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), young Prince Charles and his playmate Oleg were handsome, long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood:
We shall now go back from mid-August 1958 to a certain afternoon in May three decades earlier when he was a dark strong lad of thirteen with a silver ring on the forefinger of his sun-tanned hand. Queen Blenda, his mother, had recently left for Vienna and Rome. He had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg, Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions--of which we had so many during our long northern spring--sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens. I wish I could provide the reader with cut-out figures and parts of attire as given in paper-doll charts for children armed with scissors. It would brighten a little these dark evenings that are destroying my brain. Both lads were handsome, long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood. At twelve, Oleg was the best center forward at the Ducal School. When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet. On that particular afternoon a copious shower lacquered the spring foliage of the palace garden, and oh, how the Persian lilacs in riotous bloom tumbled and tossed behind the green-streaming, amethyst-blotched windowpanes! One would have to play indoors. Oleg was late. Would he come at all? (note to Line 130)
In his poem Olegov shchit (“Oleg’s Shield,” 1829) Pushkin calls Oleg (the first Kievan prince of the Rurik family who attacked the Greeks and nearly took Constantinople in 907) voinstvennyi varyag (the bellicose Varangian):
Когда ко граду Константина
С тобой, воинственный варяг,
Пришла славянская дружина
И развила победы стяг,
Тогда во славу Руси ратной,
Строптиву греку в стыд и страх,
Ты пригвоздил свой щит булатный
На цареградских воротах.
Настали дни вражды кровавой;
Твой путь мы снова обрели.
Но днесь, когда мы вновь со славой
К Стамбулу грозно притекли,
Твой холм потрясся с бранным гулом,
Твой стон ревнивый нас смутил,
И нашу рать перед Стамбулом
Твой старый щит остановил.
When you, O warlike soldier-Viking,
Accompanied by Slav brigade,
At Constantine’s Great City striking
Unfurled the victory banner frayed,
Then to great Russia’s martial glory,
To shame and fear of stubborn Greek,
You pinned amidst the great furore
Your damask shield to gates antique.
The days of bloody strife’s furore
Are here again, we’ve followed you.
But now we’ve come afresh in glory
With menaces on Stamboul too,
Your hill by fearsome roar was shaken,
Resounded loud your jealous moan,
And though Stamboul again was taken
By ancient shield we still were thrown.
(tr. R. Moreton)
Pushkin’s Pesn' o veshchem Olege ("The Song of Wise Oleg," 1822) is based on the legend of Oleg’s death cited by Lomonosov at the end of O knyazhenii Olgove (“On Oleg’s Princedom”):
О смерти его дивное осталось повествование, вероятность по мере древности имеющее. Прежде войны на греков спросил Олег волхвов, от чего ему конец жизни приключится. Ответ дали, что от любимого своего коня умрет. Для того положил он никогда на него не садиться, нижe к себе приводить, но поставить и кормить на особливом месте. Возвратясь из Греции по четырех летах, во время осени об оном вспомнил. Призвал старейшину конюхов и, жив ли оный конь, спросил. Услышав, что умер, волхвам посмеялся. "Лживы, - сказал, - все ваши гадания: конь мертв, а я жив; хочу видеть кости его и вам показать в обличение". Итак, поехал на место, где лежали голые кости, и, голый лоб увидев, сошел с коня, наступил на него и молвил: "От того ли мне смерть быть может?". Внезапно змея, изо лба выникнув, в ногу ужалила, от чего разболелся и умер, княжив тридцать три года. Весь народ много об нем плакал. Погребен на горе Щековице, и могила его видна была во время летописателя Нестора.
Very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens bring to mind Lomonosov’s Hotinskaya oda (“The Ode on the Taking of Hotin,” 1739). In his poem Ne yambom li chetyryokhstopnym… (“Not with the iambic tetrameter…” 1938) Hodasevich says that the first sound of Lomonosov’s Hotinskaya oda (the first Russian poem written in iambic tetrameter) became our first cry of life:
Из памяти изгрызли годы,
За что и кто в Хотине пал,
Но первый звук Хотинской оды
Нам первым криком жизни стал.
