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), Shade’s mother assisted her husband in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico:
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)
In Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America,” 1925-26) Mayakovski describes his brief stay in Vera Cruz and mentions “zopilotes,” the peaceful crows of Mexico:
По дороге к вокзалу автомобиль спугнул стаю птиц. Есть чего испугаться.
Гусиных размеров, вороньей черноты, с голыми шеями и большими клювами, они подымались над нами.
Это «зопилоты», мирные вороны Мексики; ихнее дело — всякий отброс.
In Stikhi o sovetskom pasporte (“The Verses about Soviet Passport,” 1929) Mayakovski compares his passport to a bomb:
И вдруг,
И вдруг, как будто
И вдруг, как будто ожогом,
И вдруг, как будто ожогом, рот
скривило
скривило господину.
Это
Это господин чиновник
Это господин чиновник берет
мою
мою краснокожую паспортину.
Берет —
Берет — как бомбу,
Берет — как бомбу, берет —
Берет — как бомбу, берет — как ежа,
как бритву
как бритву обоюдоострую,
берет,
берет, как гремучую
берет, как гремучую в 20 жал
змею
змею двухметроворостую.
But suddenly
Mr. Officer's face
turns awry,
as if
he has smelled disaster.
You've guessed it:
the officer's taken my
red-skinned hulk of a passport.
He handles it
like a hedgehog
or bomb,
like a bee
to be nipped
by the wings,
like a twisting rattlesnake
three yards long
with a hundred
deadly stings.
(tr. D. Rottenberg)
In his poem Dlya stranstviya nochnogo mne ne nado... ("I don't need for the night journey," 1929) VN mentions his bespasportnaya ten' (passportless shadow):
Для странствия ночного мне не надо
ни кораблей, ни поездов.
Стоит луна над шашечницей сада.
Окно открыто. Я готов.
И прыгает с беззвучностью привычной,
как ночью кот через плетень,
на русский берег речки пограничной
моя беспаспортная тень.
Mayakovski’s style (the repetition of words and whole phrases omitted by the translator) in his "Verses about Soviet Passport" is parodied by Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) in a poem that he makes Quilty read aloud before his death:
Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage…
“That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.”
…when I stood Adam-naked before a federal law and all its stinging stars
“Oh, grand stuff!”
…Because you took advantage of a sin
when I was helpless moulting moist and tender
hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state
aye of a litter of Lolitas…
“Didn’t get that.”
Because you took advantage of my inner essential innocence
because you cheated me –
“A little repetitious, what? Where was I?”
Because you cheated me of my redemption
because you took
her at the age when lads
play with erector sets
“Getting smutty, eh?”
a little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the colored gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die. (2.35)
According to Humbert, Lolita’s conception took place on the honeymoon trip of Charlotte Becker and Harold E. Haze to Veracruz.
Mayakovski was a futurist poet. In Canto One of his poem Shade tells about his dead parents and mentions a preterist, one who collects cold nests:
I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
A preterist: one who collects cold nests. (ll. 71-79)