According to 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), as many old glaziers, Gradus (Shade's murderer) could deduce rather accurately water temperature from certain indices of brilliancy and motion:
Gradus, as he drove back to Geneva, wondered when he would be able to use it, that gun. The afternoon was unbearably hot. The lake had developed a scaling of silver and a touch of reflected thunderhead. As many old glaziers, he could deduce rather accurately water temperature from certain indices of brilliancy and motion, and now judged it to be at least 23°. As soon as he got back to his hotel he made a long- distance call to headquarters. It proved a terrible experience. Under the assumption that it would attract less attention than a BIC language, the conspirators conducted telephone conversations in English - broken English, to be exact, with one tense, no articles, and two pronunciations, both wrong. Furthermore, by their following the crafty system (invented in the chief BIC country) of using two different sets of code words - headquarters, for instance, saying "bureau" for "king," and Gradus saying "letter," they enormously increased the difficulty of communication. Each side, finally, had forgotten the meaning of certain phrases pertaining to the other's vocabulary so that in result, their tangled and expensive talk combined charades with an obstacle race in the dark. Headquarters thought it understood that letters from the King divulging his whereabouts could be obtained by breaking into Villa Disa and rifling the Queen's bureau; Gradus, who had said nothing of the sort, but had merely tried to convey the results of his Lex visit, was chagrined to learn that instead of looking for the King in Nice he was expected to wait for a consignment of canned salmon in Geneva. One thing, though, came out clearly: next time he should not telephone, but wire or write. (note to Line 469)
Gradus is the Russian word for "degree." The Russian word gradusnik (thermometer) was coined by Lomonosov, the author of Pis'mo o pol'ze stekla ("Letter on the Use of Glass," 1752). At the beginning of his poem Lomonosov says that they who esteem glass (whose parent is fire) less than minerals think about things incorrectly:
Неправо о вещах те думают, Шувалов,
Которые Стекло чтут ниже Минералов,
Приманчивым лучем блистающих в глаза:
Не меньше польза в нем, не меньше в нем краса
Нередко я для той с Парнасских гор спускаюсь;
И ныне от нее на верьх их возвращаюсь,
Пою перед тобой в восторге похвалу
Не камням дорогим, ни злату, но Стеклу.
И как я оное хваля воспоминаю,
Не ломкость лживого я счастья представляю.
Не должно тленности примером тое быть,
Чего и сильный огнь не может разрушить,
Других вещей земных конечный разделитель:
Стекло им рождено; огонь его родитель.
Describing Gradus's appearance, Kinbote 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 pointille of his suppressed mustache. (note to Line 949)
Unlike Gradus, Kinbote is bearded. Lomonosov is the author of Gimn borode ("A Hymn to the Beard," 1757).
In VN’s story Poseshchenie muzeya (“A Visit to the Museum,” 1938) the narrator mentions zasluzhennye mineraly (venerable minerals) and a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading "Grand Duke" and "Middle Duke" if translated:
Всё было как полагается: серый цвет, сон вещества, обеспредметившаяся предметность; шкап со стертыми монетами, лежащими на бархатных скатиках, а наверху шкапа -- две совы,-- одну звали в буквальном переводе "Великий князь", другую "Князь средний"; покоились заслуженные минералы в открытых гробах из пыльного картона; фотография удивленного господина с эспаньолкой высилась над собранием странных черных шариков различной величины, занимавших почетное место под наклонной витриной: они чрезвычайно напоминали подмороженный навоз, и я над ними невольно задумался, ибо никак не мог разгадать их природу, состав и назначение.
Everything was as it should be: gray tints, the sleep of substance, matter dematerialized. There was the usual case of old, worn coins resting in the inclined velvet of their compartments. There was, on top of the case, a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading "Grand Duke" and "Middle Duke" if translated. Venerable minerals lay in their open graves of dusty papier mache; a photograph of an astonished gentleman with a pointed beard dominated an assortment of strange black lumps of various sizes. They bore a great resemblance to frozen frass, and I paused involuntarily over them, for I was quite at a loss to guess their nature, composition, and function.