The green-streaming, amethyst-blotched windowpanes mentioned by Kinbote remind one of Lomonosov’s Pis’mo o pol’ze stekla (“Letter on the Use of Glass,” 1752). According to Kinbote, Gradus (Shade’s murderer) never became a real success in the glass business:
Gradus never became a real success in the glass business to which he turned again and again between his wine-selling and pamphlet printing jobs. He started as a maker of Cartesian devils--imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He also worked as a teazer, and later as a flasher, at governmental factories--and was, I believe, more or less responsible for the remarkably ugly red-and-amber windows in the great public lavatory at rowdy but colorful Kalixhaven where the sailors are. He claimed to have improved the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d'alarme used by the grape growers and orchardmen to scare the birds. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time. (note to Line 171)
In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius:
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. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
Sudarg suggest gosudar’ (sovereign) and its feminine form, gosudarynya. Lomonosov is the author of Oda na den’ vosshestviya na prestol eyo velichestva gosudaryni imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny 1748 goda (“Ode on the Anniversary of the Ascent to the Throne of her Majesty Empress Elizaveta Petrovna of the Year 1748”). In Eugene Onegin (Five: XXV: 1-4) Pushkin parodies the opening lines of Lomonosov’s poem:
Но вот багряною рукою 34
Заря от утренних долин
Выводит с солнцем за собою
Весёлый праздник именин.
But lo, with crimson hand 34
Aurora from the morning dales
leads forth, with the sun, after her
the merry name-day festival.
Pushkin’s note 34: Пародия известных стихов Ломоносова:
Заря багряною рукою
От утренних спокойных вод
Выводит с солнцем за собою, ― и проч.
a parody of Lomonosov’s well-known lines:
Aurora with a crimson hand
from the calm morning waters
leads forth with the sun after her, etc.
In Chapter Five of EO Pushkin describes Tatiana’s name-day party (Jan. 12, OS). The “real” name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seems to be Vsevolod Botkin. Vsevolod’s name-day is Apr. 22 (May 5, NS). The Zemblan Revolution broke out on May 1, 1958. Describing his and Oleg’s discovery of a secret passage, Kinbote says that a national revolution was needed to make that secret passage real again:
This detailed recollection, whose structure and maculation have taken some time to describe in this note, skimmed through the King's memory in one instant. Certain creatures of the past, and this was one of them, may lie dormant for thirty years as this one had, while their natural habitat undergoes calamitous alterations. Soon after the discovery of the secret passage he almost died of pneumonia. In his delirium he would strive one moment to follow a luminous disk probing an endless tunnel and try the next to clasp the melting haunches of his fair ingle. To recuperate he was sent for a couple of seasons to southern Europe. The death of Oleg at fifteen, in a toboggan accident, helped to obliterate the reality of their adventure. A national revolution was needed to make that secret passage real again. (note to Line 130)
Oleg died in a toboggan accident. Lomonosov came from Kholmogory, a rural locality in the Province of Arkhangelsk (in the Russian North). Btw., the name Kholmogory brings to mind Krasnogorie (“Fairhill”), Lenski’s seat in EO. Like Lomonosov, Lenski studied in Germany.
Russian for "boyhood," otrochestvo comes from otrok (boy, lad; adolescent), the word that Pushkin repeats twice in the first line of his poem Podrazhanie arabskomu ("Imitation of the Arabic," 1835):
Отрок милый, отрок нежный,
Не стыдись, навек ты мой;
Тот же в нас огонь мятежный,
Жизнью мы живём одной.
Не боюся я насмешек:
Мы сдвоились меж собой,
Мы точь в точь двойной орешек
Под единой скорлупой.
Sweet lad, tender lad,
Have no shame, you're mine for good;
We share a sole insurgent fire,
We live in boundless brotherhood.
I do not fear the gibes of men;
One being split in two we dwell,
The kernel of a double nut
Embedded in a single shell.
In Pushkin's poem Otrok ("The Boy," 1830) otrok is Lomonosov:
Невод рыбак расстилал по брегу студеного моря;
Мальчик отцу помогал. Отрок, оставь рыбака!
Мрежи иные тебя ожидают, иные заботы:
Будешь умы уловлять, будешь помощник царям.