Describing Gradus (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade's murderer), Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the mineral blue of his jaw:
Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the preceding cantos. He has short upright black hair. We can fill in the bleak oblong of his face with most of its elements such as thick eyebrows and a wart on the chin. He has a ruddy but unhealthy complexion. We see, fairly in focus, the structure of his somewhat mesmeric organs of vision. We see his melancholy nose with its crooked ridge and grooved tip. We see the mineral blue of his jaw and the gravelly pointillé of his suppressed mustache. (note to Line 949)
At the beginning of Pis’mo o pol’ze stekla (“Letter on the Use of Glass,” 1752) Lomonosov mentions mineraly (the minerals):
Неправо о вещах те думают, Шувалов,
Которые Стекло чтут ниже Минералов...
They think wrongly of things, Shuvalov,
Who value the Glass lower than the Minerals…
According to Kinbote, Gradus never became a real success in the glass business:
Gradus never became a real success in the glass business to which he turned again and again between his wine-selling and pamphlet printing jobs. He started as a maker of Cartesian devils--imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He also worked as a teazer, and later as a flasher, at governmental factories--and was, I believe, more or less responsible for the remarkably ugly red-and-amber windows in the great public lavatory at rowdy but colorful Kalixhaven where the sailors are. He claimed to have improved the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d'alarme used by the grape growers and orchardmen to scare the birds. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time. (note to Line 171)
In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), a mirror maker of genius:
He [Charles Xavier] awoke to find her [Fleur de Fyler] standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young – little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
Sudarg suggest gosudar’ (sovereign) and its feminine form, gosudarynya. Lomonosov is the author of Oda na den’ vosshestviya na prestol eyo velichestva gosudaryni imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny 1748 goda (“Ode on the Anniversary of the Ascent to the Throne of her Majesty Empress Elizaveta Petrovna of the Year 1748”). In Eugene Onegin (Five: XXV: 1-4) Pushkin parodies the opening lines of Lomonosov’s poem:
Но вот багряною рукою 34
Заря от утренних долин
Выводит с солнцем за собою
Весёлый праздник именин.
But lo, with crimson hand 34
Aurora from the morning dales
leads forth, with the sun, after her
the merry name-day festival.
Pushkin’s note 34: Пародия известных стихов Ломоносова:
Заря багряною рукою
От утренних спокойных вод
Выводит с солнцем за собою, ― и проч.
a parody of Lomonosov’s well-known lines:
Aurora with a crimson hand
from the calm morning waters
leads forth with the sun after her, etc.
Lomonosov is the author of Gimn Borode (“A Hymn to the Beard,” 1757). Unlike Shade and Gradus, Kinbote is bearded:
Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be shattered. The thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Mrs. C., did not escape our notice as I was helping the tired old poet to find his galoshes after that dreary get-together party at your house. One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver." Of course I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. There was also the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, head of the department to which I was attached, begged me in a formal voice to be seated, then closed the door, and having regained, with a downcast frown, his swivel chair, urged me "to be more careful." In what sense, careful? A boy had complained to his adviser. Complained of what, good Lord? That I had criticized a literature course he attended ("a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity"). Laughing in sheer relief, I embraced my good Netochka, telling him I would never be naughty again. I take this opportunity to salute him. He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the president of the college) definitely knew. (Foreword)
Kinbote’s silly cognomen, the Great Beaver brings to mind Onegin’s bobrovyi vorotnik (beaver collar) that silvers with frostdust in Chapter One (XVI: 4) of Pushkin’s EO:
Уж тёмно: в санки он садится.
"Пади, пади!" - раздался крик;
Морозной пылью серебрится
Его бобровый воротник.
К Talon4 помчался: он уверен,
Что там уж ждёт его Каверин.
Вошёл: и пробка в потолок,
Вина кометы брызнул ток,
Пред ним roast-beef окровавленный,
И трюфли, роскошь юных лет,
Французской кухни лучший цвет,
И Стразбурга пирог нетленный
Меж сыром Лимбургским живым
И ананасом золотым.
It’s already dark. He gets into a sleigh.
The cry “Way, way!” resounds.
With frostdust silvers
his beaver collar.
To Talon's he has dashed off: he is certain
that there already waits for him [Kaverin];
has entered and the cork goes ceilingward,
the flow of comet wine has spurted,
a bloody roast beef is before him,
and truffles, luxury of youthful years,
the best flower of French cookery,
and a decayless Strasbourg pie
between a living Limburg cheese
and a golden ananas.
