In a humorous quatrain quoted by Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) ‘Black Miller’ mentions a new bambino:
Dr Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp, not only left him, in 1871, to live with Norbert von Miller, amateur poet, Russian translator at the Italian Consulate in Geneva, and professional smuggler of neonegrine — found only in the Valais — but had imparted to her lover the melodramatic details of the subterfuge which the kindhearted physician had considered would prove a boon to one lady and a blessing to the other. Versatile Norbert spoke English with an extravagant accent, hugely admired wealthy people and, when name-dropping, always qualified such a person as ‘enawmously rich’ with awed amorous gusto, throwing himself back in his chair and spreading tensely curved arms to enfold an invisible fortune. He had a round head as bare as a knee, a corpse’s button nose, and very white, very limp, very damp hands adorned with rutilant gems. His mistress soon left him. Dr Lapiner died in 1872. About the same time, the Baron married an innkeeper’s innocent daughter and began to blackmail Demon Veen; this went on for almost twenty years, when aging Miller was shot dead by an Italian policeman on a little-known border trail, which had seemed to get steeper and muddier every year. Out of sheer kindness, or habit, Demon bade his lawyer continue to send Miller’s widow — who mistook it naively for insurance money — the trimestrial sum which had been swelling with each pregnancy of the robust Swissess. Demon used to say that he would publish one day Black Miller’s quatrains which adorned his letters with the jingle of verselets on calendarial leaves:
My spouse is thicker, I am leaner.
Again it comes, a new bambino.
You must be good like I am good.
Her stove is big and wants more wood.
We may add, to complete this useful parenthesis, that in early February, 1893, not long after the poet’s death, two other less successful blackmailers were waiting in the wings: Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood; and the son of one of the former employees of the famous clandestine-message agency after it had been closed by the U.S. Government in 1928, when the past had ceased to matter, and nothing but the straw of a prison-cell could reward the optimism of second-generation rogues.) (2.11)
In his narrative poem Rim (“Rome,” 1913-15), written after the meter and rhyme scheme of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin stanza, Sergey Solovyov says that he will not pray na razukrashennyi vertep, / s mishurnym, zolotym Bambino (to the decorated nativity scene / with a gingerbread golden Bambino):
Где предрекла Октавиану
Сибилла ход земных судеб,
Теперь молиться я не стану
На разукрашенный вертеп,
С мишурным, золотым Bambino.
Но дети стаей голубиной
Воркуют с кафедры. Меня
Заученная болтовня
Невольно трогает. Их жесты
Порывисты, как у южан.
Здесь дети знатных горожан
Знакомятся. Здесь есть невесты
Для жениха в пятнадцать лет,
Здесь каждый мальчуган – поэт.
Sibilla (the Sybil) in the stanza’s second line brings to mind Sybil Shade, the poet’s wife in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962). Sybil Shade and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochki (“The Swallows,” 1884) and Alter Ego (1878) are poems by Afanasiy Fet (who was married to Maria Botkin). In his diary (the entry of Aug. 30, 1918) Alexander Blok mentions dvoyniki (the dopplegangers) whom he conjured up in 1901, drugoe ya (alter ego) and Botkinskiy period (the Botkin period) of his life:
К ноябрю началось явное моё колдовство, ибо я вызвал двойников ("Зарево белое...", "Ты - другая, немая...").
Любовь Дмитриевна ходила на уроки к М. М. Читау, я же ждал её выхода, следил за ней и иногда провожал её до Забалканского с Гагаринской - Литейной (конец ноября, начало декабря). Чаще, чем со мной, она встречалась с кем-то - кого не видела и о котором я знал.
Появился мороз, "мятель", "неотвязный" и царица, звенящая дверь, два старца, "отрава" (непосланных цветов), свершающий и пользующийся плодами свершений ("другое я"), кто-то "смеющийся и нежный". Так кончился 1901 год.
Тут - Боткинский период.
In his Vospominaniya ob Aleksandre Bloke (“Reminiscences of Alexander Blok,” 1921) Sergey Solovyov (Blok’s second cousin) says that, during their last meeting in October 1915, Blok compared himself to Fet (a poet who sang only as a young man and in his old age):
Последний раз виделись мы с моим троюродным братом в октябре 1915 года. Он жил вдвоём с Любовью Дмитриевной, которая играла на сцене в театре Яворской. Очень он был грустен. Говорил, что совсем не пишет стихов и что, может быть, ему, как Фету, суждено петь только в юности и старости.
