In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Amphitheatricus, a writer of fugitive poetry who dubbed Onhava (the capital of Zembla) "Uranograd:"
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). (note to Line 71)
The author of Gospoda Obmanovy (“The Obmanov Family,” 1902), a satire on the Russian imperial family (the Romanovs), in his book Zver’ iz bezdny (“Beast from the Abyss,” 1911) Amfitearov speaks of the phenomenon that K. H. Ulrichs dubbed uranizm (Urningism) and mentions the trial of Oscar Wilde:
С 1864 по 1880 год в Лейпциге у Отто и Кадлера вышла целая серия работ по социальной физиологии некоего советника Ульрикса, озаглавленных в большинстве латинскими титулами — Vindex-Inclusa, Vindicta, Formatrix, Ara spei, Gladius furens. Критические стрелы. Идея этих статей — что «половое чувство не имеет отношения к полу». В мужском теле может заключаться женская и женскими страстями одаренная душа (anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa) и, наоборот, женщина по телу может обладать душою и страстями мужчины. Ульрикс настаивал, что явление это, которое он назвал «уранизмом», есть лишь физиологическое исключение, а отнюдь не патологическая аномалия. На этом основании он требовал, чтобы закон и общество относились к любви урнингов как к явлению совершенно дозволительному и естественному и советовал даже разрешать браки между лицами одного и того же поля, которых судьба создала с урнингическими наклонностями. Нельзя не согласиться, что мальчишеские выходки развратного и пьяного юноши- язычника, которому было «все дозволено», оставлены обдуманной и научно поставленной теорией Ульрикса, старого ученого-христианина, далеко за флагом. А процесс Оскара Уайльда? А столь много нашумевшие разоблачения «Pall Mall Gazette» о подвигах английской родовой и коммерческой аристократии в лондонских трущобах? А записки Горона? А Эйленбург? А гомосексуальные радения — «лиги любви» — в современной России? А повести, в которых участники гомосексуального приключения предварительно молятся коленопреклоненно пред «иконами, приведшими де нас к общей радости»? Если урнингизм пытается переползти порог этики, его воспрещающей, — это симптом, пожалуй, поярче того, что две тысячи лет тому назад он откровенно переползал порог этики, к нему совершенно равнодушной.
«Я слыхал от некоторых, — говорит Светоний, — будто Нерон высказывал твердое убеждение, что стыд не свойствен природе человеческой, равно как нет в человеческом теле частей, обреченных на целомудрие, но что большинство людей только скрывают свои половые пороки и ловко притворяются целомудренными. Поэтому он извинял все другие пороки тем, кто откровенно предавался в его обществе похабству (professis apud se obscoenitatem»). Эта проповедь упразднения стыда откровенно развивалась в XV веке забубенною литературою Италии, в XVII — Англии, в XVIII — Франции, в конце XIX и в XX — России. В одном подпольно-порнографическом французском романе, приписываемом перу Альфреда де Мюссе, изображается общество, члены которого обязывались клятвою именно — как требовал Нерон — совершенно упразднить половой стыд и стараться довести тело своё до такой изощрённости, чтобы каждую часть его можно было использовать в целях сладострастия. (vol. III, “The Orgy,” chapter 1)
Amfiteatrov’s “beast from the abyss” is Nero (37-68 AD), the last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Kinbote's landlord, Judge Goldsworth, is an authority on Roman law. In VN's satire on the editors of the Paris émigré review Chisla (“Numbers”), Iz Kalmbrudovoy poemy Nochnoe puteshestvie" (Vivian Calmbrood's "The Night Journey," 1931), Chenstone (the fictitious poet to whom Pushkin ascribed his little tragedy “The Covetous Knight,” 1830) mentions Johnson (whom they had beaten with a candlestick for a marked article) and Petroniy novyi (the new Petronius):
Ущерб, закат... Петроний новый
с полуулыбкой на устах,
с последней розой бирюзовой
в изящно сложенных перстах,
садится в ванну. Все готово.
Уж вольной смерти близок час.
