Investigating the phenomena in the Haunted Barn, Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) asked the luminous circlet if it were a will-o-the-wisp:
The notes continue for several pages but for obvious reasons I must renounce to give them verbatim in this commentary. There were long pauses and "scratches and scrapings" again, and returns of the luminous circlet. She spoke to it. If asked something that it found deliciously silly ("Are you a will-o-the-wisp?") it would dash to and fro in ecstatic negation, and when it wanted to give a grave answer to a grave question ("Are you dead?") would slowly ascend with an air of gathering altitude for a weighty affirmative drop. For brief periods of time it responded to the alphabet she recited by staying put until the right letter was called whereupon it gave a small jump of approval. But these jumps would get more and more listless, and after a couple of words had been slowly spelled out, the roundlet went limp like a tired child and finally crawled into a chink; out of which it suddenly flew with extravagant brio and started to spin around the walls in its eagerness to resume the game. The jumble of broken words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I transcribe:
pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told
In her Remarks, the recorder states she had to recite the alphabet, or at least begin to recite it (there is a merciful preponderance of a's) eighty times, but of these seventeen yielded no results. Divisions based on such variable intervals cannot be but rather arbitrary; some of the balderdash may be recombined into other lexical units making no better sense (e. g., "war," "talant," "her," "arrant," etc.). The barn ghost seems to have expressed himself with the empasted difficulty of apoplexy or of a half-awakening from a half-dream slashed by a sword of light on the ceiling, a military disaster with cosmic consequences that cannot be phrased distinctly by the thick unwilling tongue. And in this case we too might wish to cut short a reader's or bedfellow's questions by sinking back into oblivion's bliss - had not a diabolical force urged us to seek a secret design in the abracadabra,
812: Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
813 Of correlated pattern in the game.
I abhor such games; they make my temples throb with abominable pain - but I have braved it and pored endlessly, with a commentator's infinite patience and disgust, over the crippled syllables in Hazel's report to find the least allusion to the poor girl's fate. Not one hint did I find. Neither old Hentzner's specter, nor an ambushed scamp's toy flashlight, nor her own imaginative hysteria, expresses anything here that might be construed, however remotely, as containing a warning; or having some bearing on the circumstances of her soon-coming death. (note to Line 347)
The coded message that Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) fails to decipher seems to be from Aunt Maud. Kinbote does not realize that Shade’s (not Hazel’s) death is predicted in it. Shade is killed by Gradus on July 21, 1959. Alexander Blok’s poem Sbezhal s gory i zamer v chashche (“Ran down the hill and froze in the thicket”) is written from the point of view of bolotnyi ogon’ (will-o-the-wisp) and is dated July 21, 1902:
Сбежал с горы и замер в чаще.
Кругом мелькают фонари...
Как бьётся сердце — злей и чаще!.
Меня проищут до зари.
Огонь болотный им неведом.
Мои глаза — глаза совы.
Пускай бегут за мною следом
Среди запутанной травы.
Моё болото их затянет,
Сомкнётся мутное кольцо,
И, опрокинувшись, заглянет
Мой белый призрак им в лицо.
21 июля 1902
Shade’s murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius. In his epistle “To V. Ya. Bryusov” (1912) Blok mentions Bryusov’s collection Zerkalo teney (“The Mirror of Shadows”):
И вновь, и вновь твой дух таинственный
В глухой ночи́, в ночи пустой
Велит к твоей мечте единственной
Прильнуть и пить напиток твой.
Вновь причастись души неистовой,
И яд, и боль, и сладость пей,
И тихо книгу перелистывай,
Впиваясь в зеркало теней…
Пусть, несказа́нной мукой мучая,
Здесь бьётся страсть, змеится грусть,
Восторженная буря случая
Сулит конец, убийство — пусть!
Что жизнь пытала, жгла, коверкала,
Здесь стало лёгкою мечтой,
И поле траурного зеркала
Прозрачной стынет красотой…
А красотой без слов повелено:
«Гори, гори. Живи, живи.
Пускай крыло души прострелено —
Кровь обагрит алтарь любви».
In his poem Elektricheskie svety (“The Electric Lights,” 1913) Bryusov compares modern poets to the electric lights above the noisy street crowd:
Мы – электрические светы
Над шумной уличной толпой;
Ей – наши рдяные приветы
И ей – наш отсвет голубой!
Качаясь на стеблях высоких,
Горя в преддверьях синема,
И искрясь из витрин глубоких,
Мы – дрожь, мы – блеск, мы – жизнь сама!
Что было красочным и пёстрым,
Меняя властным волшебством,
Мы делаем бесцветно-острым,
Живей и призрачней, чем днём.
И женщин, с ртом, как рана, алым,
И юношей, с тоской в зрачках,
Мы озаряем небывалым
Венцом, что обольщает в снах.
