To the words of a professor of physics “History has denounced him [the King of Zembla], and that is his epitaph" Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) replies that in due time history will have denounced everybody:
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool." (note to Line 894)
In her Russian translation of PF Vera Nabokov renders “has denounced” as izoblichila and “will have denounced” as izoblichit. At the beginning of Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov (1825) Shuyski tells Vorotynski that he could have proved (izoblichit’) the secret villain's guilt with a single word:
Воротынский
Ужасное злодейство! Полно, точно ль
Царевича сгубил Борис?
Шуйский
А кто же?
Кто подкупал напрасно Чепчугова?
Кто подослал обоих Битяговских
С Качаловым? Я в Углич послан был
Исследовать на месте это дело:
Наехал я на свежие следы;
Весь город был свидетель злодеянья;
Все граждане согласно показали;
И, возвратясь, я мог единым словом
Изобличить сокрытого злодея.
VOROTYNSKI. Fearful crime!
Is it beyond all doubt Boris contrived
The young boy's murder?
SHUYSKI. Who besides? Who else
Bribed Chepchugov in vain? Who sent in secret
The brothers Bityagovsky with Kachalov?
Myself was sent to Uglich, there to probe
This matter on the spot; fresh traces there
I found; the whole town bore witness to the crime;
With one accord the burghers all affirmed it;
And with a single word, when I returned,
I could have proved the secret villain's guilt.
Pushkin (who followed Karamzin in accusing Boris Godunov of the murder of little Prince Dimitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible) dedicated Boris Godunov to the memory of N. M. Karamzin, the author of the twelve-volume History of the Russian State. In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen describes his childhood travels and pairs Karamzin with Count Tolstoy:
After that, they tried to settle whether their ways had merged somewhere or run closely parallel for a bit that year in Europe. In the spring of 1881, Van, aged eleven, spent a few months with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice, while Demon was having a much better time in Cuba than Dan was at Mocuba. In June, Van was taken to Florence, and Rome, and Capri, where his father turned up for a brief spell. They parted again, Demon sailing back to America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe’s and d’Annunzio’s marble footprints, and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed). Did Marina suspect that Van was somewhere in the same general area as she throughout 1881? Probably no. Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes, while Marina was in Spain with her Grandee. After carefully matching memories, Van and Ada concluded that it was not impossible that somewhere along a winding Riviera road they passed each other in rented victorias that both remembered were green, with green-harnessed horses, or perhaps in two different trains, going perhaps the same way, the little girl at the window of one sleeping car looking at the brown sleeper of a parallel train which gradually diverged toward sparkling stretches of sea that the little boy could see on the other side of the tracks. The contingency was too mild to be romantic, nor did the possibility of their having walked or run past each other on the quay of a Swiss town afford any concrete thrill. But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. (1.24)
In his novel Voyna i mir (“War and Peace,” 1869) Leo Tolstoy says that a king is history’s slave:
Царь — есть раб истории.
История, т. е. бессознательная, общая, роевая жизнь человечества, всякой минутой жизни царей пользуется для себя, как орудием для своих целей.
Наполеон, несмотря на то, что ему более чем когда-нибудь, теперь, в 1812 году, казалось, что от него зависело verser или не verser le sang de ses peuples (как в последнем письме писал ему Александр) никогда более как теперь не подлежал тем неизбежным законам, которые заставляли его (действуя в отношении себя, как ему казалось, по произволу) делать для общего дела, для истории то, чтò должно было совершиться.
A king is history's slave. History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peoples - as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him - he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive life - that is to say, for history - whatever had to be performed. (Vol. Three, Part I, chapter 1)
Verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peoples brings to mind “versiple,” as in Canto Four of his poem Shade calls his muse. In Canto Four of his poem Shade describes shaving and mentions slaves who make hay as he shaves the space between his mouth and nose:
And while the safety blade with scrap 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 gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-938)
In a sonnet that he composed directly in English Conmal (the king’s uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) says that he is not a slave:
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
At the end of his Commentary Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that, history permitting, he may sail back to his recovered kingdom:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
“Sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art” brings to mind “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” at the end of Jaques’ famous monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7):
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Boris Godunov was written under a strong influence of Shakespeare. According to Pushkin, in his poem Graf Nulin ("Count Null," 1825) he parodied history and The Rape of Lucrece, a rather weak poem by Shakespeare:
В конце 1825 года находился я в деревне. Перечитывая «Лукрецию», довольно слабую поэму Шекспира, я подумал: что если б Лукреции пришла в голову мысль дать пощёчину Тарквинию? быть может, это охладило б его предприимчивость и он со стыдом принуждён был отступить? Лукреция б не зарезалась. Публикола не взбесился бы, Брут не изгнал бы царей, и мир и история мира были бы не те.
Итак, республикою, консулами, диктаторами, Катонами, Кесарем мы обязаны соблазнительному происшествию, подобному тому, которое случилось недавно в моём соседстве, в Новоржевском уезде.
Мысль пародировать историю и Шекспира мне представилась. Я не мог воспротивиться двойному искушению и в два утра написал эту повесть.
Я имею привычку на моих бумагах выставлять год и число. «Граф Нулин» писан 13 и 14 декабря. Бывают странные сближения.
"I am accustomed to date my papers. Graf Nulin was written on 13 and 14 December. History does repeat itself strangely." The disastrous Decembrist rising in St. Petersburg took place on Dec. 14, 1825.
Pushkin wrote Boris Godunov and Graf Nulin in Mikhaylovskoe (the estate of the poet's mother in the Province of Pskov). A character in Boris Godunov, Pimen (the old monk and chronicler) says: Eshchyo odno poslednee skazan'ye, i letopis' okonchena moya (one last tale and my chronicle is finished). Neut. of odin (one), odno is an anagram of Odon (a world famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla).
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 and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. One of Blok's poems begins: Kogda zamrut otchayanie i zloba ("When despair and spite stop bother you," 1908). In VN’s novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934) Hermann kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. Hermann Karlovich loves to recite Pushkin's poem in which the poet calls himself ustalyi rab (weary slave):
Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит —
Летят за днями дни, и каждый час уносит
Частичку бытия, а мы с тобой вдвоём
Предполагаем жить, и глядь — как раз умрём.
На свете счастья нет, но есть покой и воля.
Давно завидная мечтается мне доля —
Давно, усталый раб, замыслил я побег
В обитель дальную трудов и чистых нег.
'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose.
Day after day flits by, and with each hour there goes
A little bit of life; but meanwhile you and I
Together plan to dwell… yet lo! 'tis then we die.
There is no bliss on earth: there is peace and freedom, though.
An enviable lot I long have yearned to know:
Long have I, weary slave, been contemplating flight
To a remote abode of work and pure delight.
In the Post Scriptum to his poem Moya rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830) Pushkin mentions his black ancestor Abram Hannibal who was a confidant, not slave, of the tsar Peter I:
Сей шкипер деду был доступен,
И сходно купленный арап
Возрос усерден, неподкупен,
Царю наперсник, а не раб.