At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane:
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)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his married life and asks his wife (whom Shade associates with the Vanessa butterfly) to come and be worshipped:
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)
In the last line of his poem On Stella's Birth-day 1719 Jonathan Swift mentions his Worship:
Stella this Day is thirty four,
(We shan't dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin on the Green,
So little is thy Form declin'd
Made up so largely in thy Mind.
Oh, woud it please the Gods to split
Thy Beauty, Size, and Years, and Wit,
No Age could furnish out a Pair
Of Nymphs so graceful, Wise and fair
With half the Lustre of your Eyes,
With half your Wit, your Years and Size:
And then before it grew too late,
How should I beg of gentle Fate,
(That either Nymph might have her Swain,)
To split my Worship too in twain.
Swift's 'Stella' (Esther Johnson) brings to mind Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube 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:
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet's entourage - for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag. (note to Line 627: The great Starover Blue)
The maiden name of Starover Blue's mother comes from lazur’ (azure). In his poem Nado mnoy v lazuri yasnoy… (“Over me in clear azure,” 1830) Pushkin mentions zvyozdochka odna (one little star) and blednaya luna (pale moon):
Надо мной в лазури ясной
Светит звёздочка одна,
Справа — запад тёмно-красный,
Слева — бледная луна.
Over me in clear azure
one little star shines,
to the right is dark-red West,
to the left is pale moon.
In his epigram on Kachenovski patterned on a sonnet, Zhurnalami obizhennyi zhestoko… (“Insulted deeply by the reviews…” 1829), Pushkin mentions gospodin parnasskiy starover (Mr. Parnassian Old Believer):
Журналами обиженный жестоко,
Зоил Пахом печалился глубоко;
На цензора вот подал он донос;
Но цензор прав, нам смех, зоилу нос.
Иная брань, конечно, неприличность,
Нельзя писать: Такой-то де старик,
Козёл в очках, плюгавый клеветник,
И зол и подл: всё это будет личность.
Но можете печатать, например,
Что господин парнасский старовер
(В своих статьях) бессмыслицы оратор,
Отменно вял, отменно скучноват,
Тяжеловат и даже глуповат;
Тут не лицо, а только литератор.
Insulted deeply by some journalists
Zoilus Pakhom files charges, where he lists
Claims and complains. The teasers, yet,
For sure will be found not guilty, one can bet
Some invective, of course, aren't recommended.
One cannot write that Mister Such-and-Such,
Bespectacled goat... - this is a bit too much,
A shabby libeler... - should also be amended.
However, one can say politely that
Mr. Parnassian Old Believer is just sad
And slightly ponderous, and in the latest journal
His article is sort of daft and dull,
A bit annoying, honestly, 'tis fool.
Here is the literateur and nothing personal.
(tr. V. Gurvich)
According to Kinbote, there is a whiff of Swift in some of his notes:
It is so like the heart of a scholar in search of a fond name to pile a butterfly genus upon an Orphic divinity on top of the inevitable allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther! In this connection a couple of lines from one of Swift's poems (which in these backwoods I cannot locate) have stuck in my memory:
When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom
Advanced like Atalanta's star
As to the Vanessa butterfly, it will reappear in lines 993-995 (to which see note). Shade used to say that its Old English name was The Red Admirable, later degraded to The Red Admiral. It is one of the few butterflies I happen to be familiar with. Zemblans call it harvalda (the heraldic one) possibly because a recognizable figure of it is borne in the escutcheon of the Dukes of Payn. In the autumn of certain years it used to occur rather commonly in the Palace Gardens and visit the Michaelmas daisies in company with a day-flying moth. I have seen The Red Admirable feasting on oozy plums and, once, on a dead rabbit. It is a most frolicsome fly. An almost tame specimen of it was the last natural object John Shade pointed out to me as he walked to his doom (see, see now, my note to lines 993-995).
I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire. (note to Line 270)
Kinbote quotes Swift’s poem Cadenus and Vanessa (1713). W. B. Yeats’s one-act play The Words upon the Windowpane (1930) features a séance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium, along with those of his two lovers, Stella and Vanessa. Witnessing these forces at work, those attending the séance are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths in their own lives.
Shade is the author of a book on Pope (Supremely Blest). According to Sir Walter Scott (Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D. D., 1826), Pope observed, that though Swift’s face had an expression of dullness, his eyes were very particular. They were as azure, he said, as the heavens, and had an unusual acuteness.
In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade mentions poor old man Swift:
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):
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
What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cp. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)
Kinbote is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name). An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade’s murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote’s Commentary). Nadezhda means “hope.” 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 and of Jonathan Swift's death), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega, the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes near New Wye:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). (note to Lines 47-48)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade calls 1958 "a year of Tempests:"
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. 679-682)
At the end of his poem A nebo budushchim beremenno... ("And the sky is pregnant with the future..." 1923) Mandelshtam says that the sky is pregnant with the azure (zabremenevshee lazur'yu) and calls it al'fa i omega buri (alpha and omega of the tempest):
А ты, глубокое и сытое,
Забременевшее лазурью,
Как чешуя многоочитое,
И альфа и омега бури;
Тебе — чужое и безбровое,
Из поколенья в поколение, —
Всегда высокое и новое
Передаётся удивление.
In his memoirs Shum vremeni ("Noise of Time," 1925) Mandelshtam describes the concerts of Hofmann (the pianist) and Kubelik (the violinist) and compares the musicians to Lilliputs:
Кто такие были Гофман и Кубелик? - Прежде всего в сознании тогдашнего петербуржца они сливались в один образ. Как близнецы, они были одного роста и одной масти. Ростом ниже среднего, почти недомерки, волосы чернее вороньего крыла. У обоих был очень низкий лоб и очень маленькие руки. Оба сейчас мне представляются чем-то вроде премьеров труппы лилипутов. К Кубелику меня возили на поклон в Европейскую гостиницу, хотя я не играл на скрипке. Он жил настоящим принцем. Он тревожно взмахнул ручкой, испугавшись, что мальчик играет на скрипке, но сейчас же успокоился и подарил свой автограф, что от него и требовалось. (The Concerts of Hofmann and Kubelik)
In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Gordon Krummholz, b. 1944, a musical prodigy and an amusing pet (cf. "And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well" in Shade's discarded variant). Gordon seems to hint at Byron. In Canto Six (XXVIII: 6) of Don Juan Byron mentions Lilliput:
Oh, enviable Briareus! with thy hands
And heads, if thou hadst all things multiplied
In such proportion! -- But my Muse withstands
The giant thought of being a Titan's bride,
Or travelling in Patagonian lands;
So let us back to Lilliput, and guide
Our hero through the labyrinth of love
In which we left him several lines above.
This is an abridged version of my recent post “POOR OLD MAN SWIFT & RUSSIAN HUMORISTS IN PALE PIRE” (that I began to write from the wrong end, so to speak). I would rework it entirely but fear that my attempts at improving will only spoil it.