Даём соблазн любви продажной,
Случайным встречам – тайный смысл;
Угрюмый дом многоэтажный
Мы превращаем в символ числ.
Из быстрых уличных мельканий
Лишь мы поэзию творим,
И с нами – каждый на экране,
И, на экране кто, – мы с ним!
Залив сияньем современность,
Её впитали мы в себя,
Всю ложь, всю мишуру, всю бренность
Преобразили мы, любя, –
Мы – электрические светы
Над шумной уличной толпой,
Мы – современные поэты,
Векам зажжённые Судьбой!
Bryusov’s poem brings to mind Shade’s poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote in the same note of his Commentary:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
E. A. Poe's poem Tamerlane (1831) was translated into Russian by Bryusov.
Charles the Beloved is the son of King Alfin. Alphina is the youngest of the four daughters of Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote’s landlord). Hazel Shade drowns in Lake Omega. In a poem addressed to Bryusov Sergey Solovyov (Alexander Blok’s second cousin) says that, in the book of Russian verse, Pushkin is alpha and Bryusov omega:
Прах, вспоённый влагой снега,
Режет гения соха.
Звука Пушкинского нега!
Пушкин - альфа, ты - омега
В книге русского стиха.
Pushkin is the author of Tsygany (“The Gypsies,” 1824). Gradus’ wife, a beader in Radugovitra, left her husband with a gypsy lover. In the second stanza of “The Electric Lights,” a poem included in his collection Sem’ tsvetov radugi (“Seven Colors of the Rainbow”), Bryusov mentions vitriny (the shop-windows). In his memoir essay “Byusov” (1924) Vladislav Hodasevich mentions Bryusov’s hope that under the Bolsheviks he would be able to turn Russian literature na stol’ko-to gradusov (to so-and-so many degrees):
А какая надежда на то, что в истории литературы будет сказано: "в таком-то году повернул русскую литературу на столько-то градусов".
In his “Ballad” (1921) Hodasevich mentions the sixteen-candlepower sun:
Сижу, освещаемый сверху,
Я в комнате круглой моей.
Смотрю в штукатурное небо
На солнце в шестнадцать свечей.
I sit illuminated from above,
In my circular room.
I gaze into the plaster sky
At the sixteen-candlepower sun.
Hodasevich's poem Pered zerkalom ("In Front of the Mirror," 1924), with the epigraph Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (the opening line of Dante's Inferno), begins with the word я (I) repeated three times:
Я, я, я! Что за дикое слово!
Неужели вон тот - это я?
Разве мама любила такого,
Жёлто-серого, полуседого
И всезнающего, как змея?
Me, me, me. What a preposterous word!
Can that man there really be me?
Did Mama really love this face,
dull yellow with greying edges
like an ancient know-it-all snake?
(transl. Peter Daniels)
In the first three lines of Shade’s poem the word “I” is repeated three times:
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)
In his diary (the entry of Oct. 28, 1870) Leo Tolstoy says that, thanks to book-printing, many people live the greater parts of their lives, as it were, pered zerkalom (before the mirror):
Благодаря книгопечатанию, публичности и угрозам её, последняя естественность нашей жизни уничтожается. Большое число людей живут большую часть жизни как будто перед зеркалом.
In the same entry of Oct. 28, 1870, Tolstoy says that poetry is a fire that begins to burn in a man’s soul. This fire stings, warms up and gives light:
Поэзия есть огонь, загорающийся в душе человека. Огонь этот жжёт, греет и освещает.
Есть люди, которые чувствуют жар, другие теплоту, третьи видят только свет, четвертые и света не видят. Большинство же — толпа — судьи поэтов, не чувствуют жара и теплоты, а видят только свет. И они и все думают, что дело поэзии только освещать. Люди, которые так думают, сами делаются писателями и ходят с фонарём, освещая жизнь. (Им естественно кажется, что свет нужнее там, где темно и беспорядочно.) Другие понимают, что дело в тепле, и они согревают искусственно то, что удобно согревается (то и другое делают часто и настоящие поэты там, где огонь не горит в них). Но настоящий поэт сам невольно и с страданьем горит и жжёт других. И в этом всё дело.
According to Tolstoy, a true poet cannot help burning himself and burns others with his fire. At the end of Pushkin’s poem Prorok (“The Prophet,” 1826) God tells to the poet (whose sinful tongue the six-winged seraph ripped out, replacing it with a snake’s wise sting):
"Восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли,
Исполнись волею моей,
И, обходя моря и земли,
Глаголом жги сердца людей".
"Arise, O Prophet, watch and hark,
Fulfill all my commands:
Go forth now over land and sea,
And with your word ignite men's hearts."