Но погоди! Чем резать жилу,
не лучше ль обратится к мылу,
не лучше ль вымыться хоть раз?"
In G. Ivanov’s unfinished novel Tretiy Rim (“The Third Rome,” 1929) the action takes place in St. Petersburg (the former capital of Russia). In the last stanza of his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen’ya… (“Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret…” 1927) G. Ivanov mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire):
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья,
Как Байрон за бледным огнём,
Сквозь полночь и розы, о, без сожаленья…
— И ты позабудешь о нём.
A good poet, G. Ivanov wrote bad prose, including the offensive article on Sirin in “Numbers” (#1, 1930) and Raspad atoma (“Disintegration of the Atom,” 1938), a wretched novelette. In his novel Pnin (1957) VN satirizes G. Ivanov and his friend G. Adamovich (also known as Sodomovich) as Zhorzhik Uranski, an influential literary critic:
One of her admirers, a banker, and straightforward patron of the arts, selected among the Parisian Russians an influential literary critic, Zhorzhik Uranski, and for a champagne dinner at the Ougolok had the old boy devote his next feuilleton in one of the Russian--language newspapers to an appreciation of Liza's muse on whose chestnut curls Zhorzhik calmly placed Anna Akhmatov's coronet, whereupon Liza burst into happy tears--for all the world like little Miss Michigan or the Oregon Rose Queen. Pnin, who was not in the know, carried about a folded clipping of that shameless rave in his honest pocket-book, naively reading out passages to this or that amused friend until it got quite frayed and smudgy. Nor was he in the know concerning graver matters, and in fact was actually pasting the remnants of the review in an album when, on a December day in 1938, Liza telephoned from Meudon, saying that she was going to Montpellier with a man who understood her 'organic ego', a Dr Eric Wind, and would never see Timofey again. An unknown French woman with red hair called for Liza's things and said, well, you cellar rat, there is no more any poor lass to taper dessus--and a month or two later there dribbled in from Dr Wind a German letter of sympathy and apology assuring lieber Herr Pnin that he, Dr Wind, was eager to marry 'the woman who has come out of your life into mine.' (Chapter Two, 5)
Liza’s son Victor imagines that his father is the king who refuses to abdicate and prefers to go into exile:
The King, his father, wearing a very white sports shirt open at the throat and a very black blazer, sat at a spacious desk whose highly polished surface twinned his upper half in reverse, making of him a kind of court card. Ancestral portraits darkened the walls of the vast panelled room. Otherwise, it was not unlike the headmaster's study at St Bart's School, on the Atlantic seaboard, some three thousand miles west of the imagined Palace. A copious spring shower kept lashing at the french windows, beyond which young greenery, all eyes, shivered and streamed. Nothing but this sheet of rain seemed to separate and protect the Palace from the revolution that for several days had been rocking the city.... Actually, Victor's father was a cranky refugee doctor, whom the lad had never much liked and had not seen now for almost two years.
The King, his more plausible father, had decided not to abdicate. No newspapers were coming out. The Orient Express was stranded, with all its transient passengers, at a suburban station, on the platform of which, reflected in puddles, picturesque peasants stood and gaped at the curtained windows of the long, mysterious cars. The Palace, and its terraced gardens, and the city below the palatial hill, and the main city square, where decapitations and folk dances had already started, despite the weather--all this was at the heart of a cross whose arms terminated in Trieste, Graz, Budapest, and Zagreb, as designated in Rand McNally's Ready Reference Atlas of the World. And at the heart of that heart sat the King, pale and calm, and on the whole closely resembling his son as that under-former imagined he would look at forty himself. Pale and calm, a cup of coffee in his hand, his back to the emerald-and-grey window, the King sat listening to a masked messenger, a corpulent old nobleman in a wet cloak, who had managed to make his way through the rebellion and the rain from the besieged Council Hall to the isolated Palace.
'Abdication! One-third of the alphabet!' coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. 'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of exile.'
