In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions his frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green:
I cannot understand why from the lake
I could make out our front porch when I'd take
Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree
Has intervened, I look but fail to see
Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space
Has caused a fold or furrow to displace
The fragile vista, the frame house between
Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green. (ll. 41-48)
Describing the Zemblan Revolution, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) compares the King to the only black piece in what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type:
In simple words I described the curious situation in which the King found himself during the first months of the rebellion. He had the amusing feeling of his being the only black piece in what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type. The Royalists, or at least the Modems (Moderate Democrats), might have still prevented the state from turning into a commonplace modern tyranny, had they been able to cope with the tainted gold and the robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, the King refused to abdicate. A haughty and morose captive, he was caged in his rose-stone palace from a corner turret of which one could make out with the help of field glasses lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club, and the English ambassador in old-fashioned flannels playing tennis with the Basque coach on a clay court as remote as paradise. How serene were the mountains, how tenderly painted on the western vault of the sky! (note to Line 130)
According to Shade, Kinbote told him 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. On the chessboard of Pale Fire the black chess pieces (and the black squares) are red and the white chess pieces (and the white squares) are green. “The Color of the Grave is Green” is a poem by Emily Dickinson (a pale spinster):
The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—
To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—
The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—
Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—
The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the Snows could make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—
You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—cannot find—
The Duplicate in the poem’s penultimate stanza brings to mind “And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate / Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate” at the beginning of Shade’s poem:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! (ll. 1-12)
While Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) is the Green Queen, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) is the Red Queen. “A Lady red—amid the Hill” is a poem by Emily Dickinson:
A Lady red—amid the Hill
Her annual secret keeps!
A Lady white, within the Field
In placid Lily sleeps!
The tidy Breezes, with their Brooms—
Sweep vale—and hill—and tree!
Prithee, My pretty Housewives!
Who may expected be?
The Neighbors do not yet suspect!
The Woods exchange a smile!
Orchard, and Buttercup, and Bird—
In such a little while!
And yet, how still the Landscape stands!
How nonchalant the Hedge!
As if the “Resurrection”
Were nothing very strange!
Voskresenie ("Resurrection," 1899) is a novel by Leo Tolstoy. In Drugie berega (“Other Shores,” 1954), the Russian version of his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951), VN describes his best chess problem and mentions Morozov’s drawing of Leo Tolstoy and A. B. Goldenweiser (the musician) at a chess board:
Помню, как я медленно выплыл из обморока шахматной мысли, и вот, на громадной английской сафьяновой доске в бланжевую и красную клетку, безупречное положение было сбалансировано, как созвездие. Задача действовала, задача жила. Мои Staunton'ские шахматы (в 1920-ом году дядя Константин подарил их моему отцу), великолепные массивные фигуры на байковых подошвах, отягощённые свинцом, с пешками в шесть сантиметров ростом и королями почти в десять, важно сияли лаковыми выпуклостями, как бы сознавая свою роль на доске. За такой же доской, как раз уместившейся на низком столике, сидели Лев Толстой и А. Б. Гольденвейзер 6-го ноября 1904-го года по старому стилю (рисунок Морозова, ныне в Толстовском Музее в Москве), и рядом с ними, на круглом столе под лампой, виден не только открытый ящик для фигур, но и бумажный ярлычок (с подписью Staunton), приклеенный к внутренней стороне крышки. Увы, если присмотреться к моим двадцатилетним (в 1940-ом году) фигурам, можно было заметить, что отлетел кончик уха у одного из коней, и основания у двух-трех пешек чуть подломаны, как край гриба, ибо много и далеко я их возил, сменив больше пятидесяти квартир за мои европейские годы; но на верхушке королевской ладьи и на челе королевского коня все ещё сохранился рисунок красной коронки, вроде круглого знака на лбу у счастливого индуса. (Chapter Thirteen, 4)
I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal leather, the flawless
position was at last balanced like a constellation. It worked. It lived. My Staunton chessmen (a twenty-year-old set given to me by my father’s Englished brother, Konstantin), splendidly massive pieces, of tawny or black wood, up to four and a quarter inches tall, displayed their shiny contours as if conscious of the part they played. Alas, if examined closely, some of the men were seen to be chipped (after traveling in their box through the fifty or sixty lodgings I had changed during those years); but the top of the king’s rook and the brow of the king’s knight still showed a small crimson crown painted upon them, recalling the round mark on a happy Hindu’s forehead. (Chapter Fourteen, 3)
At the beginning of his Commentary Kinbote mentions a game of chess that he played with an Iranian student:
The image in these opening lines evidently refers to a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly slower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space. We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint. When in the last year of Shade's life I had the fortune of being his neighbor in the idyllic hills of New Wye (see Foreword), I often saw those particular birds most convivially feeding on the chalk-blue berries of junipers growing at the corner of his house. (See also lines 181-182.)
My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name "robin" to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!
Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"); closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved (born 1915), whose glorious misfortunes I discussed so often with my friend.
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)
"Robin" mentioned by Kinbote brings to mind one fainting robin in Emily Dickinson's poem "If I can stop one heart from breaking:"
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.