The epigraph to VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) is from James Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson:
This reminds me of the ludicrous account he
gave Mr. Langston, of the despicable state of a
young gentleman of good family. 'Sir, when I
heard of him last, he was running about town
shooting cats.' And then in a sort of kindly
reverie, he bethought himself of his own
favorite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be
shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.'
- James Boswell, the Life of Samuel Johnson
At the beginning of her essay Montaigne (included in “The Common Reader,” 1925) Virginia Woolf mentions “the face of Boswell peeping between other people's shoulders in the famous biography:”
Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, "Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?" Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.
After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps. The Religio Medici is a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other people's shoulders in the famous biography.
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), New Wye is at the latitude of Palermo (the capital of Sicily):
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo. (Foreword)
When he tells Kinbote that he agrees with the old snuff-takers, Shade means Rousseau's words (quoted by Tolstoy in his essay “Who Should Learn Writing of Whom; Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant Children?” 1862) "man is born perfect:"
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon. (note to Line 549)
Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Doctor,” 1643) by Sir Thomas Browne brings to mind the entry on Religion in Kinbote’s Index:
Religion: contact with God, 47; the Pope, 85; freedom of mind, 101; problem of sin and faith, 549; see Suicide.
In “Rambling Round Evelyn” (a title that brings to mind Kinbote's rambles with Shade) Virginia Woolf mentions religions and kings:
For he will allow it to be an innocent employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy or the pulpit.
An allusion to “Through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), “a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul” also brings to mind “in a glass, darkly” (a phrase used by Prof. Hurley in the interview quoted by Kinbote in his Foreword to Shade’s poem):
Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: "None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Nonsense again! Aside from the veritable clarion of internal evidence ringing throughout Canto Four, there exists Sybil Shade's affirmation (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband "never intended to go beyond four parts." For him the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in pardonable self-approbation while his discreet companion kept trying in vain to adapt the swing of a long-limbed gait to the disheveled old poet's jerky shuffle. Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if all this were not enough - and it is, it is enough - I have had the dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.)
In Kinbote’s Index the entry on Religion is followed by Rippleson Caves:
Rippleson Caves, sea caves in Blawick, named after a famous glass maker who embodied the dapple-and-ringle play and other circular reflections on blue-green sea water in his extraordinary stained glass windows for the Palace, 130, 149. (Index)
In her novel The Waves (1931) Virginia Woolf says:
There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.
In Canto Two of his poem Shade writes:
I went upstairs and read a galley proof,
And heard the wind roll marbles on the roof.
"See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing"
Has unmistakably the vulgar ring
Of its preposterous age. (ll. 417-21)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
The draft yields an interesting variant:
417 I fled upstairs at the first quawk of jazz
And read a galley proof: "Such verses as
'See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king’
Smack of their heartless age." Then came your call
This is, of course, from Pope's Essay on Man. One knows not what to wonder at more: Pope's not finding a monosyllable to replace "hero" (for example, "man") so as to accommodate the definite article before the next word, or Shade's replacing an admirable passage by the much flabbier final text. Or was he afraid of offending an authentic king? In pondering the near past I have never been able to ascertain retrospectively if he really had "guessed my secret," as he once observed (see note to line 991).
According to Kinbote, the King left Zembla in a powerful motorboat prepared for him in the Rippleson Caves (note to Line 149). In his poem V severnom more (“In a Northern Sea”) from the cycle Vol'nye mysli ("Free Thoughts," 1907) Alexander Blok describes a sea voyage in a big-bellied and funny motorboat and mentions mnogotsventaya ryab’ (many-colored ripples) on the water:
И с длинного, протянутого в море,
Подгнившего, сереющего мола,
Прочтя все надписи: "Навек с тобой",
"Здесь были Коля с Катей", "Диодор
Иеромонах и послушник Исидор
Здесь были. Дивны божии дела", -
Прочтя все надписи, выходим в море
В пузатой и смешной моторной лодке.
Бензин пыхтит и пахнет. Два крыла
Бегут в воде за нами. Вьётся быстрый след,
И, обогнув скучающих на пляже,
Рыбачьи лодки, узкий мыс, маяк,
Мы выбегаем многоцветной рябью
В просторную ласкающую соль.
In his poem Blok compares a lantern on the yacht’s thin mast to the precious stone of a ferronnière:
Над морем - штиль. Под всеми парусами
Стоит красавица - морская яхта.
На тонкой мачте - маленький фонарь,
Что камень драгоценной фероньеры,
Горит над матовым челом небес…
И, снова обогнув их, мы глядим
С молитвенной и полною душою
На тихо уходящий силуэт
Красавицы под всеми парусами...
На драгоценный камень фероньеры,
Горящий в смуглых сумерках чела.
Alexander Bryullov portrayed Pushkin’s wife Natalie wearing her ferronnière and long earrings. La belle ferronnière is a portrait of a lady, usually attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, in the Louvre. 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 The Modern Essay (in “The Common Reader”) Virginia Woolf mentions Walter Pater’s "Notes on Leonardo da Vinci:"
Of all writers in the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because before setting out to write his essay ("Notes on Leonardo da Vinci") he has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision, such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the writer's conception as a whole before us.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his life in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and mentions the critic Yuli Ayhenvald, “a Russian version of Walter Pater:”
I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas.
Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives
His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse. I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald—a Russian version of Walter Pater—later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
Morella (1835) is a short story in the Gothic horror genre by E. A. Poe. At the beginning of E. A. Poe's story How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) Psyche Zenobia says that her name means in Greek "the soul" and sometimes "a butterfly:"
I presume everybody has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek, and means "the soul" (that's me, I'm all soul) and sometimes "a butterfly," which latter meaning undoubtedly alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas.