In Canto Three of his poem John Shade describes his visit to Mrs. Z. who mentioned Shade’s poem about Mon Blon that appeared in the Blue Review:
"I can't believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound--But I'm so dense!" (ll. 781-786)
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
An image of Mont Blanc's "blue-shaded buttresses and sun-creamed domes" is fleetingly glimpsed through the cloud of that particular poem which I wish I could quote but do not have at hand. The "white mountain" of the lady's dream, caused by a misprint to tally with Shade's "white fountain," makes a thematic appearance here, blurred as it were by the lady's grotesque pronunciation. (note to Line 782)
Shade’s “white fountain” brings to mind Pushkin’s poem Bakhchisarayskiy fontan (“The Fountain of Bakhchisaray,” 1823). According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral Demon and d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, wept comme des fontaines (3.8). In Canto Ten (IX: 3-4) of EO Pushkin mentions bezrukiy knyaz’ (the one-armed Prince). In the description of the Onegin-Lenski duel in Chapter Six of EO Pushkin predicted his own death. In his essay Sud’ba Pushkina (“The Fate of Pushkin,” 1897) Vladimir Solovyov (Sergey’s uncle, the author of a doctrine about Divine Sophia) quotes Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1828) and the lines from Byron’s Manfred (1816-17) in which Mont Blanc (“the monarch of mountains”) is mentioned:
Уже в сонете "Поэту" высота самосознания смешивается с высокомерием и требование бесстрастия - с обиженным и обидным выражением отчуждения.
Ты - царь, живи один!
Это взято, кажется, из Байрона: the solitude of kings. Но ведь одиночество царей состоит не в том, что они живут одни,- чего, собственно, и не бывает,- а в том, что они среди других имеют единственное положение. Это есть одиночество горных вершин.
Монблан - монарх соседних гор:
Они его венчали.
("Манфред" Байрона). (chapter VII)
Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crown'd him long ago (Manfred, Act One, scene 1).
According to Mrs. Z., her niece climbed the Matterhorn. In his memoirs Nachalo veka (“In the Beginning of the Century,” 1933) Andrey Bely (a close friend of Sergey Solovyov) mentions Anna Goncharov, the first woman who climbed Mont Blanc:
Особенно памятна А. С. Гончарова, любимица, даже гордость отца, утверждавшего: некогда он заинтересовал Анну Сергеевну вопросами психологии, да так, что она, поехав в Париж и окончив Сорбонну, стала доктором философии, была лично знакома с Шарко, с Рише и с Бутру; она, первая из женщин, взошла на Монблан; и после этого триумфа - явилась в Москву; часто бывала у нас; она - та самая Гончарова, то есть из семьи жены Пушкина; и, даже: разглядывая портреты сестер Гончаровых, отчетливо можно было восстановить все черты фамильного сходства, взяв исходною точкою лицо сестры Натальи Николаевны, жены Дантеса; те же гладкие темные волосы, так же на уши зачесанные; и та же, так сказать, носолобость; то есть отсутствие грани меж носом и лбом; казалось: лицо бежит в нос; нос огромный у Анны Сергеевны, умный и хищный; глаза - оживленные, темные; только: она являла уродливейшую карикатуру даже не на Наталью Николаевну, а на некрасивую сестру ее; эта была бы ангелом красоты перед Анной Сергеевною; редко я видел лицо некрасивей; спасала огромная одушевленность и брызжущая интеллектуальность; являяся к нам, она часами умнейше трещала с отцом на труднейшие философские темы; отец оживлялся; он очень ценил Гончарову; когда-то он принимал живейшее участие в спешном образовании двоюродного брата А. С, робкого Павла Николаевича Батюшкова, поступившего в университет и часто являвшегося к нам; П. Н. - внучок поэта Батюшкова; Гончарова и Батюшков в начале девятьсотых годов отдались теософии; пока же слова такого не было в лексиконе у Анны Сергеевны; но слово "психология" склонялось во всех падежах; и склонялось во всех падежах слово "гипнотизм"; Анна Сергеевна мне была приятна умом и той ласковостью, с которой она относилась ко мне; скоро она подарила мне в прекрасном переплёте "Из царства пернатых" профессора Кайгородова; и с той поры подымается во мне не прекращающееся несколько лет увлечение птицами; Анна Сергеевна покровительствовала моему увлечению естествознанием и от времени до времени подаривала за книгою книгу, посвященную царствам природы.
Kinbote’s Zembla is a land of reflections, of “resemblers.” According to Bely (whose penname means “white”), Anna Goncharov bore a strong resemblance to Ekaterina Goncharov, Pushkin’s sister-in-law who married d’Anthès (the poet’s murderer). Pushkin’s fatal duel took place near Chyornaya Rechka (the Black River). In his poem Bal v zhenskoy gimnazii (“The Ball at the School for Girls,” 1922) Sasha Chyorny (whose penname means “black”) calls a jealous schoolboy nemoy Monblan prezren’ya (the mute Mont Blanc of contempt):
В простенке - бледный гимназист,
Немой Монблан презренья.
Мундир до пяток, стан как хлыст,
А в сердце - лава мщенья.
Он презирает потолок,
Оркестр, паркет и люстры,
И рот кривится поперёк
Усмешкой Заратустры.
Мотив презренья стар как мир...
Вся жизнь в тумане сером:
Его коричневый кумир
Танцует с офицером! (1)
The schoolboy’s koricnevyi kumir (brown idol) who is dancing with the officer brings to mind Brownhill, Ada’s school for girls. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina’s twin sister), Van mentions fashionable Brown Hill College:
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played ‘golf’ on Sundays and belonged to ‘lodges.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
In Aqua’s deranged mind Dr Lapiner becomes “a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover:”
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son. (ibid.)
