Describing his rented house, 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 Lake Omega, the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes near New Wye:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)
Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) drowned in Lake Omega. In his poem Davno plyvu zhiteyskim morem (“I’ve been long in the ups and downs of life,” 1864) Vyazemski uses the phrase s al’fy na omegu (from alpha to omega):
Давно плыву житейским морем,
Не раз при мне вздымался вал,
Который счастьем или горем
Пловцов случайно заливал.
Но в красный день и под ненастьем
Не мог я хорошо понять,
Что люди признавали счастьем
И что способны горем звать.
Их поиски мне были чужды,
И чужды их забот плоды.
В их счастье не имел я нужды,
В их горе не видал беды.
Чужому мненью, словно игу,
Не подставлял я головы;
Как знал, читал я жизни книгу,
Но не со слов людской молвы.
Теперь, что с альфы на омегу
Я окончательно попал,
Теперь, что после бурь ко брегу
Несет меня последний вал,
Еще с толпою разнородней
Своим фарватером плыву,
И мнится мне, всё сумасбродней —
Все люди бредят наяву.
Я прав иль нет? Не мне задачу
Решить, но с грустью сознаюсь;
О торжествах я часто плачу,
А над страданьями смеюсь.
...Now that from alpha to omega
I eventually found myself come,
Now that after the storms to the shore
The last wave carries me...
In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 27) VN calls Vyazemski “a verbal virtuoso” and points out that Vyazemski's mother was Irish:
Prince (knyaz’) Pyotr Vyazemski (1792-1878), a minor poet, was disastrously influenced by the French poetaster Pierre Jean Béranger; otherwise he was a verbal virtuoso, a fine prose stylist, a brilliant (though by no means always reliable) memoirist, critic and wit. Pushkin was very fond of him and vied with him in scatological metaphors (see their letters). He was Karamzin’s ward, Reason’s godchild, Romanticism’s champion, and an Irishman on his mother’s side (O’Reilly).
In J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (Franny and Zooey are two of the seven children of Bessie Glass, née Gallagher, an Irishwoman) the narrator says that there were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family:
He said he was-this is exactly what he said-he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son,' and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you-that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! That's what makes me so mad! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something.. . . It's just awful. He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn't talking, he's smoking his smelly cigars all over the house. I'm so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die."
"The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again."
There were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family, but this last little remark perhaps Zooey alone was coordinated well enough to bring in safely over a telephone. Or so this narrator suggests. And Franny may have felt so, too. In any case, she suddenly knew that it was Zooey at the other end of the phone. She got up, slowly, from the edge of the bed. "All right, Zooey," she said. "All right."
Not quite immediately: "Beg pardon?"
"I said, all right, Zooey."
"Zooey? What is this? . . . Franny? You there?"
"I'm here. Just stop it now, please. I know it's you."
"What in the world are you talking about, sweetheart? What is this? Who's this Zooey?"
"Zooey Glass," Franny said. "Just stop it now, please. You're not being funny. As it happens, I'm just barely getting back to feeling half-way-"
"Grass, did you say? Zooey Grass? Norwegian chap? Sort of a heavyset, blond, ath-"
"All right, Zooey. Just stop, please. Enough's enough. You're not funny. ... In case you're interested, I'm feeling absolutely lousy. So if there's anything special you have to say to me, please hurry up and say it and leave me alone." This last, emphasized word was oddly veered away from, as if the stress on it hadn't been fully intended.
Describing King Alfin’s death in an aviation accident, Kinbote mentions Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero:
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
The father of Charles the Beloved, King Alfin is the son of King Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid:
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid. K 's grandfather, d. 1900 at seventy-five, after a long dull reign; sponge-bag-capped, and with only one medal on his Jaegar jacket, he liked to bicycle in the park; stout and bald, his nose like a congested plum, his martial mustache bristing with obsolete passion, garbed in a dressing gown of green silk, and carrying a flambeau in his raised hand, he used to meet, every night, during a short period in the middle-Eighties, his hooded mistress, Iris Acht (q. v.) midway between palace and theater in the secret passage later to be rediscovered by his grandson, 130. (Index)
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid, brings to mind the three Turgenevs. In Chapter Ten (XVI: 9-14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions khromoy Turgenev (lame Turgenev), the Decembrist:
Одну Россию в мире видя,
Лаская в ней свой идеал,
Хромой Тургенев им внимал
И, слово рабство ненавидя,
Предвидел в сей толпе дворян
Освободителей крестьян.
seeing but Russia in the world,
in her caressing his ideal,
to them did lame Turgenev hearken
and the word slavery hating,
in this crowd of nobles foresaw
the liberators of the peasants.
Pushkin destroyed Chapter Ten of EO on Oct. 19, 1830 (the Lyceum anniversary). On Oct. 19, 1959, Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide. It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade’s poem not in “Cedarn, Utana,” but in a lunatic asylum in Quebec.
One of Pushkin’s staunchest supporters and truest friends, Alexander Turgenev (lame Nikolay’s elder brother, 1784-1845) helped to enroll young Pushkin in the Lyceum and accompanied Pushkin’s coffin to the Svyatye Gory monastery (where the poet was buried). A distant relative of brothers Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev (the novelist) is the author Dovol’no (“Enough,” 1865). In VN’s poem To Prince S. M. Kachurin (1947) there is a sentence that consists of a single word, dovol’no:
Мне хочется домой. Довольно.
Качурин, можно мне домой?
В пампасы молодости вольной,
в техасы, найденные мной.
I want to go home. Enough, in truth.
Kachurin, may I now go home?