In her essay The Russian Point of View (also included in “The Common Reader”) Virginia Woolf says:
Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction.
At the end of his poem Shade mentions a Vanessa butterfly that wheels in the low sun and settles on the sand:
A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 993-999)
In “Rambling Round Evelyn” Virginia Woolf mentions the gardener who trundles his barrow and a Red Admiral’s head:
No one can read the story of Evelyn's foreign travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference between us--that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here no doubt we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a second.
A few moments after writing Line 999 of his poem Shade is killed by Gradus. Jakob Gradus in reverse, Sudarg of Bokay (the mirror maker of genius mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index) hints at gosudar’ (sovereign). Gosudar’ is the Russian title of Machiavelli’s Prince (1532), a work written in the mirrors for princes style and beginning with the Letter to Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Gradus is also known as de Grey. The title of Virginia Woolf’s book, “The Common Reader,” was borrowed from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Gray (1779).
In his story Nabor (“Recruiting,” 1935) VN says that a self-portrait is seldom successful and mentions the hypnotic spell of the indispensable mirror:
Этот сквер, эти розы, эту зелень во всех их незамысловатых преображениях он видел тысячу раз, но все насквозь сверкало жизнью, новизной, участием в его судьбе, когда с ним и со мной случались такие припадки счастья. Рядом, на ту же в темно-синюю краску выкрашенную, горячую от солнца, гостеприимную и равнодушную скамейку, сел господин с русской газетой. Описать этого господина мне трудно, да и незачем, автопортрет редко бывает удачен, ибо в выражении глаз почти всегда остается напряженность: гипноз зеркала, без которого не обойтись. Почему я решил, что человека, с которым я сел рядом, зовут Василием Ивановичем? Да потому, что это сочетание имен, как кресло, а он был широк и мягок, с большим домашним лицом, и, положа руки на трость, сидел удобно, неподвижно,-- только сновали зрачки за стеклами очков, от облака, идущего в одну сторону, к идущему в другую грузовику или от воробьихи, кормящей на гравии сына, к прерывистым дергающимся движениям, делаемым маленьким деревянным автомобилем, который за нитку тянул за собой забывший о нем ребенок (вот упал набок, но продолжал ехать).
This little street garden, these roses, this greenery—he had seen them a thousand times, in all their uncomplicated transformations, yet it all sparkled through and through with vitality, novelty, participation in one’s destiny, whenever he and I experienced such fits of happiness. A man with the local Russian newspaper sat down on the same dark-blue, sun-warmed, hospitable, indifferent bench. It is difficult for me to describe this man; then again, it would be useless, since a self-portrait is seldom successful, because of a certain tension that always remains in the expression of the eyes—the hypnotic spell of the indispensable mirror. Why did I decide that the man next to whom I had sat down was named Vasiliy Ivanovich? Well, because that blend of name and patronymic is like an armchair, and he was broad and soft, with a large cozy face, and sat, with his hands resting on his cane, comfortably and motionlessly; only the pupils of his eyes shifted to and fro, behind their lenses, from a cloud traveling in one direction to a truck traveling in the other, or from a female sparrow feeding her fledgling on the gravel to the intermittent, jerky motion of a little wooden automobile pulled on a string by a child who had forgotten all about it (there—it fell on its side, but nevertheless kept progressing).
Vasiliy Ivanovich is the name of the main character in VN’s story Oblako, ozero, bashnya (“Cloud, Castle, Lake,” 1937). Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) drowned in Lake Omega, the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero and Zero.
In Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions his wife’s portrait by Lang:
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)
In his note to Line 682 (Lang) Kinbote writes:
A modern Fra Pandolf no doubt. I do not remember seeing any such painting around the house. Or did Shade have in mind a photographic portrait? There was one such portrait on the piano, and another in Shade's study. How much fairer it would have been to Shade's and his friend's reader if the lady had deigned answer some of my urgent queries.
In his novel Pnin (1957) VN mentions the fresco portraits of faculty members by the great Lang:
Brilliant Cockerell also told of the strange feud between Pnin and his compatriot Komarov--the mediocre muralist who had kept adding fresco portraits of faculty members in the college dining hall to those already depicted there by the great Lang. Although Komarov belonged to another political faction than Pnin, the patriotic artist had seen in Pnin's dismissal an anti-Russian gesture and had started to delete a sulky Napoleon that stood between young, plumpish (now gaunt) Blorenge and young, moustached (now shaven) Hagen, in order to paint in Pnin; and there was the scene between Pnin and President Poore at lunch--an enraged, spluttering Pnin losing all control over what English he had, pointing a shaking forefinger at the preliminary outlines of a ghostly muzhik on the wall, and shouting that he would sue the college if his face appeared above that blouse; and there was his audience, imperturbable Poore, trapped in the dark of his total blindness, waiting for Pnin to peter out and then asking at large: 'Is that foreign gentleman on our staff?' Oh, the impersonation was deliciously funny, and although Gwen Cockerell must have heard the programme many times before, she laughed so loud that their old dog Sobakevich, a brown cocker with a tear-stained face, began to fidget and sniff at me. (Chapter Seven, 6)
A regular martinet in regard to his underlings, Prof. Pnin is the Head of the bloated Russian Department at Wordsmith University.
On the other hand, the great Lang brings to mind Mr. Langston mentioned by Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Btw., The Haunted Barn (a scene offered by Kinbote in his note to Line 347: old barn) brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s story (and the posthumous collection of short stories, 1944) The Haunted House (1921).