The solarium in which Demon was being massaged brings to mind neonegrine (found only in the Valais) smuggled by Black Miller. Black Miller’s very limp, very damp hands adorned with rutilant gems remind one of Ruby Black (Van’s very young wet-nurse who also went mad) and joined black-ruby hands of mental panic and physical pain:
But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (ibid.)
Van and Ada discover that they brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they found in the attic of Ardis Hall. In her herbarium Marina mentions Dr Lapiner, her and her sister’s physician whom Marina calls lapochka (darling):
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliqsuaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here. (1.1)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p. 13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
Describing a conversation at table in “Ardis the First,” Van mentions an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, suffered by Marina and Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess) who comes down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique:
‘You know, children,’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!’
‘But you just said you collected flowers?’ said Ada.
‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.’
The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself — and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! — Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist). (1.10)
In one of his epigrams on lesbians Vladimir Solovyov, the author of V Al’pakh (“In the Alps,” 1886), mentions Catullus and his Lesbia:
Дал вечность Лесбии своей
Катулл, хоть к ней отнёсся строго...
Катуллов нет у нас, ей-ей,
Но Лесбий, батюшки, как много!
Catullus immortalized his Lesbia,
Although he didn’t spare her…
Among us there is not a single Catullus,
But, Goodness, how many lesbians!
In Carmen 13 (Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me) Catullus mentions candida puella (a fair-skinned girl):
Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
cenam, non sine candida puella
et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.
Haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli
plenus sacculus est aranearum.
Sed contra accipies meros amores,
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque;
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.
You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my house
in a few days, if the gods favor you,
and if you bring with you a large and good dinner,
not without a fair-skinned girl
and wine and wit and laughter for all.
If you bring these, I say, our charming one,
you will dine well—for your Catullus's
purse is full of cobwebs.
But in return you will receive my undiluted affections
or that which is sweeter and more elegant:
for I will give perfume, which the Venuses
and Cupids gave to my girl,
and when you smell it, you will ask the gods
that they make all of you, Fabullus, a nose.
Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions his landlord’s four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee):
Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith
The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade's. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows.
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse.
The name of Judge Goldsworth’s second eldest daughter seems to hint at candida puella. The last two lines of Catullus' fourteen-line poem bring to mind Gogol's story Nos (“The Nose,” 1835). The characters in Gogol’s play Revizor (“The Inspector,” 1836) include Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin ("Mr. Slapdash"), Bobchinski (cf. "bad Bob," Kinbote's roomer) and Dobchinski (the landowners and near-twins). According to Zemlyanika (the charity commissioner whose surname means “strawberry” but also brings to mind Kinbote’s Zembla), Dobchinski’s children (one of them was born before his mother married Dobchinski) have a very strong likeness to the Judge:
Артемий Филипович. Очень может быть. (Помолчав.) Могу сказать, что не жалею ничего и ревностно исполняю службу. (Придвигается ближе с своим стулом и говорит вполголоса.) Вот здешний почтмейстер совершенно ничего не делает: все дела в большом запущении, посылки задерживаются… извольте сами нарочно разыскать. Судья тоже, который только что был пред моим приходом, ездит только за зайцами, в присутственных местах держит собак, и поведения, если признаться пред вами, конечно для пользы отечества, я должен это сделать, хотя он мне родня и приятель, поведения самого предосудительного: здесь есть один помещик Добчинский, которого вы изволили видеть, и как только этот Добчинский куда-нибудь выйдет из дому, то он там уж и сидит у жены его, я присягнуть готов… и нарочно посмотрите на детей: ни одно из них не похоже на Добчинского, но все, даже девочка маленькая, как вылитый судья.
Хлестаков. Скажите пожалуйста! А я никак этого не думал.
CHARITY COMMISSIONER. It's very possible. (After a short silence.) I can only say that I spare no effort to perform my duty zealously. (Draws his chair a little closer and speaks in a lower tone.) There's this Postmaster here does absolutely nothing. Everything is in the greatest state of neglect: letters and packages are kept back . . . pray investigate the matter yourself. The Judge too, who was here just before me, does nothing but hunt hares, and keeps his dogs in the County Court buildings; while his general conduct, if I must unburden my mind to you—certainly it's for my country's good that I have to do it, though he's my friend and connection—well, his conduct is most deplorable. There's a certain proprietor here, Dobchinski by name you have deigned to meet him and as soon as ever Dobchinski goes away anywhere, his wife and the Judge are having a tête-à-tête. I am ready to swear to it... and the children, down to the youngest little girl, have a very strong likeness to the Judge—
KHLESTAKOV. Well, I declare! I never should have thought it! (Act Four, scene VI)
Gogol is the author of Schlözer, Miller and Herder, an essay included in Arabeski (“The Arabesques,” 1835), and Rim (“Rome,” 1842), a fragment. In "Rome" Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана,
придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: “Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!”
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. 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 Blok (who, according to G. Ivanov, did not know what a coda was). Orest Miller (1833-89) was Dostoevski’s first biographer. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index seem be a coda of Shade's poem.