In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions fra Karamazov mumbling his inept all is allowed:
Among our auditors were a young priest
And an old Communist. Iph could at least
Compete with churches and the party line.
In later years it started to decline:
Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in
Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept;
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,
A school of Freudians headed for the tomb. (ll. 635-644)
In his essay O Dostoevskom (“On Dostoevski,” 1921) Balmont quotes the words of Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevski’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) "[if God does not exist], vsyo pozvoleno (all is allowed):"
Узнав сам много раз величайшую боль, величайшие соблазны, самые большие возможности и самую великую невозможность, видевший смерть лицом к лицу, когда молодость кричала в нем и шептала всеми своими голосами, он, стоявший на эшафоте и считавший секунды, отделяющие его от казни, явленной во всем ужасе, хотя и не пришедшей внешне, он, узнавший чудовищный и священный недуг, падучую, посланную Судьбой до него молниеносному пророку Аллаха как страшный дар, помогающий узнавать подземные тайны и тайны верхней бездны, он, без вины томившийся годы на каторге и знавший там радость принять от бедной девочки копейку милостыни, - мог ли он не знать, что есть в душах человеческих. Много раз растоптанный Судьбой и узнавший, что на остриях боли так же играет радуга, как она, играя, стоит на горних высях свершившейся грозы, он, говоривший и с Богом и с Дьяволом в полной мере человеческого голоса, воистину питался душами и всем, что в душах. Страшно ли это? Вероятно, страшно. Но, как Бенвенуто Челлини, он мог бы сказать, что он не знает, какого цвета страх ("io nоn conoscendo di che colore la paura si fusse"). И нет. Он слишком хорошо знал, какого цвета страх. Но он не страшился быть там, где страшно. Рок ему велел смотреть на Горгон, и он смотрел. Мы от него знаем, как шевелятся довременные змеи. Но самый неистовый художник итальянского Возрождения, создавший героя, убивающего красивое чудовище, был перед этим смиренным Достоевским не больше как ребенок. Ваятель Персея, по-детски свершая свои элементарные бесчинства и злодейства, весело полагал, что ему всё позволено. Достоевский начертал огненными буквами эту Сатанинскую заповедь, вопреки его воле ставшую боевым кличем нашей извращенной действительности: "всё позволено". Но он знал также, как знал много раз видевший смерть и на доске проплывший морскую бездну апостол Павел, что "всё мне позволительно, но ничто не должно обладать мною". Творчески прикасаясь к змеиным областям человеческой души, Достоевский всегда помнил то великое правило, которое дано русской поговоркой: "змею выше глаз не поднимай". Он не дозволил змее верховодить над своим умом. Он не дал ей возможности ужалить его в глаза. Ходивший по умственным остриям и в значительной степени вышедший в своей философии Заратустры из Достоевского, Ницше неизбежно оборвался в пропасть и впал в роковое безумие потому, что он поднял змею выше своих глаз.
Balmont compares Dostoevski to Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, and artist who also wrote poetry and a famous autobiography. According to Balmont, like Cellini, Dostoevski could say that he did not know what color fear is ("io nоn conoscendo di che colore la paura si fusse"). Cellini is the author of Perseus with the Head of Medusa (a sculpture alluded to by Balmont). Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote’s landlord) resembles a Medusa-locked hag:
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. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), the king left Zembla clad in bright red clothes. In his essay Balmont says that Dostoevski once wrote in his diary: “You never saw the red color, but I shall tell you about it:”
Он пишет романы, но это не романы, а жуткая, колдовская и пророческая летопись. Каждый роман - исполинское стихотворение в семь строф по сто страниц в строфе, и все семь смертных грехов пройдут по семи этим строфам и падут, растоптанные, пронзенные копьем святого Георгия. Люду человеческих привидений соответствует природа и обстановка городских улиц, откуда истребляюще вынуто все телесное, так что самое реальное становится самым воздушным и фантастическим в неизмеримо большей степени, чем это мы видим, например, на затянутых дымкой картинах Тернера или в дьявольских видениях Брейгеля. Жители Мертвого Дома, каторжники, - дети, похожие на обиженных ангелов, - сладострастники, ум которых пляшет пляску, похожую на приступ падучей, - подвижники, совершающие земной поклон перед убийцами, - убийцы, говорящие над трупом о бытии или небытии Бога, - юродивые, говорящие слова непреходящей ценности, - юноша, читающий звездную книгу, - влюбленные, убивающие своих любимых, ибо в этих людях любовь есть сумасшествие, - бесы, принявшие человеческую личину, и пытавшиеся погубить целую страну еще полстолетия тому назад, и разрушившие всю Россию ныне, и грозящие всему стройному и живому на земле, чего не может, не хочет сознать и увидеть слепая Европа. "Вы никогда не видали красного цвета, а я вам буду говорить о нём", - написал однажды в своем дневнике Достоевский. Он сдержал свое слово. И его слово - предостережение. Не постоянная ли это судьба всех прорицателей, к безысходному горю тех, кто глух к предвещаниям.
