In his Commentary 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 his uncle Conmal, Duke of Aros, who translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Zemblan:
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin begins with the death of Onegin’s uncle (who had most honest principles and, when taken ill in earnest, has made one respect him). In his EO Commentary VN several times mentions Jean-François Ducis (1733-1816), a fervent admirer of "Sakespir." In Ducis’s French version (1772) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.1) Hamlet tells Ophelia:
Que tu me connois mal , ô ma chere Ophélie!
On the other hand, the name Conmal seems to hint at kon’ mal (a small horse), the first two words in a Russian riddle about the swallow:
Конь мал за морем бывал:
Спереди — шильце,
Сзади — вильце,
Сверху — чёрное суконце,
Снизу — белое полотенце.
A small horse was oversees:
a little awl in front,
a little fork behind,
a piece of black cloth on the top,
a white towel underneath.
According to Kinbote, the King saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
The “real” name of both Sybil Shade and Queen Disa seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochki (“The Swallows,” 1884) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (who was married to Maria Botkin). In his famous monologue (omitted by Ducis) Hamlet mentions a bare bodkin. Conmal’s last words bring to mind Mourir, dormir, rêver peut-être (Hamlet’s words in a French version). In Ducis's adaptation Hamlet tells Ophelie:
Mon malheur est de vivre & non pas de mourir. (3.1)
Conmal says his last words in French. In his Essais (Book One, Chapter XVIII) Montaigne says: à se dernier rôle de la mort et de nous il n’y a plus que feindre, il faut parler français (in this last role of death one should not pretend anymore, one should speak French). VN’s story Lik (1939) ends in the protagonist’s words that he says in French:
К дому, где жили Колдуновы, автомобиль подъехал со стороны площади. Там собралась толпа, и только с помощью упорных трубных угроз автомобилю удалось протиснуться. Около фонтана, на стуле, сидела жена Колдунова, весь лоб и левая часть лица были в блестящей крови, слиплись волосы, она сидела совершенно прямо и неподвижно, окружённая любопытными, а рядом с ней, тоже неподвижно, стоял её мальчик в окровавленной рубашке, прикрывая лицо кулаком, -- такая, что ли, картина. Полицейский, принявший Лика за врача, провёл его в комнату. Среди осколков, на полу навзничь лежал обезображенный выстрелом в рот, широко раскинув ноги в новых белых... -- Это мои,-- сказал Лик по-французски.
The taxi approached Koldunov’s place from the direction of the square. A crowd had gathered, and it was only by dint of persistent threats with its horn that the driver managed to squeeze through. Koldunov’s wife was sitting on a chair by the public fountain. Her forehead and left cheek glistened with blood, her hair was matted, and she sat quite straight and motionless surrounded by the curious, while, next to her, also motionless, stood her boy, in a bloodstained shirt, covering his face with his fist, a kind of tableau. A policeman, mistaking Lik for a doctor, escorted him into the room. The dead man lay on the floor amid broken crockery, his face blasted by a gunshot in the mouth, his widespread feet in new, white –
“Those are mine,” said Lik in French.
There is lik (obs., face) in karlik (dwarf). According to Kinbote, on his deathbed Conmal called him Karlik:
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fngers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla - partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39 - 40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" (note to Line 12)
In Lik the hero forgets at Koldunov’s the carton box containing his new white shoes and, dying of a heart failure at the seaside, imagines a trip in a taxi to Koldunov’s to fetch his shoes. According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Botkin is the one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear:
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
Lik is an actor who plays a young Russian named Igor in Suire's play The Abyss:
Есть пьеса "Бездна" (L'Abîme) известного французского писателя Suire. Она уже сошла со сцены, прямо в Малую Лету (т. е. в ту, которая обслуживает театр,-- речка, кстати сказать, не столь безнадежная, как главная, с менее крепким раствором забвения, так что режиссёрская удочка иное ещё вылавливает спустя много лет). В этой пьесе, по существу идиотской, даже идеально идиотской, иначе говоря -- идеально построенной на прочных условностях общепринятой драматургии, трактуется страстной путь пожилой женщины, доброй католички и землевладелицы, вдруг загоревшейся греховной страстью к молодому русскому, Igor, -- Игорю, случайно попавшему к ней в усадьбу и полюбившему её дочь Анжелику. Старый друг семьи,-- волевая личность, угрюмый ханжа, ходко сбитый автором из мистики и похотливости, ревнует героиню к Игорю, которого она в свой черед ревнует к Анжелике,-- словом, все весьма интересно, весьма жизненно, на каждой реплике штемпель серьезной фирмы, и уж, конечно, ни один толчок таланта не нарушает законного хода действия, нарастающего там, где ему полагается нарастать, и, где следует, прерванного лирической сценкой или бесстыдно пояснительным диалогом двух старых слуг.