Saying this, the King, a widower, glanced at the desk photograph of a beautiful dead woman, at those great blue eyes, that carmine mouth (it was a coloured photo, not fit for a king, but no matter). The lilacs, in sudden premature bloom, wildly beat, like shut-out maskers, at the dripping panes. The old messenger bowed and walked backward through the wilderness of the study, wondering secretly whether it would not be wiser for him to leave history alone and make a dash for Vienna where he had some property.... Of course, Victor's mother was not really dead; she had left his everyday father, Dr Eric Wind (now in South America), and was about to be married in Buffalo to a man named Church.
Victor indulged night after night in these mild fancies, trying to induce sleep in his cold cubicle which was exposed to every noise in the restless dorm. Generally he did not reach that crucial flight episode when the King alone--solus rex (as chess problem makers term royal solitude)--paced a beach on the Bohemian Sea, at Tempest Point, where Percival Blake, a cheerful American adventurer, had promised to meet him with a powerful motor-boat. Indeed, the very act of postponing that thrilling and soothing episode, the very protraction of its lure, coming as it did on top of the repetitive fancy, formed the main mechanism of its soporific effect.
An Italian film made in Berlin for American consumption, with a wild-eyed youngster in rumpled shorts, pursued through slums and ruins and a brothel or two by a multiple agent; a version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, recently staged at St Martha's, the nearest girls' school; an anonymous Kafkaesque story in a ci-devant avant-garde magazine read aloud in class by Mr Pennant, a melancholy Englishman with a past; and, not least, the residue of various family allusions of long standing to the flight of Russian intellectuals from Lenin's régime thirty-five years ago--these were the obvious sources of Victor's fantasies; they may have been, at one time, intensely affecting; by now they had become frankly utilitarian, as a simple and pleasant drug. (Chapter Four, 1)
According to Kinbote, Charles the Beloved and the actor Odon left Zembla in a powerful motor-boat. A world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot, Odon (pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b. 1915) has a half-brother Nodo (b. 1916, son of Leopold O'Donnell and of a Zemblan boy impersonator; a cardsharp and despicable traitor) whose name seems to hint at François Nodot (c.1650-1710), the author of spurious supplements to the text of Satyricon of Petronius. In his epigram (1931) on G. Ivanov VN mentions sem’ya zhurnal’nykh shulerov (a family of the literary cardsharps):
— Такого нет мошенника второго
Во всей семье журнальных шулеров!
— Кого ты так? — Иванова, Петрова,
Не всё ль равно? — Позволь, а кто ж Петров?
“You could not find in all of Grub Street
a rogue to match him vile enough!”
“Whom do you mean – Petrov, Ivanov?
No matter… Wait, though – who’s Petrov?”
(transl. by Vera Nabokov and DN)
Odon = Nodo = odno (neut. of odin, “one”). In a letter of Feb. 27, 1907, to Valentina Verigin (the actress and memoirist) Alexander Blok, the author of Korol’ na ploshchadi (“The King in the Square,” 1906, a play) says that there are moments when he feels that he and Leonid Andreyev (the author of Bezdna, “The Abyss,” 1902, a short story) are odno (one):
Я знаю, что Вы не чувствуете теперь Леонида Андреева, может быть от усталости, может быть оттого, что не знаете того последнего отчаянья, которое сверлит его душу. Каждая его фраза — безобразный визг, как от пилы, когда он слабый человек, и звериный рев, когда он творец и художник. Меня эти визги и вопли проникают всего, от них я застываю и переселяюсь в них, так что перестаю чувствовать живую душу и становлюсь жестоким и ненавидящим всех, кто не с нами (потому что в эти мгновенья я с Л. Андреевым — одно, и оба мы отчаявшиеся и отчаянные). Последнее отчаянье мне слишком близко, и оно рождает во мне последнюю искренность, притом, может быть, вывороченную наизнанку.
Blok's and Andreyev's poslednee otchayan'ye (last despair) brings to mind VN's novel Otchayanie ("Despair," 1934) whose narrator and main character, Hermann Karlovich, imagines that he found in Felix (a tramp who is killed by Hermann) his perfect double.