Pushkin’s note 4: Well-known restaurateur.
In his EO Commentary (note to One: XVI: 5-6) VN discusses the rhyme uveren (certain) / Kaverin and mentions the consonne d’appui (intrusive consonant):
As in French orthometry, the punctilious spangle of the consonne d’appui (reckoned tawdry in English) increases the acrobatic brilliance of the Russian rhyme.
In Canto Four of his poem Shade mentions his sensual love for the consonne d’appui, Echo’s fey child:
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. (ll. 967-970)
In Canto Four Shade describes shaving and mentions old Zembla’s fields:
Since my biographer may be too staid
Or know too little to affirm that Shade
Shaved in his bath, here goes: "He'd fixed a sort
Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support
Running across the tub to hold in place
The shaving mirror right before his face
And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd
Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed."
The more I weigh, the less secure my skin;
In places it's ridiculously thin;
Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick
And my grimace, invites the wicked nick.
Or this dewlap: some day I must set free
The Newport Frill inveterate in me.
My Adam's apple is a prickly pear:
Now I shall speak of evil and despair
As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight,
Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate
Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess
And find unchanged that patch of prickliness.
I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke
Who in commercials with one gliding stroke
Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin,
Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin.
I'm in the class of fussy bimanists.
As a discreet ephebe in tights assists
A female in an acrobatic dance,
My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance.
Now I shall speak... Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
Making the little hairs all stand on end
As in the enlarged animated scheme
Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
And while the safety blade with scrape and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek;
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gay stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 887-938)
In his note to Line 937 (Old Zembla) Kinbote writes:
I am a weary and sad commentator today.
Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope's Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote:
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where
So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla – my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange...
At the beginning of his poem Pokhvala komaru (“In Praise of the Mosquito,” 1807) Derzhavin mentions Pope (spelling the name as a two-syllable word, Pópe) who glorified the lock of a woman’s hair in his Rape of the Lock (1717) and Lomonosov who praised chest’ usov (the dignity of mustache) in his "Hymn to the Beard:”
Пиндар воспевал орла
Митрофанов — сокола́,
А Гомер, хоть для игрушек,
Прославлял в грязи лягушек;
Попе — женских клок власов,
И Вольтер, я мню, в издевку
Величал простую девку,
Ломоносов — честь усов.
Я, в деревне, для забавы,
В подражание их славы,
Проворчу тара-бара.
Стройся, лира восхищенна,
Слышь Виргилья вновь, вселенна:
Я пою днесь Комара!
In his book Derzhavin (1931) Hodasevich points out that the author of “Waterfall” loved all winged creatures and dedicated poems not only to different birds but even to the mosquito:
Как он любил всё крылатое! Недаром воспел не только орла, соловья, лебедя и павлина, но и ласточку, ястреба, сокола, голубя, аиста, пеночку, зяблика, снигиря, синичку, желну, чечётку, тетерева, бекаса и, наконец, даже комара…
In the next paragraph Hodasevich describes Derzhavin’s visit to Countess Branitski (Prince Potyomkin’s beloved niece whose daughter Eliza married Count Vorontsov, the Governor of New Russia) in her Belaya Tserkov’ estate (in the Province of Kiev) in the summer of 1813:
26 июля прибыли в Киев, провели там три дня, помолились в Лавре, осмотрели достопримечательности и поехали под Белую Церковь, в имение графини Браницкой, той самой племянницы Потёмкина, на руках у которой он умер дорогою в Николаев. Перед памятью дяди графиня благоговела; в его честь был воздвигнут ею род пантеона, где бюст Державина высился среди прочих. Графа Ксаверия Петровича не случилось дома. Зато Элиза, кокетливая и быстроглазая дочка графини, в любезности не отставала от матери. Державину был оказан приём зараз торжественный и сердечный — как автору «Водопада» и старому другу.
In his poem Poltava (1829) Pushkin mentions the moon shining over Belaya Tserkov’ (in the night before the execution of Kochubey and Iskra). The characters in Pushkin's poem include the Swedish king Charles XII.
While Charles Xavier Vseslav (the full name of Charles the Beloved) brings to mind Count Ksaveriy Petrovich (Eliza’s father who was absent at the time of Derzhavin’s visit to Countess Branitski), John Francis Shade (Shade’s full name) reminds one of Franciszek Ksawery Branicki (the Count’s Polish name). The three main characters in PF, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to be one and the same person whose “real” name is 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). There is nadezhda (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 (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa and a target of his epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.