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), the maiden name of Shade’s mother was Caroline Lukin:
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, nee 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, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
St. Luke the Painter is a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti included in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. Rossetti’s poem Three Shadows brings to mind the opening line of Shade’s poem (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”), the Shadows (a regicidal organization of which Gradus is a member) and Apollon Maykov’s drama in verse Tri smerti (“Three Deaths,” 1857). One of its three main characters is the poet Lucan. In his epic poem De Bello Civili (“On the Civil War”), more commonly referred to as the Pharsalia, Lucan famously calls Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) magni nominis umbra (the shadow of a great name). Shade likes his name: Shade, Ombre, almost “man” in Spanish. Like Seneca (Nero’s tutor, another character in Maykov’s “Three Deaths”), Lukan (Seneca’s nephew) was born in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania Baetica (a Roman province in Spain). Gaius Julius Caesar was murdered by the members of the Roman senate in the curia of Pompey. Kinbote’s landlord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman law. The murder of Julius Caesar took place in the Ides of March. Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) drowned in Lake Omega on a wild March night. Shade writes his poem and is murdered by Gradus in July, 1959. July was named in honor of Julius Caesar.
In Canto Four of his poem Shade describes shaving. In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions his brown beard. In Maykov’s “Three Deaths” Lucius mentions ritor borodatyi (a bearded teacher of rhetoric):
По смерти слава – нам не в прок!
И что за счастье, что когда-то
Укажет ритор бородатый
В тебе для школьников урок!..
Fame after death doesn’t profit us!
And what’s point, if one day
A bearded teacher of rhetoric
Will point in you a lesson for schoolboys!..
Lucius quotes Lucan’s “Epistle to Death” in which Lucan says that it seems to us that we will die not wholly, not at once:
"Посланье к смерти" помнишь ты?
В нем есть высокие черты!
С скелета смерти снял ты смело
Земной фантазии цветы...
Ты помнишь:
(декламирует)
"Друзья! нам смерть страшна лишь чем?
Все кажется, что не совсем,
Не разом мы умрём,
Что будем видеть мы свой труп,
Улыбку неподвижных губ,
Глаза с тупым зрачком;
А мухи стаей по лицу,
Без уваженья к мертвецу,
И по лбу поползут;
И с содроганьем от тебя
Родные, близкие, друзья
В испуге отойдут..."
In his poem Exegi monumentum (1836) Pushkin says: Net, ves’ ya ne umru… (No, I’ll not wholly die). Pushkin’s poem ends in the line I ne osporivay gluptsa (And do not contradict the fool). At the beginning of Maykov’s “Three Deaths” Lucius says that, unlike a fool, a wise man thinks to the end (Mudrets otlichen ot gluptsa / tem, chto on myslit do kontsa):
Мудрец отличен от глупца
Тем, что он мыслит до конца.
И вот - я долго наблюдаю
И нахожу, что смерть разит
Всего скорее аппетит.
Я целый час жую, глотаю,
Но всё без вкуса - и не сыт!..
Вина попробуем! Быть может.
Живая Вакхова струя
Желудок дремлющий встревожит...
Ну, кто же пьет со мной, друзья?
Лукан!.. да ты как в лихорадке!
В Сенеке строгий стоицизм
Давно разрушил организм!
И если вы в таком упадке -
Не мудрено, что в этот час
Мой здравый разум бесит вас!
According to Lucius (who wants to try some wine), death first of all affects appetite. At the end of his poem Kinbote quotes a Zemblan saying, “God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty:”
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
The three main characters in PF, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose “real” name is Botkin and who dies not at once but, as it were, by degrees. 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.
In his poem V. P. B. (1856), an epistle to Vasiliy Botkin (the author of "Letters about Spain," 1851), Apollon Maykov says that he and Botkin refuse to dance to the dudka (pipe) of critics:
Подчиняясь критиканам нашим,
Не пойдём далёко мы вперёд.
