In a conversation at the Faculty Club Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that kings do not die - they only disappear and Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Flatman:
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon - American History - "that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I hear," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere -"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to - what's his name - oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, Sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too, trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink. (note to Line 894)
In Kinbote’s Index there is an entry on Flatman:
Flatman, Thomas, 1637-88, English poet, scholar and miniaturist, not known to old fraud, 894.
In "William Congreve" Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire (1836) Hartley Coleridge mentions the hyperbolical prayer of Flatman, that 'Kings should never die:'
Towards the end of 1694 Queen Mary died. Few queens have made fewer personal enemies, and perhaps few have been more sincerely regretted. But were we to judge of the quality of national affliction by the sable flights of lugubrious verse that were devoted to the good Queen's memory, we should say that the English nation were the worst actors of royal woe in the world. Congreve committed a pastoral among the rest, — perhaps not the worst copy of verses produced on the occasion. It must be a very indifferent “Keen” that is not better than any of them. Such drivel might make the Muses join in the hyperbolical prayer of Flatman, that 'Kings should never die.'
At the beginning of Congreve’s The Mourning Muse of Alexis. A Pastoral (1695) Menalcas mentions this Gloomy Shade:
Behold, Alexis, see this Gloomy Shade,
Which seems alone for Sorrow's Shelter made;
Where, the glad Beams of Light can never play,
But, Night succeeding Night, excludes the Day;
Where, never Birds with Harmony repair,
And lightsom Notes, to cheer the Dusky Air,
To welcome Day, or bid the Sun farewel,
By Morning Lark, or Evening Philomel.
No Violet here, nor Daisy e'er was seen,
No sweetly budding Flower, nor springing Green:
For fragrant Myrtle, and the blushing Rose,
Here, baleful Yew with deadly Cypress grows.
Here then, extended on this wither'd Moss,
We'll lie, and thou shalt sing of ALBION's Loss;
Of ALBION's Loss, and of PASTORA's Death,
Begin thy mournful Song, and raise thy tuneful Breath.
As pointed out by Ward Swanson (“The Nabokovian” # 44, 2000), in his poem “On the Much Lamented Death of our late Sovereign Lord King Charles II of Blessed Memory” (1685), Thomas Flatman says that Princes should only disappear:
But Princes (like the wondrous Enoch) should be free
From Death’s unbounded tyranny,
And when their godlike race is run
And nothing glorious left undone,
Never submit to Fate, but only disappear. (ll. 21-25)
Hartley Coleridge is a son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his poem Kubla Khan (1797) S. T. Coleridge mentions Alph, the sacred river, and a cedarn cover:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. Cedarn is an anagram of nacred, a word that rhymes with sacred.
The working title of VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) was A Person from Porlock (after a man who interrupted Coleridge in the process act of writing down his great visionary poem). The characters of Bend Sinister include Dr Azureus and a person called Crystalsen. At the beginning of his poem Shade mentions the false azure in the windowpane and that crystal land outdoors:
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.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate…
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! (ll. 1-12)
In a draft Pushkin’s poem Anchar (“The Upas Tree,” 1828) subtitled Drevo yada (“A Tree of Poison”) has the epigraph from Coleridge:
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost
Weeps only tears of poison.
According to Kinbote, “tree” in Zemblan is grados:
Line 49: shagbark
A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King's Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade's collection of short poems Hebe's Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting here (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):
THE SACRED TREE
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados.
Goethe’s poem Ginkgo Biloba (from The West-Eastern Divan) ends in the lines:
Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern,
Daß ich eins und doppelt bin?
Don’t you feel in my songs
That I am One and Two?
Der Doppelgänger is a poem by Heinrich Heine set to music by Franz Schubert. In his Memorien Heine says that some of his French friends called him, mispronouncing his name, Mr. Un rien (“Mr. Nothing”):
Hier in Frankreich ist mir gleich nach meiner Ankunft in Paris mein Deutscher Name "Heinrich" in "Henry" übersetzt worden, und ich musste mich darin schicken und auch endlich hierzulande selbst so zu nennen, da das Wort Heinrich dem französischen Ohr nicht zusagte und überhaupt die Franzosen sich alle Dinge in der Welt recht bequem machen. Auch den Namen "Henri Heine" haben sie nie recht aussprechen können, und bei den meisten heiβe ich Mr. Enri Enn; von vielen wird dieses in Enrienne zusammengezogen, und einige nannten mich Mr. Un rien.
