken individually the figures are not significant.
Such a result has in principle nothing whatever to do with astrology, but could occur just as well in any other set of statistics.
The astrological experiment is by its very nature a lucky hit; were it not so it would have to be casual.
But presumably it is causal only in the most minimal degree.
You could therefore dismiss it as a mere lusus naturae if nobody wondered about the so-called chance.
The psychologist, who is concerned with the processes in the unconscious, knows that these remarkable “chances” happen chiefly when archetypal conditions are present, and it often looks as if the inner psychic disposition were reflected either in another person or in an animal or in circumstances generally, thanks to a simultaneous and causally independent parallel disposition.
Hence the accompanying phenomena in cases of death: the clock stops, a picture falls off the wall, a glass cracks, etc.
Until now such phenomena were furnished with ad hoc explanations and with names like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and so on.
But that explains nothing, even when certain of these phenomena are compared with radar.
I have never yet heard of a radar beam that could pick up a point in the future.
Radar mentioned by C. G. Jung in his letter to Hans Bender brings to mind Gradus, his shargar (Zemblan for “puny ghost”) and "the radiant spirit of our poet" mentioned by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his Commentary:
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft-and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:
Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of Tanagra and the first three letters of "dust" form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. "Simple chance!" the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. "Leningrad used to be Petrograd?" "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?"
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.
Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels. We saw him last on the late afternoon of July 10th when he returned from Lex to his hotel in Geneva, and there we left him.
For the next four days Gradus remained fretting in Geneva. The amusing paradox with these men of action is that they constantly have to endure long stretches of otiosity that they are unable to fill with anything, lacking as they do the resources of an adventurous mind. As many people of little culture, Gradus was a voracious reader of newspapers, pamphlets, chance leaflets and the multilingual literature that comes with nose drops and digestive tablets; but this summed up his concessions to intellectual curiosity, and since his eyesight was not too good, and the consumability of local news not unlimited, he had to rely a great deal on the torpor of sidewalk cafes and on the makeshift of sleep.
How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimation, and the star that no party member can ever reach.
On Wednesday morning, still without news, Gradus telegraphed headquarters saying that he thought it unwise to wait any longer and that he would be staying at Hotel Lazuli, Nice. (note to Line 596)
Kinbote is tempted to synchronize Gradus's departure from Zembla with the date when Shade began his last poem:
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)
Shade’s murderer, Jakob Gradus is the son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga. At the end of “Glory” Martin Edelweiss goes to Riga and then to “Zoorland,” crossing the Soviet-Latvian border. Martin’s and Sonya’s Zoorland resembles Kinbote’s Zembla (a distant northern land). Sonya is a diminutive of Sofia (which is also the name of Martin Edelweiss’s mother). 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). Lastochka (“The Swallow,” 1792-94) and Lebed’ (“The Swan,” 1804) are poems by Derzhavin. In Canto Two of his poem Shade compares his daughter (who always nursed a small mad hope) to the dingy cygnet:
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. (ll. 318-319)
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 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.
The characters in “Glory” include the writer Bubnov (Sonya’s lover):
Писатель Бубнов, - всегда с удовольствием отмечавший, сколь много выдающихся литературных имён двадцатого века начинается на букву "б", - был плотный, тридцатилетний, уже лысый мужчина с огромным лбом, глубокими глазницами и квадратным подбородком. Он курил трубку, - сильно вбирая щёки при каждой затяжке, - носил старый чёрный галстук бантиком и считал Мартына франтом и европейцем. Мартына же пленяла его напористая круглая речь и вполне заслуженная писательская слава. Начав писать уже заграницей, Бубнов за три года выпустил три прекрасных книги, писал четвёртую, героем её был Христофор Колумб - или, точнее, русский дьяк, чудесно попавший матросом на одну из Колумбовых каравелл, - а так как Бубнов не знал ни одного языка, кроме русского, то для собирания некоторых материалов, имевшихся в Государственной библиотеке, охотно брал с собою Мартына, когда тот бывал свободен.
