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 wrote his last poem in July, 1959:
Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto. (Foreword)
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)
The month of July was named in honor of Julius Caesar. In the first stanza of his poem Solntse (“The Sun,” 1923) translated by DN as Provence VN says that the same cicadas sang in Caesar’s reign:
Слоняюсь переулками без цели,
прислушиваюсь к древним временам:
при Цезаре цикады те же пели,
и то же солнце стлалось по стенам.
Поёт платан, и ствол в пятнистом блеске;
поёт лавчонка; можно отстранить
легко звенящий бисер занавески:
поёт портной, вытягивая нить.
И женщина у круглого фонтана
поёт, полощет синее бельё,
и пятнами ложится тень платана
на камни, на корзину, на неё.
Как хорошо в звенящем мире этом
скользить плечом вдоль меловых оград,
быть русским заблудившимся поэтом
средь лепета латинского цикад!
I wander aimlessly from lane to lane,
bending a careful ear to ancient times:
the same cicadas sang in Caesar’s reign,
upon the walls the same sun clings and climbs.
The plane tree sings: with light its trunk is pied;
the little shop sings: delicately tings
the bead-stringed curtain that you push aside—
and, pulling on his thread, the tailor sings.
And at a fountain with a rounded rim,
rinsing blue linen, sings a village girl,
and mottle shadows of the plane tree swim
over the stone, the wickerwork, and her.
What bliss it is, in this world full of song,
to brush against the chalk of walls, what bliss
to be a Russian poet lost among
cicadas trilling with a Latin lisp!
In vinograd (grape) there is ograd (of walls), a word that rhymes with tsikad (of cicadas) in the last stanza of VN’s poem. According to Kinbote, Gradus 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 (note to Line 17). "Vinogradus" brings to mind Orlovius, a character in VN’s novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934), and Dr. Azureus, a character in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947). At the beginning of his poem Shade 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)
According to Orlovius (the insurance agent), the chief thing by him is optimismus:
Он одобрил принятое мной и тут же осуществлённое решение, которое к тому же он сам давно советовал мне принять. Неделю спустя я пригласил его к нам обедать. Заложил угол салфетки сбоку за воротник. Принимаясь за суп, выразил неудовольствие по поводу политических событий. Лида ветрено спросила его, будет ли война и с кем. Он посмотрел на нее поверх очков, медля ответом (таким приблизительно он просквозил в начале этой главы), и наконец ответил:
"Тяжело сказать, но мне кажется, что это исключено. Когда я молод был, я пришел на идею предположить только самое лучшее, – ("лучшее" у него вышло чрезвычайно грустно и жирно). – Я эту идею держу с тех пор. Главная вещь у меня – это оптимизмус".
"Что как раз необходимо при вашей профессии", – сказал я с улыбкой.
Он исподлобья посмотрел на меня и серьезно ответил:
"Но пессимизмус даёт нам клиентов".
A week later I asked him [Orlovius] to dinner. He tucked the corner of his napkin sideways into his collar. While tackling his soup, he expressed displeasure with the trend of political events. Lydia breezily inquired whether there would be any war and with whom? He looked at her over his spectacles, taking his time (such, more or less, was the glimpse you caught of him at the beginning of this chapter) and finally answered: “It is heavy to say, but I think war excluded. When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best” (he all but turned “best” into “pest,” so gross were his lip-consonants). “I hold this idea always. The chief thing by me is optimismus.”
“Which comes in very handy, seeing your profession,” said I with a smile.
He lowered at me and replied quite seriously:
“But it is pessimismus that gives clients to us.” (Chapter Three)
In Chekhov’s story Dom s mezoninom (“The House with the Mezzanine,” 1896) Belokurov talks of the disease of the century—pessimism:
Белокуров длинно, растягивая «э-э-э-э...», заговорил о болезни века — пессимизме. Говорил он уверенно и таким тоном, как будто я спорил с ним. Сотни верст пустынной, однообразной, выгоревшей степи не могут нагнать такого уныния, как один человек, когда он сидит, говорит и неизвестно, когда он уйдёт.
— Дело не в пессимизме и не в оптимизме, — сказал я раздраженно, — а в том, что у девяноста девяти из ста нет ума.
Belokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
'Pessimism or optimism have nothing to do with it,' I said, irritably. 'The point is, ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no brains.' (chapter II)
The characters of “The House with the Mezzanine” include Lydia (Missy’s elder sister), a namesake of Hermann’s wife in “Despair.” As to Orlovius, his name seems to blend Orlov, a character in Chekhov’s Rasskaz neizvestnogo cheloveka (“The Story of an Unknown Man,” 1893), with “fair Ignatius” (as Chekhov called his friend and fellow writer Ignatiy Potapenko, the model of Trigorin in Chekhov’s play “The Seagull”).
The narrator and main character in "Despair," Hermann Karlovich kills Felix (a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double). 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”).
July 5 (the day on which Gradus left Onhava on the Coppenhagen plane) is Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). In Canto Two (began early in the morning of July 5, 1959) Shade mentions his birthday and a singing cicada:
And finally there was the sleepless night
When I decided to explore and fight
The foul, the inadmissible abyss,
Devoting all my twisted life to this
One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings
Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings. (ll. 177-182)
In his diary (the entry of May 4, 1897) Chekhov says that in Melikhovo he was visited by Dasha Musin-Pushkin (whose husband, engineer Glebov, was killed during a hunt), aka Cicada, who sang a lot:
Приезжала Даша Мусина-Пушкина, вдова инженера Глебова, убитого на охоте, она же Цикада. Много пела.
In his story Dama s sobachkoy (“The Lady with the Dog,” 1899) Chekhov mentions cicadas:
В Ореанде сидели на скамье, недалеко от церкви, смотрели вниз на море и молчали. Ялта была едва видна сквозь утренний туман, на вершинах гор неподвижно стояли белые облака. Листва не шевелилась на деревьях, кричали цикады и однообразный, глухой шум моря, доносившийся снизу, говорил о покое, о вечном сне, какой ожидает нас. Так шумело внизу, когда еще тут не было ни Ялты, ни Ореанды, теперь шумит и будет шуметь так же равнодушно и глухо, когда нас не будет. И в этом постоянстве, в полном равнодушии к жизни и смерти каждого из нас кроется, быть может, залог нашего вечного спасения, непрерывного движения жизни на земле, непрерывного совершенства.
At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. (chapter II)
As he speaks to his daughter (a schoolgirl of twelve), Gurov (the main character in Chekhov’s story), uses the phrase tri gradusa tepla (three degrees above freezing-point):
— Теперь три градуса тепла, а между тем идёт снег, — говорил Гуров дочери. — Но ведь это тепло только на поверхности земли, в верхних же слоях атмосферы совсем другая температура.
“It’s three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,” said Gurov to his daughter. “The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in the atmosphere.” (chapter IV)
According to Kinbote, onhava-onhava means in Zemblan “far, far away:”
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium - when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out - and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor - one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant “of the Umruds,” an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulated him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places -- Our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never -- was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumudrov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew - to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
At the end of “The Lady with the Dog” Chekhov uses the phrase daleko-daleko (far, far away):
Потом они долго советовались, говорили о том, как избавить себя от необходимости прятаться, обманывать, жить в разных городах, не видеться подолгу. Как освободиться от этих невыносимых пут?
- Как? Как? - спрашивал он, хватая себя за голову. - Как?
И казалось, что ещё немного - и решение будет найдено, и тогда начнётся новая, прекрасная жизнь; и обоим было ясно, что до конца ещё далеко-далеко и что самое сложное и трудное только ещё начинается.
Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these intolerable fetters?
“How? How?” he repeated, clutching his head. “How?”
And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning. (chapter IV)
On July 5, 1959, Kinbote and Gradus are forty-four. Chekhov died in July 1904, at the age of forty-four. In Ob iyune i iyule (“On June and July”), a part of his humorous Filologicheskie zametki (“Philological Notes,” 1885), Chekhov mentions the inexorable red pencil with which Death scratched off in July six Russian poets:
Для писателей июль несчастный месяц. Смерть своим неумолимым красным карандашом зачеркнула в июле шестерых русских поэтов и одного Памву Берынду.
For the writers July is an unhappy month. With its inexorable red pencil Death scratched off in July six Russian poets and one Pamva Berynda.