The last eight years of his life Heine (1797-1856) was bedridden. Geyne prikovannyi* (“Heine Bedridden”) is an essay by I. Annenski included in Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy (“The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909). Annenski published his “First Book of Reflections” (1906) under the penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”). In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (“none would”). Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse.
Shade tells Kinbote that Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote’s landlord who is on his sabbatical in England) is one of them. Actually, it is Gradus (poet's murderer) who seems to be the third part of Botkin.
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 Alexander Blok (who, according to G. Ivanov, did not know what a coda is). Netochka (Dr. Oscar Nattochdag's nickname) hints at Dostoevski's unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849).
Pushkin's Sonet (1830) has the epigraph from William Wordsworth (a friend of S. T. Coleridge): "Scorn not the sonnet, critic." William Congreve is the author of The Double Dealer (1693), a comic play. In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. III, p. 142) VN quotes a line from Dmitriev's version of Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734-35):
Kongrev applauded me, Svift was not my detractor...
In the fair copy of Pushkin's EO (Eight: II: 5-6) the line I Dmitrev ne byl nash khulitel' (and Dmitriev was not our detractor) is followed by i byta russkogo khranitel' (and the custodian of Russian lore). The custodian of Russian lore is Karamzin, the author of the twelve-volume "History of the Russian State," a work that brings to mind Professor Pardon (American History) and a volume of Historia Zemblica mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane,
to mend a broken viola d’amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he
lolled in his father’s ample chair, his legs over its arms, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order. (note to Line 80)
After the death of Queen Blenda (the mother of Charles Xavier Vseslav) Fleur de Fyler (an elegant lady-in-waiting) tries to seduce the young Prince. “Defiler of flowers,” Fleur de Fyler (whose fragile ankles were the 'careful jewels' in Arnor's poem about a miragarl) brings to mind veshnie tsvety (vernant blooms) trampled by female feet in Chapter One (XXXI: 1-4) of EO:
Когда ж и где, в какой пустыне,
Безумец, их забудешь ты?
Ах, ножки, ножки! где вы ныне?
Где мнете вешние цветы?
So when and where, in what desert, will you
forget them, madman? Little feet,
ah, little feet! Where are you now?
Where do you trample vernant blooms?
In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 142) VN points out that in a letter of Sept. 19, 1818, to A. Turgenev Dmitriev termed young Pushkin "a beautiful flower of poetry that will not fade soon." In a letter of Oct. 20, 1820, to Vyazemski Dmitriev (who was critical of Ruslan and Lyudmila) says that it is a pity that Pushkin often slips into le burlesque, and more pity still that he did not take for motto a famous verse [Piron's], slightly altered: "La mère en défendra la lecture à sa fille." According to Kinbote, Fleur de Fyler was given an advice or command by her mother who spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. In Canto Two of Ruslan and Lyudmila Pushkin mentions Scheherazade (the story-teller in "A Thousand and One Nights"):
Довольно… благо мне не надо
Описывать волшебный дом:
Уже давно Шехеразада
Меня предупредила в том.
Но светлый терем не отрада,
Когда не видим друга в нём.
The widow of King Alfin (whose name seems to hint at Alph, the sacred river in Coleridge's Kubla Khan), Queen Blenda brings to mind Belinda, the main character in Pope's mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717). Shade is the author of a book on Pope, Supremely Blest. 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 (who admits that there is a whiff of Swift in some of his notes) is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (or Botkine). 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). 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.
*a play on Prometey prikovannyi (“Prometheus Bound”), a tragedy by Aeschylus. Prometheus is a Titan who is credited with the creation of humanity from clay and who defies the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity as civilization. A translator of Euripides, Annenski was a classical scholar and borrowed his penname Nik. T-o from Odysseus who in Homer’s Odyssey calls himself Outis (“Nobody”) in order to deceive Polyphemus (the Cyclops).