The writer Bubnov (who used to point out with satisfaction how many distinguished Russian literary names of the twentieth century began with the letter B) was a bearish, balding man of thirty, with a huge forehead, deep-set eyes, and a square chin. He smoked a pipe, sucking in his cheeks deeply with every puff, wore an old black bow tie, and considered Martin a fop and a foreigner. As to Martin, he was much taken with Bubnov’s energetic, rotund delivery and with his quite justified fame. Bubnov, whose writing career had begun in exile, had already had three excellent novels brought out by a Russian émigré publisher in Berlin, and was now writing a fourth. Its hero was Christopher Columbus, or, to be more exact, a Muscovite scrivener who, after many escapades, had miraculously ended up as a sailor on one of Columbus’s caravels. Bubnov knew no language other than Russian, so that when he had to go to the State Library for his research and Martin happened to be free, he willingly took him along. (Chapter 33)
Bubnov is a character in Gorky’s play Na dne (“At the Bottom,” 1902). Gorky’s real name, Peshkov comes from peshka (pawn) and brings to mind the pawns promoted to ivory unicorns and ebony fauns in Shade’s poem. Another character in Gorky’s “At the Bottom,” Baron recalls Baron A. and Baron B. mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
I, too, was wont to draw my poet’s attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky. Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture.
The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows’ neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit’s father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to “young” Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:
Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent. (note to Line 286)
In his letter of Feb. 12, 1958, to Hans Bender C. G. Jung mentions Chance:
Chance is an event, too, and if it didn’t exist causality would be axiomatic.
According to Kinbote, the name Bretwit means Chess Intelligence. In Ilf and Petrov's Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928) Ostap Bender plays chess at Vasyuki. In a conversation with Kinbote Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
In his essay Gogol’ i chyort (“Gogol and the Devil,” 1906) Merezhkovski compares Gogol to Leibnitz:
Гоголь сделал для нравственных измерений то же, что Лейбниц для математики, — открыл как бы дифференциальное исчисление, бесконечно великое значение бесконечно малых величин добра и зла. Первый он понял, что чёрт и есть самое малое, которое лишь вследствие нашей собственной малости кажется великим, самое слабое, которое лишь вследствие нашей собственной слабости, кажется сильным. «Я называю вещи, — говорит он, — прямо по имени, то есть чёрта называю прямо чёртом, не даю ему великолепного костюма á lа Байрон и знаю, что он ходит во фраке…» «Дьявол выступил уже без маски в мир: он явился в своём собственном виде». (Part One, II)
According to Merezhkovski, Gogol did for moral measurements what Leibnitz had done for mathematics: he discovered a kind of differential calculus, the infinitely great significance of infinitely small amounts of good and evil. Gogol was the first who realized that the devil is the smallest that seems great because of our own smallness, the weakest that seems strong because of our own weakness. Merezhkovski quotes the words of Gogol who said that he did not give to the devil a magnificent costume á lа Byron.
At the end of his letter to Hans Bender C. G. Jung mentions Leibnitz and Schopenhauer:
Meaningful coincidences present a tremendous problem which it is impossible to overestimate.
Leibniz as well as Schopenhauer had inklings of it [meaningful coincidences], but they gave a false answer because they started with an axiomatic causality.
Fet's poem Izmuchen zhizn'yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy... ("By life tormented and by cunning hope," 1864) has an epigraph from Schopenhauer. The author of Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884), Afanasiy Fet was married to Maria Botkin.
Lermontov’s poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) ends in the line: Ya – ili Bog – ili nikto (“Myself – or God – or none at all”). Nikto b ("none would," a phrase used by Mozart in Pushkin's little tragedy "Mozart and Salieri," 1830) is Botkin in reverse.
Gradus + shargar + opyat’ + inn = grusha + radar + gost’ya + Pnin
opyat’ – again
grusha – pear, pear-tree
gost’ya – female guest
At the end of Lastochka Derzhavin says that his dusha (soul) is gost’ya mira (a guest in this world):
Душа моя! гостья ты мира:
Не ты ли перната сия? —
Воспой же бессмертие, лира!
Восстану, восстану и я, —
Восстану, — и в бездне эфира
Увижу ль тебя я, Пленира?
My soul! You are a guest in the world:
Isn’t you this feathered creature?
So sing of immortality, my lyre!
I too, I too will raise,
I will raise – and in the abyss of ether
Will I see you, my Plenyra?