Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, 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) mentions Mt. Glitterntin:
The Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness), divides it into two parts, the flourishing eastern region of Onhava and other townships, such as Aros and Grindelwod, and the much narrower western strip with its quaint fishing hamlets and pleasant beach resorts. The two coasts are connected by two asphalted highways; the older one shirks difficulties by running first along the eastern slopes northward to Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla, and only then turning west at the northmost point of the peninsula; the newer one, an elaborate, twisting, marvelously graded road, traverses the range westward from just north of Onhava to Bregberg, and is termed in tourist booklets a "scenic drive." Several trails cross the mountains at various points and lead to passes none of which exceeds an altitude of five thousand feet; a few peaks rise some two thousand feet higher and retain their snow in midsummer; and from one of them, the highest and hardest, Mt. Glitterntin, one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east, beyond the Gulf of Surprise, a dim iridescence which some say is Russia. (note to Line 149)
Glitterntin, Mt., a splendid mountain in the Bera Range (q. v.); pity I may never climb it again, 149. (Index)
Mt. Glitterntin seems to hint at Glittertind (official form on maps: Glittertinden), the second highest mountain in Norway, at 2,465 m above sea level, including the glacier at its peak (without the glacier, it is 2452 m). Glitter Mountain (the peak’s English name) brings to mind the saying “all that glitters is not gold.” The popular form of this expression is a derivative of a line in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, which employs the word "glisters" (a 17th-century synonym for "glitters"). The line comes from a secondary plot of the play, in the scroll inside the golden casket the puzzle of Portia's boxes (Act II – Scene 7 – Prince of Morocco):
All that glisters is not gold—
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscrolled
Fare you well. Your suit is cold.
The characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet include Fortinbras, Prince of Norway. The name of the capital of Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at “heaven” (onhava-onhava means in Zemblan "far, far away"). In Hamlet (1.5) Hamlet tells Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In his sonnet Shakespeare Matthew Arnold mentions the Heaven of Heavens that Shakespeare made his dwelling-place:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
Describing Shade's murder by Gradus, Kinbote quotes a line from Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy (1853):
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)
"The inviolable shade" seems to hint not only at Shade (the author of the poem that Kinbote holds in his left hand) but also at Viola, Sebastian's twin sister in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. At the end of VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian's half-brother V.) says that, despite Sebastian's death, the hero remains:
The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) - but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Chapter 20)
Similarly, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus can be someone whom neither of them knows. In fact, they seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin's personality. 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 in Russian "hope." In Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy the line quoted by Kinbote is preceded by the line "Still nursing the unconquerable hope:"
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade-
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark tingles, to the nightingales!
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says that she “always nursed a small mad hope.” In Canto Three Shade tells about IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter), describes his visit to Mrs. Z. (who saw a tall white mountain during her heart attack) and, at the end of the Canto, mentions "faint hope:"
Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is
My firm conviction – "Darling, shut the door.
Had a nice trip?" Splendid – but what is more
I have returned convinced that I can grope
My way to some – to some – "Yes, dear?" Faint hope. (ll. 830-835)
In Shakespeare’s historical play Richard III (Act 5, scene 2) Richmond says:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
In his Commentary Kinbote calls the poet’s wife “Sybil Swallow:”
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir. (note to Line 275)
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello’s wife in Shakespeare's Othello. In Shakespeare's play (Act III, scene 4) Othello mentions a two-hundred-year-old Egyptian sybil who gave his mother a magic handkerchief:
'Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sewed the work.
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,V
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.
Sybil Shade and Queen Disa seem to be one and the same person whose “real” name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochka (“The Swallow,” 1792-94) and Nadezhda (“Hope,” 1810) are poems by Derzhavin. 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.