In his Commentary and Index to Shade’s poem 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) mentions Nodo, the half-brother of Odon (pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b. 1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla), and mad Mandevil, a cousin of the King's throne page (Baron Radomir Mandevil, b. 1925, man of fashion and Zemblan patriot):
The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
Nodo, Odon’s half-brother, b. 1916, son of Leopold O'Donnell and of a Zemblan boy impersonator; a cardsharp and despicable traitor, 171. (Index)
Mandevil, Baron Mirador, cousin of Radomir Mandevil (q.v.), experimentalist, madman and traitor, 171 (Index)
The name of Odon’s half-brother seems to hint at François Nodot (c. 1650-1710), the author of spurious supplements to the text of Satyricon of Petronius. 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 author’s fellow traveler in his journey to London) mentions Petroniy novyi (the new Petronius) who with a half-smile on his lips sits in a bath preparing to cut his veins:
Ущерб, закат... Петроний новый
с полуулыбкой на устах,
с последней розой бирюзовой
в изящно сложенных перстах,
садится в ванну. Всё готово.
Уж вольной смерти близок час.
Но погоди! Чем резать жилу,
не лучше ль обратится к мылу,
не лучше ль вымыться хоть раз?"
In Calmbrood’s poem Chenstone (the fictitious poet to whom Pushkin ascribed his little tragedy “The Covetous Knight,” 1830) mentions a certain Johnson whom they had beaten up with a candlestick for a marked article:
Дни Ювенала отлетели.
Не воспевать же, в самом деле,
как за краплёную статью
побили Джонсона шандалом?
Johnson’s “marked article” is G. Ivanov’s abusive review in Chisla (Numbers, # 1, 1930) of Sirin’s novels and stories. In his epigram (1931) on G. Ivanov VN mentions sem’ya zhurnal’nykh shulerov (a family of 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)
In VN's story Usta k ustam ("Lips to Lips," 1931), another satire on the editors of "Numbers," Euphratski calls Galatov (the editor of Arion to whom Ilya Borisovich sends his manuscript) russkiy Dzhoys (the Russian Joyce). Nodo's father, Leopold O'Donnell is a namesake of Leopold Bloom (the main character in Joyce's Ulysses).
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.
The name Mandevil seems to hint at a line in Byron’s Don Juan:
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last
Man — and, as we would hope — perhaps the devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:
While youth’s hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this — the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion. (Canto the Fourth, II)
Petronius (c. 27-66 AD) was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his visit to Cambridge in the late 1930s and meeting with Nesbit who still saw in Lenin’s short reign a kind of glamorous quinquennium Neronis:
When, after an absence of almost seventeen years I revisited England, I made the dreadful mistake of going to see Cambridge again not at the glorious end of the Easter term but on a raw February day that reminded me only of my own confused old nostalgia. I was hopelessly trying to find an academic job in England (the ease with which I obtained that type of employment in the U.S.A. is to me, in backthought, a constant source of grateful wonder). In every way the visit was not a success. I had lunch with Nesbit at a little place, which ought to have been full of memories but which, owing to various changes, was not. He had given up smoking. Time had softened his features and he no longer resembled Gorki or Gorki’s translator, but looked a little like Ibsen, minus the simian vegetation. An accidental worry (the cousin or maiden sister who kept house for him had just been removed to Binet’s clinic or something) seemed to prevent him from concentrating on the very personal and urgent matter I wanted to speak to him about. Bound volumes of Punch were heaped on a table in a kind of small vestibule where a bowl of goldfish had formerly stood—and it all looked so different. Different too were the garish uniforms worn by the waitresses, of whom none was as pretty as the particular one I remembered so clearly. Rather desperately, as if struggling against boredom, Ibsen launched into politics. I knew well what to expect—denunciation of Stalinism. In the early twenties Nesbit had mistaken his own ebullient idealism for a romantic and humane something in Lenin’s ghastly rule. Ibsen, in the days of the no less ghastly Stalin, was mistaking a quantitative increase in his own knowledge for a qualitative change in the Soviet regime. The thunderclap of purges that had affected “old Bolsheviks,” the heroes of his youth, had given him a salutary shock, something that in Lenin’s day all the groans coming from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon had not been able to do. With horror he pronounced the names of Ezhov and Yagoda—but quite forgot their predecessors, Uritski and Dzerzhinski. While time had improved his judgment regarding contemporaneous Soviet affairs, he did not bother to reconsider the preconceived notions of his youth, and still saw in Lenin’s short reign a kind of glamorous quinquennium Neronis. (Chapter Thirteen, 5)
Glamorous quinquennium Neronis brings to mind a number of Sylvia O'Donnell's more or less glamorous marriages:
O'Donnell, Sylvia, nee O'Connell, born 1895? 1890?, the much-traveled, much-married mother of Odon (q. v.), 149, 691; after marrying and divorcing college president Leopold O'Donnell in 1915, father of Odon, she married Peter Gusev, first Duke of Rahl, and graced Zembla till about 1925 when she married an Oriental prince met in Chamonix; after a number of other more or less glamorous marriages, she was in the act of divorcing Lionel Lavender, cousin of Joseph, when last seen in this Index.
Odon's mother, Sylvia O'Donnell (who arranged Kinbote's lectureship at Wordsmith University and rented for Kinbote the Goldsworth chateau) is a namesake of Sylvia Beach, Joyce's friend whom VN met in Paris.
Just as ‘Nesbit’ (as VN dubbed his Cambridge friend) has the advantage of entering into a voluptuous palindromic association with Ibsen (the author of Catiline), Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) enters into a similar association with Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody"), the penname of Innokentiy Annenski. In "Lips to Lips" Ilya Borisovich wants to publish his novel under the penname I. Annenski. Annenski's Kniga otrazheniy ("The Book of Reflections," 1906) and "The Second Book of Reflections" (1909) bring to mind Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index:
He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young - little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
The essays in Annenski's "Book of Reflections" include Yumor Lermontova ("Lermontov's Humor"). In his Commentary Kinbote quotes Shade’s words about Russian intellectuals and humorists and mentions Prof. Botkin:
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 Lermontov’s poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) the last word is nikto (nobody):
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!
Lermontov compares his soul to the ocean in which nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) lies. 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 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.
See also the updated full version of my previous post, “AMPHITHEATRICUS, URANOGRAD & OSCAR NATTOCHDAG IN PALE FIRE.”