Kinbote calls Conmal (the King's uncle, Shakespeare’s translator into Zemblan) “the venerable Duke:”
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)
The name Conmal seems to hint at connois mal, a phrase used by Hamlet in Ducis’s French version (1772) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
Que tu me connois mal , ô ma chere Ophélie! (3.1)
One of the first Russian translations of Hamlet was made in 1748 by Alexander Sumarokov (1717-77). Lomonosov is the author of the following parody on Sumarokov (written after Lomonosov read in manuscript Sumarokov's rhymed version of Hamlet):
Женился Стил, старик без мочи,
На Стелле, что в пятнадцать лет,
И не дождавшись первой ночи,
Закашлявшись, оставил свет.
Тут Стелла бедная вздыхала,
Что на супружню смерть не тронута взирала.
An old man without potence, Stil married
fifiteen-year-old Stella,
and having not waited for the first night,
started to cough and left the world.
Here poor Stella grieved
that she was not touched by her spouse's death.
Like Lomonosov's Stil, Gradus (who is forty-four) is comletely impotent. Stil brings to mind "the svelte stilettos of a frozen stillicide" (as in Canto One of his poem Shade calls icicles):
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves. (ll. 29-40)
In his Index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions "botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto:"
Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, 894; kingbot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end, 247; bottekin-maker, 71; bot, plop, and boteliy, big-bellied (Russ.); botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto.
In his famous monologue in Shakespeare's play (3.1) Hamlet mentions a bare bodkin with which one can make his quietus. The "real" name of the three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his muderer Gradus, seems to be Vsevolod Botkin.
Stella brings to mind Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube who married Sinyavin’s son Blue (Starover Blue’s father mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary):
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet's entourage - for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag. (note to Line 627: The great Starover Blue)
The name Stella means Latin "star," the surname Lazurchik comes from lazur' (Russian for "azure"). In his fragment Nado mnoy v lazuri yasnoy… (“Over me in clear azure,” 1830) Pushkin mentions zvyozdochka odna (one little star):
Надо мной в лазури ясной
Светит звёздочка одна,
Справа — запад тёмно-красный,
Слева — бледная луна.
Over me in clear azure
one little star shines,
to the right is dark-red West,
to the left is pale moon.
In 1920 Pushkin's poem was completed by Hodasevich:
Той звезде – удел поэтов:
Слишком рано заблистать
– И меж двух враждебных светов
Замирать, сиять, мерцать!
Yon star has the fate of poets:
to begin to sparkle too early
And between the two inimical lights
to freeze, to shine, to glimmer!
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) the list of Lolita's classmates at Ramsdale school include Stella Fantasia. When Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale in 1952, she marries Murphy:
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was - ? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen -
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)
The most common family name in Ireland, Murphy is a name of Gaelic origin and means "sea warrior." In Nadgrobie (“The Gravestone,” 1768), Lomonosov’s epitaph composed by Sumarokov (who makes fun of Lomonosov’s epic poem “Peter the Great,” 1756), Sumarokov says that Lomonosov led the reader to the sea but the sea turned out to be a puddle:
«Под камнем сим лежит Фирс Фирсович Гомер,
Который, вознесясь ученьем выше мер,
Великого воспеть монарха устремился,
Отважился, дерзнул, запел и осрамился:
Дела он обещал воспеть велика мужа;
Он к морю вел чтеца, а вылилася лужа».
In his witty reply to Sumarokov, Vyveska (“The Signboard,” 1768), Derzhavin says that Sumarokov criticized Lomonosov's accomplishments in order to make out of Lomonosov, a sea, a puddle, like Sumarokov himself:
Терентий здесь живёт Облаевич Цербер,
Который обругал подъячих выше мер,
Кощунствовать своим Опекуном стремился,
Отважился, дерзнул, зевнул и подавился:
Хулил он наконец дела почтенна мужа,
Чтоб сей из моря стал ему подобна лужа.
The last word in both Sumarokov's and Derzhavin's poems is luzha (puddle). The surname Luzhin (of the main character in VN's novel The Luzhin Defense, 1930) comes from luzha. Luzhin is a character (the suitor of Rakolnikov's sister Dunya) in Dostoevski's novel Prestuplenie i nakazanie ("Crime and Punishment," 1866). The surname Raskolnikov comes from raskol'nik (a schismatic), a synonym of starover (Old Believer). In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838, to his brother Dostoevski twice repeats the word gradus (degree):
Философию не надо полагать простой математической задачей, где неизвестное - природа... Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Philosophy should not be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity… Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!..
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
October 31, 1838, was Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’s birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). 1915 – 1898 = 17.