A character in Dostoevski's novel Besy ("The Possessed," 1872), Karmazinov is a satire on Turgenev. As the author of a book on surnames, Kinbote (the grandson of Thurgus the Turgid) would know that the surname Karmazinov comes from Polish karmazyn (crimson). In German, Karmesin means "bright red cloth."
According to Balmont, every novel of Dostoevski is a monstrous poem in seven stanzas, each stanza being hundred-page long, and all the seven deadly sins are described and destroyed in these seven stanzas. Vse sem’ smertnykh grekhov (all the seven deadly sins) bring to mind all the seven deadly sins mentioned by Shade in his conversation with Kinbote:
We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of "sin," of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of "crime," and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's high-backed seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumed concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon.
KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the password is – ?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (note to Line 549)
To Kinbote’s question “And so the password is – ?” Shade replies: “Pity.” In his essay O poezii Innokentiya Annenskogo (“On the Poetry of Innokentiy Annenski,” 1910) included in his book Borozdy i mezhi (“Furrows and Boundaries,” 1916) Vyacheslav Ivanov (the author of "Dostoevski and the Novel-Tragedy," 1911) says that it is zhalost’ (pity) that makes Annenski, this half-Frenchman, half-Hellene of the period of decline, a profoundly Russian poet:
Естественным результатом этого обращения к тюремному мученичеству своего или чужого я является в возможности, как последнее слово лирического порыва, целая гамма отрицательных эмоций — отчаяния, ропота, уныния, горького скепсиса, жалости к себе и своему соседу по одиночной камере. В поэзии Анненского из этой гаммы настойчиво слышится повсюду нота жалости. И именно жалость, как неизменная стихия всей лирики и всего жизнечувствия, [делает] этого полу-француза, полу-эллина времен упадка, — глубоко русским поэтом, как бы вновь приобщает его нашим родным христианским корням. Подобно античным скептикам, он сомневался во всем, кроме одного: реальности испытываемого страдания. Отсюда — mens pagana, anima christiana. И кто так, как он, думал о дочери Иаира, поистине должен был знать сердцем Христа. (I)
Polu-frantsuz, polu-ellin (“a half-Frenchman, half-Hellene,” as V. Ivanov calls Annenski) brings to mind polurusskiy sosed (a half-Russian neighbor), as in Chapter Two (XII: 1-5) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin calls Lenski:
Богат, хорош собою, Ленской
Везде был принят как жених;
Таков обычай деревенской;
Все дочек прочили своих
За полурусского соседа:
Wealthy, good-looking, Lenski
was as a suitor everywhere received:
such is the country custom;
all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
In his Commentary Kinbote mentions a contented Sosed (Zembla’s gigantic neighbor):
That King's reign (1936-1958) will be remembered by at least a few discerning historians as a peaceful and elegant one. Owing to a fluid system of judicious alliances, Mars in his time never marred the record. Internally, until corruption, betrayal, and Extremism penetrated it, the People's Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council. Harmony, indeed, was the reign's password. The polite arts and pure sciences flourished. Technicology, applied physics, industrial chemistry and so forth were suffered to thrive. A small skyscraper of ultramarine glass was steadily rising in Onhava. The climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer, and the rich a little poorer (in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote's Law). Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren. Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content - even the political mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented Sosed (Zembla's gigantic neighbor). But let us not pursue this tiresome subject. (note to Line 12)
The "prefix" polu- (half-, semi-, demi-) occurs five times in the first three lines of G. Ivanov's poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e... ("Half-pity. Half-disgust…" 1953):
Полу-жалость. Полу-отвращенье.
Полу-память. Полу-ощущенье,
Полу-неизвестно что,
Полы моего пальто:
Полы моего пальто? Так вот в чем дело!
Чуть меня машина не задела
И умчалась вдаль, забрызгав грязью.
Начал вытирать, запачкал руки:
Все ещё мне не привыкнуть к скуке,
Скуке мирового безобразья!
The poem's second half (“I was nearly hit by a car,” etc.) brings to mind a scene described by Kinbote in his Foreword to Shade’s poem:
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough, too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth--not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years--and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handful of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuna collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me.
In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret..." 1927) G. Ivanov (the author of an offensive article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review Chisla, “Numbers,” # 1, 1930) mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire). G. Ivanov's poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e... brings to mind Pushkin’s famous epigram on Count Vorontsov (the Governor General of New Russia, Pushkin’s boss in Odessa):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,)
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there's a hope
Thet he will be a full one at last.
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) that ends in the line Ya – ili Bog – ili nikto (Myself – or God – or none at all) Lermontov compares his soul to the ocean in which nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) lies. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet’s murderer) 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, will be full again.
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, a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody,” Annenski’s penname), a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok, and a poem (1912) by Balmont. Dostoevski’s novel Podrostok (“The Adolescent,” 1875) brings to mind Ulichnyi podrostok (“The Street Urchin,” 1914), a sonnet with the coda by G. Ivanov. According to G. Ivanov, to his question “does a sonnet need a coda” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) 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 a 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 ведёт за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.
See also the updated version of my previous post, “cobra head & fra Karamazov in Pale Fire.”