Describing the king’s escape from Zembla, 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 lazy Garh, the farmer's daughter who shows to the king the shortest way to the pass:
The gnarled farmer and his plump wife who, like personages in an old tedious tale offered the drenched fugitive a welcome shelter, mistook him for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group. He was allowed to dry himself in a warm kitchen where he was given a fairy-tale meal of bread and cheese, and a bowl of mountain mead. His feelings (gratitude, exhaustion, pleasant warmth, drowsiness and so on) were too obvious to need description. A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair as he dozed off between that blaze and the tremulous light of a little earthenware cresset, a beaked affair rather like a Roman lamp, hanging above a shelf where poor beady baubles and bits of nacre became microscopic soldiers swarming in desperate battle. He woke up with a crimp in the neck at the first full cowbell of dawn, found his host outside, in a damp corner consigned to the humble needs of nature, and bade the good grunter (mountain farmer) show him the shortest way to the pass. "I'll rouse lazy Garh," said the farmer.
A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: "Garh! Garh!" Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father's wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan.
Before leaving, the King asked his host, whose name was Griff, to accept an old gold piece he chanced to have in his pocket, the only money he possessed. Griff vigorously refused and, still remonstrating, started the laborious business of unlocking and unbolting two or three heavy doors. The King glanced at the old woman, received a wink of approval, and put the muted ducat on the mantelpiece, next to a violet seashell against which was propped a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife - Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes.
The stars had just faded. He followed the girl and a happy sheepdog up the overgrown trail that glistened with the ruby dew in the theatrical light of an alpine dawn. The very air seemed tinted and glazed. A sepulchral chill emanated from the sheer cliff along which the trail ascended; but on the opposite precipitous side, here and there between the tops of fir trees growing below, gossamer gleams of sunlight were beginning to weave patterns of warmth. At the next turning this warmth enveloped the fugitive, and a black butterfly came dancing down a pebbly rake. The path narrowed still more and gradually deteriorated amidst a jumble of boulders. The girl pointed to the slopes beyond it. He nodded. "Now go home," he said. "I shall rest here and then continue alone."
He sank down on the grass near a patch of matted elfinwood and inhaled the bright air. The panting dog lay down at his feet. Garh smiled for the first time. Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception. As soon as she had settled beside him, she bent over and pulled over and off her tousled head the thick gray sweater, revealing her naked back and blancmange breasts, and flooded her embarrassed companion with ail the acridity of ungroomed womanhood. She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a gesture and got up. He thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King started to walk up the turfy incline. (note to Line 149)
Lazy Garh’s blancmange breasts bring to mind sploshnoe blamanzhe (complete blancmange) mentioned by Mayakovski in his poem Dve kul’tury (“Two Cultures,” 1928):
Графине
граф
даёт манто,
сияет
снег манжет…
Чего ещё?
Сплошной бонтон.
Сплошное бламанже.
VN’s “late namesake,” Mayakovski is the author of Pop (“The Priest,” 1928). In his poem Rumyanyi kritik moy, nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (“My ruddy-cheeked critic, pot-bellied scoffer,” 1830) Pushkin mentions lenivyi popyonok (the priest's lazy son) hailed from afar by a peasant who carries under his armpit a coffin with his child and wants the boy to call his father and open the church:
Румяный критик мой, насмешник толстопузый,
Готовый век трунить над нашей томной музой,
Поди-ка ты сюда, присядь-ка ты со мной,
Попробуй, сладим ли с проклятою хандрой.
Смотри, какой здесь вид: избушек ряд убогий,
За ними чернозём, равнины скат отлогий,
Над ними серых туч густая полоса.
Где нивы светлые? где тёмные леса?
Где речка? На дворе у низкого забора
Два бедных деревца стоят в отраду взора,
Два только деревца. И то из них одно
Дождливой осенью совсем обнажено,
И листья на другом, размокнув и желтея,
Чтоб лужу засорить, лишь только ждут Борея.
И только. На дворе живой собаки нет.
Вот, правда, мужичок, за ним две бабы вслед.
Без шапки он; несёт подмышкой гроб ребёнка
И кличет издали ленивого попёнка,
Чтоб тот отца позвал да церковь отворил.
Скорей! ждать некогда! давно бы схоронил.
Что ж ты нахмурился? — Нельзя ли блажь оставить!
И песенкою нас весёлой позабавить? —
Куда же ты? — В Москву, чтоб графских именин
Мне здесь не прогулять.
— Постой, а карантин!
Ведь в нашей стороне индейская зараза.
Сиди, как у ворот угрюмого Кавказа,
Бывало, сиживал покорный твой слуга;
Что, брат? уж не трунишь, тоска берёт — ага!
My ruddy-cheeked critic, pot-bellied scoffer,
Who's willing all his life to make fun of our languid muse,
Come here, sit down with me,
Let’s see if we can cope with the damned hyp...
Inviting Shade to his place, Kinbote asks the poet if the muse was kind to him:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking he table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now."
Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (note to Line 991)
Kinbote carries the envelope with Shade’s poem under his left armpit.
Nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (pot-bellied scoffer) in Pushkin's poem brings to mind "big-bellied," as in his Index to Shade's poem Kinbote renders the obsolete word botelyi:
Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, 894; king-bot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end, 247; bottekin-maker, 71; bot, plop, and boteliy, big-bellied (Russ.); botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto.
The “real” name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet’s murderer) seems to be Botkin. 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.
In his Parizhskaya poema (“The Paris Poem,” 1943) VN mentions kosmatye mamonty (the shaggy mammoths) that are dying out:
Вымирают косматые мамонты,
чуть жива красноглазая мышь.
Бродят отзвуки лиры безграмотной:
с кандачка переход на Буль-Миш.
С полурусского, полузабытого
переход на подобье арго.
Бродит боль позвонка перебитого
в чёрных дебрях Бульвар Араго.
Dying out are the shaggy mammoths,
barely alive is the red-eyed mouse.
Echoes of an illiterate lyre here wander,
from the slipshod to Boul’Mich you pass.
From a tongue half-Russian and half-forgotten
here you pass to a form of argot.
The pain of a severed vertebra wanders
in the black depths of Boulevard Arago.
In his poem Parizh (“Paris,” 1923) Mayakovski mentions grunt (soil), a word that brings to mind grunter (mountain farmer):
Если
метро не выпустит уличный грунт —
грунт
исполосуют рельсы.
Я подымаю рельсовый бунт.