In his commentary to Shade's poem 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) quotes Shade's words about their common acquaintance, "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron:"
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."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron." Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." (note to Line 172)
In his Open Letter to Stalin (dated August 17, 1939) Fyodor Raskolnikov famously calls Stalin "a chef preparing spicy dishes:"
Вы - повар, готовящий острые блюда, для нормального человеческого желудка они не съедобны.
You are a chef preparing spicy dishes, for a normal human stomach they are not edible.
Less than a month after finishing his Open Letter to Stalin Fyodor Raskolnikov (a Soviet dipomat whose real name was Ilyin) died from "falling out of a window" while staying in a hospital in Nice. What Raskolnikov did not probably suspect is that Stalin was a good cook indeed and that in the summer of 1905, in Stavropol, he for several months served as a cook in the house of Dmitri Surguchyov (a local merchant who was very pleased with his cook and highly praised the dishes he prepared). In his essay Zarubezhnyi Surguchyov ("The Abroad Surguchyov") that appeared in the émigré review Grany (No. 44, Frankfurt/M, 1.10.1959) Vladimir Unkovski (Ilya Surguchyov's last doctor and close friend) tells what he has heard from Ilya Surguchyov (Dmitri's son, the writer, 1881-1956, who left Russia in 1920 and settled in Paris):
Как-то я был в гостях у Ильи Дмитриевича и за ужином услышал следующий от него рассказ:
— Однажды, будучи студентом, я приехал из Петербурга в Ставрополь на летние каникулы. После обеда, по обыкновению, отец ушёл в спальню соснуть, а я часто оставался в столовой и читал. Стук в двери, пошёл отворить — молодой человек кавказского типа.
— Что вам угодно?
— Позвольте отрекомендоваться: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили. Я вчера бежал из Тифлиса, за мною следит полиция. Мне надобно временно пожить на нелегальном положении. Ваш дом считается в Ставрополе очень благонадёжным, шпики сюда не рискнут заявиться. Не возьмёте ли вы меня к себе поваром. Я отлично смыслю в кулинарии.
Я пошёл к отцу.
— Какой-то Джугашвили — нелегальный — предлагает себя в повара.
— А ты спроси, умеет ли он готовить шашлык по-карски. Если умеет, мы его берём...
И он стал служить, поставив условием, что после обеда будет уходить и возвращаться за час до ужина. Принёс маленький чемоданчик с жалким скарбом — всё имущество.
...Готовил прекрасно, отлично, мастерски. Отец был доволен. Часто мы с нашим поваром вдвоём ходили в театр на галёрку и возвращались поздно, потому что спускались в погребок и попивали кахетинское. Парень он был компанейский. Политических разговоров мы с ним не вели: я всегда был до них не охотник, и он, очевидно, остерегался. Декламировал из поэмы Руставели “Витязь в тигровой шкуре” по-грузински и отчасти казался энтузиастом... Проходили недели и месяцы. Вхожу как-то утром в кухню — пусто. Ни Виссариона, ни чемоданишка. Исчез навсегда. Не забрал следуемого ему за полмесяца жалованья...»
One day the cook escaped from the house of his master without taking his monthly payment. One cannot help recalling Domik v Kolomne ("A Small House in Kolomna," 1830), Pushkin's mock epic in octaves!
It seems that in Ilya Surguchyov's one-act play Za chakhokhbili ("At the Chakhokhbili") that appeared in 1953 (soon after Stalin's death) Stalin served as a model of the cook. Chakhokhbili (it rhymes with Dzhugashvili, Stalin's real name) is a well know Georgian dish of stewed chicken and fresh herbs (it is originally made with pheasant, but most people use chicken). The dish is usually very spicy. Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions a note in the icebox warning with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein:
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)
Georgiy Malenkov (whom Mrs. Goldsworth resembles) was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union.
In her Russian translation of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov renders "a cook-out chef apron" as fartuk piknikovogo povara-lyubitelya. The adjective piknikovyi brings to mind V nikh vidya nechto vrode piknika (Seeing in them [the crimes] some sort of picnic), a line in Igor Severyanin's sonnet Conan Doyle (1926):
Кумир сопливого ученика,
Банкира, сыщика и хулигана,
Он чтим и на Камчатке, и в Лугано,
Плод с запахом навозным парника.
Помилуй Бог меня от дневника,
Где детективы в фабуле романа
О преступленьях повествуют рьяно,
В них видя нечто вроде пикника…
«Он учит хладнокровью, сметке, риску,
А потому хвала и слава сыску!» —
Воскликнул бы любитель кровопийц,
Меня всегда мутило от которых…
Не ужас ли, что землю кроет ворох
Убийственных романов про убийц?
In his sonnet Severyanin (who famously compared culture to the roquefort cheese) calls the author of Sherlock Holmes plod s zapakhom navoznym parnika (a fruit with the dung smell of greenhouse). According to Kinbote (who likes to cook his own meals), he became a confirmed vegetarian after reading a story about an Italian despot:
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was a member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages - not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)