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 those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing:
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft-and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:
Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of Tanagra and the first three letters of "dust" form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. "Simple chance!" the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. "Leningrad used to be Petrograd?" "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?"
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.
Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels. We saw him last on the late afternoon of July 10th when he returned from Lex to his hotel in Geneva, and there we left him.
For the next four days Gradus remained fretting in Geneva. The amusing paradox with these men of action is that they constantly have to endure long stretches of otiosity that they are unable to fill with anything, lacking as they do the resources of an adventurous mind. As many people of little culture, Gradus was a voracious reader of newspapers, pamphlets, chance leaflets and the multilingual literature that comes with nose drops and digestive tablets; but this summed up his concessions to intellectual curiosity, and since his eyesight was not too good, and the consumability of local news not unlimited, he had to rely a great deal on the torpor of sidewalk cafes and on the makeshift of sleep.
How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimation, and the star that no party member can ever reach.
On Wednesday morning, still without news, Gradus telegraphed headquarters saying that he thought it unwise to wait any longer and that he would be staying at Hotel Lazuli, Nice. (note to Line 596)
VN's home city, St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914. In his article Na pechal'nom ostatke zhizni ("In the Sad Remainder of Life," 1914) V. V. Rozanov quotes Isadora Duncan's essay Се que je pense de la danse ("What I Think of Dance") in which she mentions the Tanagra figurines, Grecian urns and the dancing children of Donatello:
Совершенные формы должны помочь создать совершенное движения, учениц окружают статуэтки Танагры, греческие вазы, танцующие дети Донателло; - ибо я думаю, что красота создается тогда, когда просыпается воля к ней.
An Italian sculptor of the Renaissance, Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, c. 1386-1466) brings to mind “my dear Odonello,” as Kinbote calls his friend Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla):
Niagarin who had lived in Canada spoke English and French; Andronnikov had some German. The little Zemblan they knew was pronounced with that comical Russian accent that gives vowels a kind of didactic plenitude of sound. They were considered models of dash by the Extremist guards, and my dear Odonello once earned a harsh reprimand from the commandant by not having withstood the temptation to imitate their walk: both moved with an identical little swagger, and both were conspicuously bandy-legged.
When I was a child, Russia enjoyed quite a vogue at the court of Zembla but that was a different Russia - a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations. We may add that Charles the Beloved could boast of some Russian blood. In medieval times two of his ancestors had married Novgorod princesses. Queen Yaruga (reigned 1799-1800) his great-great-granddam, was half Russian; and most historians believe that Yaruga's only child Igor was not the son of Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) but the fruit of her amours with the Russian adventurer Hodinski, her goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century. (note to Line 681)
Like Odon (pseudonym of Donald O’Donnell), Aleksandr Lik* (the main character in VN’s story Lik, 1939) is an actor. At the beginning of the story Malaya Leta (the Lesser Lethe) is mentioned:
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.
The title of Suire’s play brings to mind the abyss that Shade 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.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (ll. 803-815)
In the same Canto Three of his poem Shade speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions the widower’s second love, a young woman in ballerina black:
We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another. Time means growth.
And growth means nothing in Elysian life.
Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,
But with a touch of tawny in the shade,
Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade
The other sits and raises a moist gaze
Toward the blue impenetrable haze.
How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy
To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy
Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
March night killed both the mother and the child?
And she, the second love, with instep bare
In ballerina black, why does she wear
The earrings from the other's jewel case?
And why does she avert her fierce young face? (ll. 569-588)
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was an American dancer (and one of Esenin’s wives). Rozanov’s first wife, Apollinariya Suslov was Dostoevski’s mistress. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski twice uses the word gradus (degree):
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает Бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God and consequently does the philosopher's work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than poetical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
Shade, Kinbote and Gradus have one and the same birthday: July 5 (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915, seventeen years later).
Rozanov is the author of Lyudi lunnogo sveta (“People of the Moonlight,” 1912). In Lunacharski (the minister of education in Lenin’s government) there is luna (moon). In his speech on Dostoevski (delivered on the hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth) Lunacharski takes the example of water in order to explain Dostoevski’s treatment of man’s psyche and mentions a fantastic Niagara Falls, a hundred times more grandiose than the real one:
Чтобы понять, что делает Достоевский с психикой - возьмём хотя бы такой пример - вода. Для того, чтобы дать человеку полное представление о воде, заставить его объять все её свойства, надо ему показать воду, пар, лёд, разделить воду на составные части, показать, что такое тихое озеро, величаво катящая свои волны река, водопад, фонтан и проч. Словом - ему нужно показать все свойства, всю внутреннюю динамику воды. И, однако, этого всё-таки будет мало. Может быть, для того, чтобы понять динамику воды, нужно превысить данные возможности и фантастически представить человеку Ниагару, в сотню раз грандиознейшую, чем подлинная. Вот Достоевский и стремится превозмочь реальность и показать дух человеческий со всеми его неизмеримыми высотами и необъяснимыми глубинами со всех сторон. Как Микель Анджело скручивает человеческие тела в конвульсиях, в агонии, так Достоевский дух человеческий то раздувает до гиперболы, то сжимает до полного уничтожения, смешивает с грязью, низвергает его в глубины ада, то потом вдруг взмывает в самые высокие эмпиреи неба. Этими полётами человеческого духа Достоевский не только приковывает наше внимание, захватывает нас, открывает нам новые неизведанные красоты, но даёт очень много и нашему познанию, показывая нам неподозреваемые нами глубины души.
