One of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus) “Leningradus:”
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
St. Petersburg's name in 1924-91 was Leningrad. In Andrey Bely’s novel Peterburg (1913) Shishnarfne tells Dudkin (the terrorist) that biologiya teney (the biology of shadows) is not yet studied; that’s why one cannot come to an agreement with a shadow, one never knows what it wants:
Александр Иванович подумал, что поведение посетителя не должное вовсе, потому что звук голоса посетителя неприличнейшим образом отделился от посетителя; да и сам посетитель, неподвижно застывший на подоконнике – или глаза изменяли? – явно стал слоем копоти на луной освещенном стекле, между тем как голос его, становясь все звончее и принимая оттенок граммофонного выкрика, раздавался прямо над ухом.
– «Тень – даже не папуас; биология теней еще не изучена; потому-то вот – никогда не столковаться с тенью: ее требований не поймешь; в Петербурге она входит в вас бациллами всевозможных болезней, проглатываемых с самою водопроводной водой…» (Chapter Six)
Mad Dudkin’s fancy transforms Shishnarfne (a Persian whose visit is imagined by Dudkin) into Enfranshish (Shishnarfne in reverse and a play on shish, ‘nothing’). Describing the days after Queen Blenda’s death, Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius:
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all the time, had him attend table-turning seances with an experienced American medium, seances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly struggled at all. 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. For other needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to mend a broken viola d'amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father's ample chair, his legs over its arm, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order.
It was warm in the evening sun. She wore on the second day of their ridiculous cohabitation nothing except a kind of buttonless and sleeveless pajama top. The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy) irritated him, and while pacing about and pondering his coronation speech, he would toss towards her, without looking, her shorts or a terrycloth robe. Sometimes, upon returning to the comfortable old chair he would find her in it contemplating sorrowfully the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior) in the history book. He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty sunbeam; but after a while she tried to cuddle up to him, and he had to push away her burrowing dark curly head with one hand while writing with the other or detach one by one her little pink claws from his sleeve or sash.
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur's naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland.
He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young – little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.
On the third night a great stomping and ringing of arms came from the inner stairs, and there burst in the Prime Councilor, three Representatives of the People, and the chief of a new bodyguard. Amusingly, it was the Representatives of the People whom the idea of having for queen the granddaughter of a fiddler infuriated the most. That was the end of Charles Xavier's chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus). With their white suitcases and obsolete musical instruments the two ladies wandered back to the annex of the Palace. There followed a sweet twang of relief - and then the door of the anteroom slid open with a merry crash and the whole heap of putti tumbled in. (note to Line 80)
Charles Xavier is afraid of Queen Blenda’s ghost. The poems in Bryusov’s collection Zerkalo teney (“The Mirror of Shadows,” 1912) include Prizraki (“The Ghosts”). In his epistle “To Valeriy Bryusov (at Receiving The Mirror of Shadows)” (1912) Alexander Blok mentions pole traurnogo zerkala (the field of funerary mirror):
И вновь, и вновь твой дух таинственный
В глухой ночи, в ночи пустой
Велит к твоей мечте единственной
Прильнуть и пить напиток твой.
Вновь причастись души неистовой,
И яд, и боль, и сладость пей,
И тихо книгу перелистывай,
Впиваясь в зеркало теней…
Пусть, несказанной мукой мучая,
Здесь бьется страсть, змеится грусть,
Восторженная буря случая
Сулит конец, убийство — пусть!
Что жизнь пытала, жгла, коверкала,
Здесь стало легкою мечтой,
И поле траурного зеркала
Прозрачной стынет красотой…
А красотой без слов повелено:
«Гори, гори. Живи, живи.
Пускай крыло души прострелено —
Кровь обагрит алтарь любви».
At the beginning of his essay his essay “Andrey Bely” (1927) Titsian Tabidze pairs Bely with Blok:
Андрей Белый и Александр Блок -- "два трепетных крыла" русского символизма. Недаром воспоминания Андрея Белого о Блоке разрастаются в эпопею и объемлют историю русской поэзии начала века. Это -- не воспоминания в обычном смысле слова, а разговор с самим собой, наедине. В этой эпопее Андрей Белый вспоминает необычайную историю встречи двух поэтов, историю сиамских близнецов, которым потом пришлось вынести на своих плечах последующую поэзию; здесь в качестве действующих лиц выступают: петербургские туманы, снежная Москва и шахматовские зори.
According to Tabidze, Andrey Bely and Alexander Blok are two palpitating wings of the Russian Symbolism. The phrase dva trepetnykh kryla (two palpitating wings) occurs in the first line of a sonnet (the eighth sonnet in a garland of sonnets) by Vyacheslav Ivanov:
Мечты одной два трепетных крыла
И два плеча одной склоненной выи,
Мы понесли восторги огневые,
Всю боль земли и всю пронзенность зла.
В одном ярме, упорных два вола,
Мы плуг влекли чрез целины живые,
Доколь в страду и полдни полевые
Единого, щадя, не отпрягла
Хозяина прилежная забота.
Так двум была работой красота
Единая, как мёд двойного сота.
И тению единого креста
Одних молитв слияли два полёта
Мы, двух теней скорбящая чета.
Vyacheslav Ivanov's sonnet ends in the line My, dvukh teney skorbyashchaya cheta (We, a grieving couple of two shades). At the beginning of his poem John Shade compares himself to the shadow of the waxwing and mentions the false azure in the windowpane:
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. (ll. 1-4)
Tam, gde zhili sviristeli… (“There where the Waxwings Lived,” 1908) is a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov. In his essay on Andrey Bely Tabidze mentions Alvek’s literary pamphlet Nakhlebniki Khlebnikova (“The Dependents of Khlebnikov”):
Недавно сообщалось, что выходит литературный памфлет Альвэка "Нахлебники Хлебникова"; по всей вероятности, автор будет пытаться доказать, что футуристы всех формаций -- "Нахлебники Хлебникова", т. е. идут от него. Однако это трудно будет доказать, во-первых, потому, что сам Хлебников косноязычным ушёл в могилу, не успев выявить поэтические замыслы, которых у него безусловно было в достатке, а во-вторых, очень сомнительна продукция оставшихся футуристов, чтобы в них искать кристаллизацию мутного начала Хлебникова.
Zoloto v lazuri (“Sun in the Azure,” 1904) is the first collection of poetry by Andrey Bely. In his essay on Bely Tabidze mentions the not yet studied biology of shadows (or shades) and compares Bely to Edgar Poe who said [in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846] that a poem can be written from end to beginning, just as the Chinese build a house in reverse:
Из всех русских поэтов последних лет Андрей Белый больше всех занят формой. Ему принадлежат многочисленные труды о природе русского стиха; он на самом деле "проверял алгеброй музыку", ведь недаром он сын профессора математики и сам не на шутку учился математике, хотя знает, "что биология теней еще не изучена"! Ведь и он мог сказать, как Эдгар По, что поэму можно написать с конца, как китайцы строят дом наоборот!
According to Tabidze, Bely has really “checked up music with algebra.” In Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” (1830) Salieri says that he cut music, like a corpse, and with algebra checked up harmony, and Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin in reverse. The “real” name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus 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’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” 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 (who did not know what a coda is). Svoemu dvoyniku ("To my Double," 1917) is a poem by Andrey Bely. In his New Year epistle To E. K. Metner (1909) Andrey Bely mentions poslednie akkordy kody (the last chords of a coda):
Твой брат С-мольную сонату
Наигрывает за стеной...
Последние аккорды коды
Прольются, оборвутся вдруг...
О, если б нам в былые годы
Перенестись, старинный друг!