The main character in VN’s play Izobretenie Val’sa (“The Waltz Invention,” 1938), Salvator Waltz calls himself razrushitel’ (a destroyer). According to Waltz, he can destroy the world in six days:
Привыкнув к мысли, простой, как азбука, что я могу строптивый мир в шесть суток изничтожить, всяк волен жить как хочет, -- ибо круг описан, вы -- внутри, и там просторно, там можете свободно предаваться труду, игре, поэзии, науке... (Act Two)
In six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, and the sea and all things in them, and rested on the seventh day (Exodus 20:11). Ambrose's Hexameron is divided into six books, corresponding to the six days of Creation. An Archbishop of Milan, Aurelius Ambrosius (Ambrose, c. 340–397) had notable influence on Augustine of Hippo (354-430). In a conversation with Kinbote John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) complains that everybody quotes St. Augustine to him:
We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of "sin," of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of "crime," and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's high-backed seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumed concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
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.
KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the password is -?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (note to Line 549)
In VN’s play Sobytie (“The Event,” 1938) the action takes place in August. The wife of the portrait painter Troshcheykin (who is afraid of the shade of his dead little son), Lyubov compares her husband to a baby from Goethe's Erlkoenig. The first two lines of Goethe's ballad, Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind, are a leitmotif of Shade's poem in Pale Fire.
The action in "The Waltz Invention" seems to take place in a dream that Lyubov dreams in the "sleep of death" after committing suicide on her dead son's fifth birthday (two days after her mother's fiftieth birthday). According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad Commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), his name means in Zemblan “a king’s destroyer:”
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. (note to Line 894)
Novaya Zemlya was the site of one of the two major nuclear test sites managed by the USSR, used for air drops and underground testing of the largest of Soviet nuclear bombs, in particular the October 30, 1961, air burst explosion of Tsar Bomba, the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. On the other hand, in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN speaks of his ancestor and mentions Nova Zembla and Dostoevski, the author of The Double, etc.:
My great-great-grandfather, General Aleksandr Ivanovich Nabokov (1749–1807), was, in the reign of Paul the First, chief of the Novgorod garrison regiment called “Nabokov’s Regiment” in official documents. The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where “Nabokov’s River” is named after my ancestor. The memory of the leader of the expedition is preserved in quite a number of place names, one of them being Golovnin’s Lagoon, Seward Peninsula, W. Alaska, from where a butterfly, Parnassius phoebus golovinus (rating a big sic), has been described by Dr. Holland; but my great-grandfather has nothing to show except that very blue, almost indigo blue, even indignantly blue, little river winding between wet rocks; for he soon left the navy, n’ayant pas le pied marin (as says my cousin Sergey Sergeevich who informed me about him), and switched to the Moscow Guards. He married Anna Aleksandrovna Nazimov (sister of the Decembrist). I know nothing about his military career; whatever it was, he could not have competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787–1852), one of the heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin’s schoolmate and close friend. Careful, printers: two “chin” ’s and one “kin.” (Chapter Three, 1)
Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1909) is a poem by Alexander Blok, the author of Korol’ na ploshchadi (“The King on the Square,” 1906), a drama. The poems in Blok’s cycle Ital’yanskie stikhi (“Italian Verses,” 1909) include “Fiesole:”
Стучит топор, и с кампанил
К нам флорентийский звон долинный
Плывёт, доплыл и разбудил
Сон золотистый и старинный…
Не так же ли стучал топор
В нагорном Фье́золе когда-то,
Когда впервые взор Беато
Флоренцию приметил с гор?
The paradisal setting for the frame story of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Villa Palmieri in Fiesole brings to mind the island of Palmera (in the Russian original, Palmora) to which Waltz plans to move. The title of Boccaccio’s Decameron (“Ten Days”) deliberately echoes that of the Hexameron. In “The Waltz Invention” Waltz asks the architect to build for him a palace on Palmera in ten days:
Гриб. Видите ли, ваше... ваше сиятельство, я, собственно, архитектор.
Вальс. А... так бы сразу и сказали. Глупое недоразумение. Мне от него захотелось есть. Отлично. Вам уже сообщили, что мне нужно?
Гриб. Вам нужен дворец.
Вальс. Да, дворец. Отлично. Я люблю громадные, белые, солнечные здания. Вы для меня должны построить нечто сказочное, со сказочными удобствами. Колонны, фонтаны, окна в полнеба, хрустальные потолки... И вот еще, - давняя моя мечта... чтоб было такое приспособление, - не знаю, электрическое, что ли, - я в технике слаб, - словом, проснешься, нажмешь кнопку, и кровать тихо едет и везет тебя прямо к ванне... И еще я хочу, чтоб во всех стенах были краны с разными ледяными напитками... Все это я давно-давно заказал судьбе, - знаете, когда жил в душных, шумных, грязных углах... лучше не вспоминать.
Гриб. Я представлю вам планы... Думаю, что угожу.
Вальс. Но главное, это должно быть выстроено скоро, я вам даю десять дней. Довольно?
Гриб. Увы, одна доставка материалов потребует больше месяца.
Вальс. Ну, это - извините. Я снаряжу целый флот. В три дня будет доставлено...
Гриб. Я не волшебник. Работа займет полгода, минимум.
Вальс. Полгода? В таком случае убирайтесь, - вы мне не нужны! Полгода! Да я вас за такое нахальство...
Входит Сон.
Сон. В чем дело? Отчего крик?
Вальс. Этому подлецу я даю десять дней, а он...
Сон. Пустяки, недоразумение. Разумеется, дворец будет готов в этот срок, - даже скорее. Не правда ли, господин архитектор?
Гриб. Да, в самом деле, я не совсем понял... Да, конечно, будет готов. (Act Three)
According to the architect, he is not volshebnik (a magician). In a letter to a publisher VN described his story Volshebnik ("The Enchanter," 1939), the Russian precursor of Lolita (1955), as a ribald novella in the style of Boccaccio and Aretino.
A special bed that Waltz wants to have in his palace is similar to that mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower. This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. (note to Line 80)