According to Lunacharski, Dostoevski shows to us the soul’s depths whose existence we did not even suspect. Vsya vnutrennyaya dinamika vody (the whole inner dynamics of water) mentioned by Lunacharski brings to mind the Dynamo goalkeeper whose mannerisms Niagarin could imitate to perfection:
It was delightful to watch the two splendid Sovietchiks running about in the yard and kicking a chalk-dusty, thumping-tight soccer ball (looking so large and bald in such surroundings). Andronnikov could tap-play it on his toe up and down a dozen times before punting it rocket straight into the melancholy, surprised, bleached, harmless heavens: and Niagarin could imitate to perfection the mannerisms of a certain stupendous Dynamo goalkeeper. (note to Line 681)
Andronnikov is a character in Dostoevski’s novel Podrostok (“The Adolescent,” 1875). Arkadiy Dolgoruki (the novel’s main character) received Katerina Akhmakov’s letter to Versilov (Arkadiy’s father) from the late Andronnikov (a jurist). While Versilov brings to mind “versipel” (as Shade calls his muse), the name of his son reminds one of Dementia’s words quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary:
The ultimate destiny of madmen's souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survived death and suddenly expands, bursts out as it were, in peals of healthy and triumphant laughter when the world of timorous fools and trim blockheads has fallen away far behind. Personally, I have not known any lunatics; but have heard of several amusing cases in New Wye ("Even in Arcady am I," says Dementia, chained to her gray column). There was for instance a student who went berserk. There was an old tremendously trustworthy college porter who one day, in the Projection Room, showed a squeamish coed something of which she had no doubt seen better samples; but my favorite case is that of an Exton railway employee whose delusion was described to me by Mrs. H., of all people. There was a big Summer School party at the Hurleys', to which one of my second ping-pong table partners, a pal of the Hurley boys had taken me because I knew my poet was to recite there something and I was beside myself with apprehension believing it might be my Zembla (it proved to be an obscure poem by one of his obscure friends - my Shade was very kind to the unsuccessful). The reader will understand if I say that, at my altitude, I can never feel "lost" in a crowd, but it is also true that I did not know many people at the H.'s. As I circulated, with a smile on my face and a cocktail in my hand, through the crush, I espied at last the top of my poet's head and the bright brown chignon of Mrs. H. above the back of two adjacent chairs: At the moment I advanced behind them I heard him object to some remark she had just made: "That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand." (note to Line 629)
Ulichnyi podrostok (“The Street Adolescent,” 1912) is a sonnet with a coda by G. Ivanov (the author of a rude article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review Numbers). 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. According to G. Ivanov (who mentions blednyi ogon’, pale fire, in one of his poems), to his question “does a sonnet need a coda” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his diary (the entry of Aug. 30, 1918) Blok mentions dvoyniki (the doubles), drugoe ya (alter ego) and Botkinskiy period (the Botkin period) of his life:
К ноябрю началось явное мое колдовство, ибо я вызвал двойников ("Зарево белое...", "Ты - другая, немая...").
Любовь Дмитриевна ходила на уроки к М. М. Читау, я же ждал её выхода, следил за ней и иногда провожал её до Забалканского с Гагаринской - Литейной (конец ноября, начало декабря). Чаще, чем со мной, она встречалась с кем-то - кого не видела и о котором я знал.
Появился мороз, "мятель", "неотвязный" и царица, звенящая дверь, два старца, "отрава" (непосланных цветов), свершающий и пользующийся плодами свершений ("другое я"), кто-то "смеющийся и нежный". Так кончился 1901 год.
Тут - Боткинский период.
Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to be one and the same person whose “real” name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevold 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 (nadezhda) 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.
Btw., there is a germ of Pale Fire in the entry of Dec. 27, 1901, of Blok’s diary:
27 декабря 1901
Я раздвоился. И вот жду, сознающий, на опушке, а – другой – совершаю в далеких полях заветное дело. И – ужасный сон! – непостижно начинаю я, ожидающий, тосковать о том, совершающем дело, и о совершенном деле…
Хоть и не вышло, а хорошая мысль стихотворения; убийца-двойник – совершит и отпадет, а созерцателю-то, который не принимал участия в убийстве, – вся награда. Мысль-то сумасшедшая, да ведь и награда – сумасшествие, которое застынет в сладостном созерцании совершенного другим. Память о ноже будет идеальна, ибо нож был хоть и реален, но в мечтах – вот она, великая тайна…
The situation in PF resembles the idea of a poem that Blok never wrote: a person witnesses a murder committed by a man's double.
*in the English version Lik is the stage name of Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn