According to 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), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrass:ing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
Ombre is the title of Charles Baudelaire’s translation (1857) of E. A. Poe’s story Shadow – A Parable (1835). Shade’s murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a Zemblan regicidal organization). At the beginning (and, presumably, at the end) of his poem Shade calls himself "the shadow of the waxwing." In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions the fantasies of Poe:
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go.
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 627-634)
The great Starover Blue brings to mind gospodin parnasskiy starover (Mr. Parnassian Old Believer) mentioned by Pushkin in his “Epigram” (1829) patterned on a sonnet:
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: все 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.
(transl. by V. Gurvich)
Pushkin’s Zoilus brings to mind young Zoilus mentioned by E. A. Poe in his “Shadow – A Parable:”
Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way — which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon — which are madness; and drank deeply — although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded; — the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and, gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teios.
In Old Latin Oinos (the name of the narrator in Poe’s story) means “one.” The three main characters in Pale Fire, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to be one and the same person. In another discarded variant quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary Shade mentions “poor Baudelaire:”
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 after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote’s commentary). 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), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa), will be full again. In his famous epigram on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda (hope):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is a hope
That he will be full at last.
In Vorontsov there is voron (raven). The Raven (1845) is a poem by E. A. Poe.
Shade’s poem 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”).
At the end of E. A. Poe's story William Wilson (1839) the title character and narrator kills his doppelgänger. E. A. Poe is the author of The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845). In Eureka: an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (1848) E. A. Poe mentions “as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw:”
Now, distinctness — intelligibility, at all points, is a primary feature in my general design. On important topics it is better to be a good deal prolix than even a very little obscure. But abstruseness is a quality appertaining to no subject per se. All are alike, in facility of comprehension, to him who approaches them by properly graduated steps. It is merely because a stepping-stone, here and there, is heedlessly left unsupplied in our road to the Differential Calculus, that this latter is not altogether as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw.
The author of Discours sur les ombres, the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande (mentioned in VN's novels "Invitation to a Beheading" and "The Gift") brings to mind Madame Eugenie Lalande, a character in E. A. Poe’s story The Spectacles (1844). In his "Epigram" Pushkin mentions kozyol v ochkakh (bespectacled goat).