There is a play of the 1920s, called L'Abîme (The Abyss), by the well-known French author Suire. It has already passed from the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater – a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later). This play – essentially idiotic, even ideally idiotic, or, putting it another way, ideally constructed on the solid conventions of traditional dramaturgy – deals with the torments of a middle-aged, rich, and religious French lady suddenly inflamed by a sinful passion for a young Russian named Igor, who has turned up at her château and fallen in love with her daughter Angélique. An old friend of the family, a strong-willed, sullen bigot, conveniently knocked together by the author out of mysticism and lechery, is jealous of the heroine’s interest in Igor, while she in turn is jealous of the latter’s attentions to Angélique; in a word, it is all very compelling and true to life, every speech bears the trademark of a respectable tradition, and it goes without saying that there is not a single jolt of talent to disrupt the ordered course of action, swelling where it ought to swell, and interrupted when necessary by a lyric scene or a shamelessly explanatory dialogue between two old retainers.
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes a tall white fountain that he saw during his heart attack, his visit to Mrs. Z. (who saw a tall white mountain during her heart attack) and mentions an abyss that he investigates:
Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But a topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. (ll. 803-810)
The name Suire (of the author of The Abyss) seems to hint at à suivre ("to be continued"), a phrase used by Solovyov at the end of his poem Mikhailu Matveyevichu Stasyulevichu v den’ chuda Aerkhangela Mikhaila v Khonekh (“To Mikhail Matveyevich Stasyulevich on the Day of Miracle at Chonae by Archangel Michael,” 1896):
Недаром в Хонех натворил
Чудес Ваш омоним небесный:
Хоть не архангел Михаил —
Вы также Михаил чудесный.
Низвергнул он уже давно
Дракона гордого и злого,—
И Вам, я верю, суждено
Низвергнуть Ратькова-Рожнова.
À suivre
Vladimir Solovyov is the author of a doctrine about Divine Sophia and Smysl lyubvi ("The Meaning of Love," 1892-93), a series of five articles. In the fifth article Solovyov (whose brother Vsevolod was a novelist and a friend of Dostoevski) quotes four poems by Fet: Alter ego (1879), Izmuchen zhizn'yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy ("By Life Tormented and by a Cunning Hope," 1864), Naprasno ("In Vain," 1852) and Poetam ("To Poets," 1890). 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 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.
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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. In his poem Ya – Gamlet. Kholodeet krov’… (“I’m Hamlet. Freezes blood…” 1914) Blok identifies himself with Hamlet and compares his wife to Ophelia:
Я — Гамлет. Холодеет кровь,
Когда плетёт коварство сети,
И в сердце — первая любовь
Жива — к единственной на свете.
Тебя, Офелию мою,
Увел далёко жизни холод,
И гибну, принц, в родном краю
Клинком отравленным заколот.
There is Blok in yabloko (apple). Describing Suire's play, VN compares its hero to yabloko razdora (the apple of discord):
Яблоко раздора -- обычно плод скороспелый, кислый, его нужно варить; так и с молодым человеком пьесы: он бледноват; стараясь его подкрасить, автор и сделал его русским, -- со всеми очевидными последствиями такого мошенничества.
The apple of discord is usually an early, sour fruit, and should be cooked. Thus the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat colorless, and it is
in a vain attempt to touch him up a little that the author has made him a Russian, with all the obvious consequences of such trickery.
At the beginning of his poem Shade mentions an apple on a plate:
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 (ll. 1-6)
At a meal at the campus Shade says that "he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple:"
I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include--lowering my voice--the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served
us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. (Foreword)
According to Kinbote, he became a vegetarian after reading a story about an Italian despot:
When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving. (note to Line 171)
Des Cannibales ("Of Cannibales") is an essay by Montaigne included in his Essais. Shade's murderer, Jakob Gradus is also known as Jack Degree. In his essay De l’experience ("Of Experience") Montaigne says that every place swarms with commentaries, of authors there is great scarcity, and uses the phrase de degré en degré (step by step):
Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations qu’à interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre subject : nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires ; d’auteurs, il en est grand cherté. Le principal et plus fameux sçavoir de nos siecles, est-ce pas sçavoir entendre les sçavans ? Est-ce pas la fin commune et derniere de tous estudes ? Nos opinions s’entent les unes sur les autres. La premiere sert de tige à la seconde, la seconde à la tierce. Nous eschellons ainsi de degré en degré. Et advient de là que le plus haut monté a souvent plus d’honneur que de mérite ; car il n’est monté que d’un grain sur les espaules du penultime.
There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honor than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one. (Essays, Book Three, Chapter XIII)