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Andreyev’s tragedy Okean (“The Ocean,” 1911) is mentioned:
Играя утром в теннис с приятельницей немкой, слушая давно приевшиеся лекции по истории искусства, перелистывая у себя в комнате потрёпанные, разношерстные книжки, -- андреевский "Океан", роман Краснова, брошюру "Как сделаться йогом", она всё время сознавала, что вот сейчас Лужин погружён в шахматные вычисления, борется, мучится, и ей было немного обидно, что она не может разделить муки его искусства.
All through those autumn days, while playing tennis in the mornings with a German girl friend, or listening to lectures on art that had long since palled on her, or leafing through a tattered assortment of books in her room - Andreyev's The Ocean, a novel by Krasnov and a pamphlet entitled "How to Become a Yogi"— she was conscious that right now Luzhin was immersed in chess calculations, struggling and suffering—and it vexed her that she was unable to share in the torments of his art. (Chapter Eight)
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) Lermontov compares his soul to the ocean in which nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) lies:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я — или Бог — или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Gloomy ocean, who can
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
The poem's last word, nikto (nobody), brings to mind Nik. T-o, Innokentiy Annenski's penname. In VN’s story Usta k ustam (“Lips to Lips,” 1931) Ilya Borisovich wants to publish his novel under the penname I. Annenski. The characters in VN's story include Galatov, the editor of Arion to whom Ilya Borisovich sends his manuscript and whom Euphratski (the journalist who signs some of his articles Tigris) calls "the Russian Joyce." In Ivanov's "Third Rome" Prince Velski (a pederast) says to himself in order to dispel the thoughts of suicide: "Tra la la la... La dona mobile. Tigris and Euphrates. Tigris and Euphrates. Amidst the green waves kissing the Tauris at daybreak I saw the Nereid." Velski quotes the Duke's song in Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851) and Pushkin's poem Nereida ("The Nereid," 1820). The libretto of Verdi's opera is based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse (“The King Amuses Himself,” 1832). Its main character, the king Francis I invited Leonardo da Vinci to Chambord and acquired Mona Lisa. 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. In a poem that he contributed for the school magazine Liza's son Victor mentions Leonardo and his Mona Lisa:
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa's
lips that you had made so red. (Chapter Four, 5)
In Pushkin's little tragedy "Mozart and Salieri" (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin in reverse. It seems that the "real" name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus is 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). There is a hope (nadezhda) 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.
In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Prof. Pnin, the Head of the bloated Russian Department at Wordsmith University, and Prof. Botkin (who taught in another department):
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)
The head of Kinbote’s department, Doctor Oscar Nattochdag (nicknamed Netochka by his colleagues) seems to blend Oscar Wilde (whose trial is mentioned by Amfiteatrov in his book on Nero) with Netochka Nezvanov (the title character of an unfinished novel by Dostoevski). Dostoevski is the author of Belye nochi (“White Nights,” 1848). Nattochdag means “night and day” in Swedish. In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov (the author of Shvedskaya spichka, "The Swedish Match," 1883, a parody of the detective story) says that Amfiteatrov's stories read as if they were perevod so shvedskogo (a translation from the Swedish):
Фельетоны Амфитеатрова гораздо лучше, чем его рассказы. Точно перевод со шведского.
According to VN (the Eugene Onegin Commentary, vol. III, p. 97), La Motte Fouqué's Pique-Dame, "Berichte aus dem Irrenhause in Briefen. Nach dem Schwedischen" (Berlin, 1826) was known to Pushkin when he wrote Pikovaya dama ("The Queen of Spades," 1834). In Pushkin's story Hermann ends up in a madhouse. It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in a madhouse.
In his memoirs Peterburgskie zimy (“The St. Petersburg Winters,” 1931) G. Ivanov says that, to his question “does a sonnet need a coda,” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions il gran poeta morto (the great dead poet) and his sonetto colla coda – explaining in a footnote that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as “sonnet with the tail” (con la coda), when the idea cannot not be expressed in fourteen lines and entails an appendix that can be longer than the sonnet itself:
В италиянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), когда мысль не вместилась и ведёт за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Shade’s poem consists of 999 lines and 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.