To the pampas of my free youth,
the Texas I found once on a roam. (4)
In Ilf and Petrov's novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) the book-keeper Berlaga (who simulates madness by claiming that he is a viceroy of India) meets in the madhouse a geography teacher who cries out “Freedom! Freedom! To the pampas!”:
Но тут больной, сидевший на кровати в глубине покоя, поднялся на тоненькие и желтые, как церковные свечи, ноги и страдальчески закричал:
-- На волю! На волю! В пампасы!
Как бухгалтер узнал впоследствии, в пампасы просился старый учитель географии, по учебнику которого юный Берлага знакомился в своё время с вулканами, мысами и перешейками. Географ сошёл с ума совершенно неожиданно: однажды он взглянул на карту обоих полушарий и не нашёл на ней Берингова пролива. Весь день старый учитель шарил по карте. Все было на месте: и Нью-Фаундленд, и Суэцкий канал, и Мадагаскар, и Сандвичевы острова с главным городом Гонолулу, и даже вулкан Попокатепетль, а Берингов пролив отсутствовал. И тут же, у карты, старик тронулся. Это, был добрый сумасшедший, не причинявший никому зла, но Берлага отчаянно струсил. Крик надрывал его душу.
-- На волю! - продолжал кричать географ. - В пампасы!
Он лучше всех на свете знал, что такое воля. Он был географ, и ему были известны такие просторы, о которых обыкновенные, занятые скучными делами люди даже и не подозревают. Ему хотелось на волю, хотелось скакать на потном мустанге сквозь заросли.
But then a patient who was sitting on a bed deep inside the large ward stood up on his legs, which were thin and yellow like church candles, and yelled out with pain:
“Freedom! Freedom! To the pampas!”
Later, the accountant learned that the man who longed for the pampas was an old geography teacher, the author of the textbook from which the young Berlaga had learned about volcanoes, capes, and isthmuses many years ago. The geographer went mad quite unexpectedly: one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and couldn't find the Bering Strait. The old teacher spent the whole day studying the map. Everything was where it was supposed to be: Newfoundland; the Suez Canal; Madagascar; the Sandwich Islands with their capital city, Honolulu; even the Popocatépetl volcano. But the Bering Strait was missing. The old man lost his mind right then and there, in front of the map.
He was a harmless madman who never hurt anybody, but he scared Berlaga to death.
The shouting broke his heart.
"Freedom!" the geographer yelled out again. “To the pampas!”
He knew more about freedom than anyone else in the world.
He was a geographer: he knew of the wide open spaces that regular people, busy doing their mundane things, can't even imagine. He wanted to be free, he wanted to ride a sweating mustang through the brush… (Chapter XVI: “Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytik”)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus 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 “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Lame Turgenev brings to mind Lord Byron (a lame poet) and Le Diable boiteux (The Devil upon Two Sticks, 1707), a comic novel by Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747). In J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey Zooey mentions his friend LeSage:
Franny, looking at him, now had a hand visored over her eyes. Zooey was sitting in the main shaft of sunlight in the room. She might have altered her position on the couch, if she meant to go on looking at him, but that would have disturbed Bloomberg, in her lap, who appeared to be asleep. "Do you really have an ulcer?" she asked suddenly. "Mother said you have an ulcer."
"Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy." He gave the snowman another, more vigorous shake. "The funny part is," he said, "I like Hess. Or at least I like him when he's not shoving his artistic poverty down my throat. At least he wears horrible neckties and funny padded suits in the middle of that frightened, super-conservative, super-conforming madhouse. And I like his conceit. He's so conceited he's actually humble, the crazy bastard. I mean he obviously thinks television's good enough to deserve him and his big, bogus-courageous, 'offbeat' talent-which is a crazy kind of humility, if you feel like thinking about it." He stared at the glass ball till the snowstorm had abated somewhat. "In a way, I sort of like LeSage, too. Everything he owns is the best-his overcoat, his two-cabin cruiser, his son's grades at Harvard, his electric razor, everything. He took me home to dinner once and stopped me in the driveway to ask me if I remembered 'the late Carole Lombard, in the movies.' He warned me I'd get a shock when I met his wife, she was such a dead ringer for Carole Lombard. I suppose I'll like him for that till I die. His wife turned out to be a really tired, bosomy, Persian-looking blonde." Zooey looked around abruptly at Franny, who had said something. "What?" he asked.
"Yes!" Franny repeated - pale, but beaming, and apparently fated, too, to like Mr. LeSage till death.
In Hinduism, the Kali Yuga is the fourth and worst of the four yugas (world ages) in a Yuga Cycle, preceded by Dvapara Yuga and followed by the next cycle's Krita (Satya) Yuga. It is believed to be the present age, which is full of conflict and sin. The Kali Yuga brings to mind Cayuga Lake, the longest of central New York's glacial Finger Lakes. The city of Ithaca, site of Ithaca College and Cornell University (where VN lectured), is located at the southern end of Cayuga Lake.
In a canceled variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade says that his age is the worst of all:
After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant:
All artists have been born in what they call
A sorry age; mine is the worst of all:
An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take
A genius with a foreign name to make,
When any jackass can rig up the stuff;
An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff
The selenographer; a comic age
That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.
Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled:
England where poets flew the highest, now
Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;
Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,
The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop
And all the Social Novels of our age
Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page. (note to Line 922)
The selenographer makes one think of Selena’s brother, a character in J. D. Salinger’s story Just Before the War with the Eskimos. Dr. Schweitzer brings to mind Vyazemski's poem Na beregu Lemanskogo ozera ("Upon the Bank of Lake Leman," 1862).