According to Professor Hurley, the chief passion of Samuel Shade (the poet’s father in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) was the study of the feathered tribe:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
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, Limner (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. (Kinbote’s note to Line 71)
The author of The Birds of America (1827), John James Audubon called his birds the “little citizens of the feathered tribe:”
Money flowed in and he was soon again established with his family in a house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says, became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a week or more, "to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe."
In VN’s story Istreblenie tiranov ("Tyrants Destroyed," 1938) the poem of our best poet quoted by the narrator (the drawing teacher at a provincial high school) begins with the line Horosho-s, - a pomnite, grazhdane (Now then, citizens, you remember):
Хорошо-с,-- а помните, граждане,
Как хирел наш край без отца?
Так без хмеля сильнейшая жажда
Не создаст ни пивца, ни певца.
Вообразите, ни реп нет,
Ни баклажанов, ни брюкв...
Так и песня, что днесь у нас крепнет,
Задыхалась в луковках букв.
Шли мы тропиной исторенной,
Горькие ели грибы,
Пока ворота истории
Не дрогнули от колотьбы!
Пока, белизною кительной
Сияя верным сынам,
С улыбкой своей удивительной
Правитель не вышел к нам.
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
Thus, without hops, no matter how strong
One’s thirst, it is rather
Difficult, isn’t it,
To make both the beer and the drinking song!
Just imagine, we lacked potatoes,
No turnips, no beets could we get:
Thus the poem, now blooming, wasted
In the bulbs of the alphabet!
A well-trodded road we had taken,
Bitter toadstools we ate.
Until by great thumps was shaking
History’s gate!
Until in his trim white tunic
Which upon us its radiance cast,
With his wonderful smile the Ruler
Came before his subjects at last! (chapter 16)
The poem’s first word, horosho-s seems to hint not only at Horosho! ("Good!" 1927), Mayakovski's poem written for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, but also at ot gospoda boga-s (from God, the Lord), a phrase used by Mayakovski in his poem Pyatyi Internatsional ("The Fifth International," 1922):
Мистики пишут: «Логос,
Это всемогущество. От господа бога-с».
The mystics write: "Logos
is omnipotence. From God, the Lord."
Mayakovski's poem Pernatye ("The Feathered Folk,” 1923, by the feathered folk Mayakovski means writers) brings to mind Sirin (VN's Russian nom de plume, after the bird of Russian fairy tales) and Pern, a word in a Zemblan saying quoted by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) at the end of his Commentary:
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)
Zemblan for "God," Gut means in German "good" and brings to mind Mayakovski's poem "Good!" In April 1930 VN’s “late namesake” committed suicide. Immediately after finishing his work on Shade’s poem (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum) Kinbote commits suicide.
Zemblan for “the Devil,” Pern seems to hint at Perun (the Slavic god of thunder). Perunu (“To Perun,” 1913) is a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov, the son of a celebrated ornithologist and author of Tam, gde zhili sviristeli… (“There where the waxwings lived,” 1908). Shade’s poem begins: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane.” 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”).
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.
According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), Lolita’s conception took place on the honeymoon trip of Charlotte Becker and Harold E. Haze to Veracruz. Charlotte Becker was the maiden name of Afanasiy Fet's mother. In 1857 Fet married Maria Botkin. The "real" name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seems to be Botkin. Fet's poem Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) brings to mind Lastochkin, the maiden name of Botkin's wife.