Честно ниву ведь свою мы пашем,
Так посев наш, верю я, взойдёт -
Хоть под дудку их мы и не пляшем.
In Andrey Bely’s novel Peterburg (1913) Shishnarfne tells Dudkin (the terrorist whose surname comes from dudka) 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 imagination transforms the Persian Shishnarfne into Enfranshish (Shishnarfne in reverse and a play on shish, ‘nothing’). Describing the forty 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)
In his poem “The Mirror” D. G. Rossetti mentions a distant mirror's shade:
SHE knew it not:—most perfect pain
To learn: this too she knew not. Strife
For me, calm hers, as from the first.
'Twas but another bubble burst
Upon the curdling draught of life,—
My silent patience mine again.
As who, of forms that crowd unknown
Within a distant mirror's shade,
Deems such an one himself, and makes
Some sign; but when the image shakes
No whit, he finds his thought betray'd,
And must seek elsewhere for his own.
Rossetti rhymes “pain” with “again.” In his note to Lines Lines 367-370 Kinbote writes:
In speech John Shade, as a good American, rhymed "again" with "pen" and not with "explain." The adjacent position of these rhymes is curious.
In the preceding note (She twisted words) Kinbote mentions “mirror words:”
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet's expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips", and "T.S. Eliot", "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. (note to Lines 347-348)
According to Kinbote, the name Zembla is a corruption of Semberland, a land of reflections, of “resemblers:”
A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblands resembled one another--and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semberland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers"--my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face!” (note to Line 894)
In the second stanza of his poem On translating "Eugene Onegin" (1955) VN mentions “reflected words:”
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up your damsel’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analize alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task -- a poet's patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
"A poet's patience and scholiastic passion blent" bring to mind Queen Blenda.
Describing King Alfin’s death, Kinbote mentions the king’s constant "aerial adjutant," Colonel Peter Gusev:
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov. In his letters to his brother Alexander Pavlovich Anton Chekhov used to address his brother “Gusev,” “Gusinykh” and even “Gusiadi.” In Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America,” 1925-26) Mayakovski describes “zopilotes,” the peaceful crows of Mexico, as birds gusinykh razmerov (the size of a goose):
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.
Shade’s mother assisted her husband in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions his mother’s passion for poetry and pairs Maykov with Mayakovski:
After 1923, when she moved to Prague, and I lived in Germany and France, I was unable to visit her frequently; nor was I with her at her death, which occurred on the eve of World War Two. Whenever I did manage to go to Prague, there was always that initial pang one feels just before time, caught unawares, again dons its familiar mask. In the pitiable lodgings she shared with her dearest companion, Evgeniya Konstantinovna Hofeld (1884-1957), who had replaced, in 1914, Miss Greenwood (who, in her turn, had replaced Miss Lavington) as governess of my two sisters (Olga, born January 5, 1903, and Elena, born March 31, 1906), albums, in which, during the last years, she had copied out her favorite poems, from Maykov to Mayakovski, lay around her on odds and ends of decrepit, secondhand furniture. (Chapter Two, 4)
The Nabokovs' dachshund Box II was a grandson of Chekhov's Quina and Brom:
Then somebody gave us another pup, Box II, whose grandparents had been Dr. Anton Chekhov’s Quina and Brom. This final dachshund followed us into exile, and as late as 1930, in a suburb of Prague (where my widowed mother spent her last years, on a small pension provided by the Czech government), he could be still seen going for reluctant walks with his mistress, waddling far behind in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire—an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat. (ibid.)
Hodasevich’s essay on Mayakovski is entitled Dekol'tirovannaya loshad' (“The Horse in Décolleté Dress,” 1927). Queen Blenda is a tweedy and horsy queen (who enjoyed capercaillie and woodcock shooting). Although they almost look like antipodes, the poet’s mother, née Caroline Lukin, and Queen Blenda, the mother of Charles the Beloved, seem to be one and the same person.