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), on his deathbed Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) called his nephew, Charles Xavier Vseslav (aka Charles the Beloved), "Karlik:"
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fngers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla - partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39 - 40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongs-skugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
In his poem Nikolayu Poslednemu (“To Nicholas the Last,” 1907) Balmont calls the tsar Nicholas II karlik (a dwarf):
Ты грязный негодяй с кровавыми руками,
Ты зажиматель ртов, ты пробиватель лбов,
Палач, в уютности сидящий с палачами,
Под тенью виселиц, над сонмами гробов.
Когда ж придёт твой час, отверженец Природы,
И страшный дух темниц, наполненных тобой,
Восстанет облаком, уже растущим годы,
И бросит молнию, и прогремит Судьбой.
Ты должен быть казнён рукою человека,
Быть может собственной, привыкшей убивать,
Ты до чрезмерности душою стал калека,
Подобным жить нельзя, ты гнусности печать.
Ты осквернил себя, свою страну, все страны,
Что стонут под твоей уродливой пятой,
Ты карлик, ты Кощей, ты грязью, кровью пьяный,
Ты должен быть убит, ты стал для всех бедой.
Природа выбрала тебя для завершенья
Всех богохульностей Романовской семьи,
Последыш мерзостный, ползучее сцепленье
Всех низостей, умри, позорны дни твои.
“Nicholas the Last” brings to mind Uran the Last, the Emperor of Zembla mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index to Shade’s poem:
When I was a child, Russia enjoyed quite a vogue at the court of Zembla but that was a different Russia - a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations. We may add that Charles the Beloved could boast of some Russian blood. In medieval times two of his ancestors had married Novgorod princesses. Queen Yaruga (reigned 1799-1800) his great-great-granddam, was half Russian; and most historians believe that Yaruga's only child Igor was not the son of Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) but the fruit of her amours with the Russian adventurer Hodinski, her goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century. (note to Line 681)
Uran the Last, Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top; dispatched one night by a group of his sister's united favorites, 681. (Index)
In Balmont's "modernized" version of Slovo o polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign") Igor's brother Vsevolod mentions yarugi (ravines):
"Все им ведомы дороги, все им знаемы яруги,
Уж натянуты их луки, много стрел, колчан отворен,
Уж наточены их сабли, сами скачут серым волком,
Ищут чести в поле бранном для себя, а князю - славы!»
Igor's mother, Queen Yaruga is Uran's sister. Brat i sestra ("Brother and Sister," 1907) is a poem by Balmont. At the end of his poem Nash tsar’ (“Our Tsar,” 1907) written for the tenth anniversary of the coronation of Nicholas II Balmont says that he who started reigning with Hodynka (the Khodynka tragedy, a human stampede that occurred on 30 May, 1896, on Khodynka Field in Moscow, during the festivities following the coronation of Nicholas II) will finish standing on the scaffold:
Наш царь - Мукден, наш царь - Цусима,
Наш царь - кровавое пятно,
Зловонье пороха и дыма,
В котором разуму - темно...
Наш царь - убожество слепое,
Тюрьма и кнут, подсуд, расстрел,
Царь-висельник, тем низкий вдвое,
Что обещал, но дать не смел.
Он трус, он чувствует с запинкой,
Но будет, час расплаты ждёт.
Кто начал царствовать - Ходынкой,
Тот кончит - встав на эшафот.
Our tsar is Mukden, tsar - Tsushima,
Our tsar is the stain of blood,
The stench of gunpowder and reek smoke,
In which the intellect feels - dark...
Our tsar is a blind-sighted squalor,
prison and whip, the judge, the shoot,
The king - the gallows, double low,
And what he promised, he dared not.
He is a coward, fumble feeling,
But hour of reckoning will come.
Who started reigning with - Hodynka,
will finish - at the scaffold stand.
The last Russian tsar, Nicholas II was executed with his entire family in July, 1918, in Ekaterinburg. Among the people who were executed with him was Doctor Evgeniy Botkin. The “real” name of the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seems to be Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again. Nadezhda ("Hope," 1890) is a poem by Balmont (a translation from Alfred de Musset):
Когда кокетливо Надежда перед нами
Смеётся, ласково кивая головой,
И вдаль летит, взмахнувши лёгкими крылами,
И с чудной грацией манит нас за собой, —
Куда идём? Куда нас сердце призывает?
За ветерком игривым ласточка летит, —
Так сердце вдаль нас, легковерных, увлекает,
Когда Надежда за собою нас мани́т.
И вдаль сама она, воздушная, несётся,
И нам кокетливо кивает головой,
И Рок, старик седой, насмешливо смеётся
С своей прекрасною и юною женой.
Balmont translated into Russian P. B. Shelley’s Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821). In Adonais P. B. Shelley mentions Urania (the muse of astronomy and, in later times, of Christian poetry):
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania! He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave and the liberticide,
Trampled and mock'd with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light. (IV)
In his essay A Defense of Poetry (1821) P. B. Shelley compares the mind in creation to a fading coal:
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
In his poem “The Nature of Electricity” quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary Shade mentions Shelley’s incandescent soul:
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 glows
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)
In his sonnet Marlo (“Marlowe”) Balmont mentions Tamerlane:
С блестящей мыслью вышел в путь он рано,
Учуяв сочетание примет.
Преобразил в зарю седой рассвет
Повторной чарой зоркого шамана.
Величием в нем сердце было пьяно.
Он прочитал влияние планет
В судьбе людей. И пламенный поэт
Безбрежный путь увидел Тамерлана.
В нем бывший Фауст более велик,
Чем позднее его изображенье.
Борец, что в самом миге низверженья
Хранит в ночи огнем зажженный лик.
И смерть его – пустынно-страстный крик
В безумный век безмерного хотенья.
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,” 1912) is a poem by Balmont:
Твой саван сияет, Египет,
Ты в белые ткани одет.
Мёд жизни не весь ещё выпит,
Есть в Солнце и взрывность и свет.
Ещё в еженощные пляски
Созвездья уводят себя.
И мир до предельной развязки
Пребудет, бессмертье любя.
И девушку с ликом газели
Влюблённый светло обоймёт,
И в этом ликующем теле
Возникнет чарующий мёд.
Чу! Сириус нам возвещает,
Что прибыл разлив в Сильсилэ,
Качает река нас, качает.
Две кобры на царском челе!
Balmont translated into Russian E. A. Poe's story The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) and his poem Raven (1845). Shade's murderer, Gradus also appears in police records as Ravus (Latin for "gray") and Ravenstone:
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he 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. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night. (note to Line 17)
Vinogradar' ("The Winegrower," 1909) is a poem by Balmont.