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), after Shade's death he distributed the ninety-two index cards with the manuscript of Shade's poem about his person and sewed up all four pockets:
I cannot recall without a shudder the lugubrious week that I spent in New Wye before leaving it, I hope, forever. I lived in constant fear that robbers would deprive me of my tender treasure. Some of my readers may laugh when they learn that I fussily removed it from my black valise to an empty steel box in my landlord's study, and a few hours later took the manuscript out again, and for several days wore it, as it were, having distributed the ninety-two index cards about my person, twenty in the right-hand pocket of my coat, as many in the left-hand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost left-breast pocket. I blessed my royal stars for having taught myself wife work, for I now sewed up all four pockets. Thus with cautious steps, among deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with rhymes, stout with another man's song, stiff with cardboard, bullet-proof at long last. (note to Line 1000)
In Pushkin's Domik v Kolomne ("A Small House in Kolomna," 1830), a mock epic in octaves, Mavra (a man who dressed himself as a woman in order to be hired as a cook by Parasha's mother) can neither cook, nor sew:
Проходит день, другой. В кухарке толку
Довольно мало: то переварит,
То пережарит, то с посудой полку
Уронит; вечно всё пересолит.
Шить сядет — не умеет взять иголку;
Ее бранят — она себе молчит;
Везде, во всем уж как-нибудь подгадит.
Параша бьется, а никак не сладит. (XXXII)
A confirmed vegetarian, Kinbote likes to cook his own meals:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questionsmere fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hufey, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
In the draft Pushkin’s “Small House in Kolomna” has the epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 279-80): Modo vir, modo femina (now a man, now a woman). There is modo in Quasimodo, the hunchback in Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). In a discarded stanza of “A Small House in Kolomna” Pushkin mentions Hugo s tovarishchi (Hugo with his friends):
Он вынянчен был мамкою не дурой:
За ним смотрел степенный Буало,
Шагал он чинно, стянут был цезурой;
Но, пудреной пиитике назло,
Растрёпан он свободною цензурой.
Учение не в прок ему пошло:
Hugo с товарищи, друзья натуры,
Его гулять пустили без цезуры. (<VII>)
The characters in Notre-Dame de Paris include Esmeralda (a gypsy girl). In his Foreword and Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus, Shade's murderer, a lift to Kinbote's house):
One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess My Shade has already left with the great beaver." Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. (Foreword)
Modo brings to mind Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards:
It was now correctly conjectured that if Odon had fled, the King had fled too: At an extraordinary session of the Extremist government there was passed from hand to hand, in grim silence, a copy of a French newspaper with the headline: L'EN-ROI DE ZEMBLA EST-IL À PARIS? Vindictive exasperation rather than state strategy moved the secret organization of which Gradus was an obscure member to plot the destruction of the royal fugitive. Spiteful thugs! They may be compared to hoodlums who itch to torture the invulnerable gentleman whose testimony clapped them in prison for life. Such convicts have been known to go berserk at the thought that their elusive victim whose very testicles they crave to twist and tear with their talons, is sitting at a pergola feast on a sunny island or fondling some pretty young creature between his knees in serene security - and laughing at them! One supposes that no hell can be worse than the helpless rage they experience as the awareness of that implacable sweet mirth reaches them and suffuses them, slowly destroying their brutish brains. A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty. The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. Gradus had long been a member of all sorts of jejune leftist organizations. He had never killed, though coming rather close to it several times in his gray life. He insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards - but let us not forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out. Perhaps our man's foreign origin secretly prompted a nomination that would not cause any son of Zembla to incur the dishonor of actual regicide. We can well imagine the scene: the ghastly neon lights of the laboratory, in an annex of the Glass Works, where the Shadows happened to hold their meeting that night; the ace of spades lying on the tiled floor, the vodka gulped down out of test tubes; the many hands clapping Gradus on his round back, and the dark exultation of the man as he received those rather treacherous congratulations. We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem.
Was Gradus really a suitable person for the job? Yes and no. One day in his early youth, when he worked as a messenger boy for a large and depressing firm of cardboard box manufacturers, he quietly helped three companions to ambush a local lad whom they wished to beat up for winning a motorcycle at a fair. Young Gradus obtained an axe and directed the felling of a tree: it crashed improperly, though, not quite blocking the country lane down which their carefree prey used to ride in the growing dusk. The poor lad whizzing along toward the spot where those roughs crouched was a slim delicate-looking Lorrainer, and one must have been vile indeed to begrudge him his harmless enjoyment. Curiously enough, while they were lying in wait, our future regicide fell asleep in a ditch and thus missed the brief affray during which two of the attackers were knuckledusted and knocked out by the brave Lorrainer, and the third run over and crippled for life.
Gradus never became a real success in the glass business to which he turned again and again between his wine-selling and pamphlet-printing jobs. He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He also worked as teazer, and later as flasher, at governmental factories - and was, I believe, more or less responsible for the remarkably ugly red-and-amber windows in the great public lavatory at rowdy but colorful Kalixhaven where the sailors are. He claimed to have improved the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d'alarme used by grape growers and orchardmen to scare the birds. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of this other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time. (note to Line 171)
Kinbote was nicknamed "the great beaver" because of his brown beard. In Canto Four of his poem Shade describes shaving:
Since my biographer may be too staid
Or know too little to affirm that Shade
Shaved in his bath, here goes: "He'd fixed a sort
Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support
Running across the tub to hold in place
The shaving mirror right before his face
And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd
Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed."
The more I weigh, the less secure my skin;
In places it's ridiculously thin;
Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick
And my grimace, invites the wicked nick.
Or this dewlap: some day I must set free
The Newport Frill inveterate in me.
My Adam's apple is a prickly pear:
Now I shall speak of evil and despair
As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight,
Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate
Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess
And find unchanged that patch of prickliness.
I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke
Who in commercials with one gliding stroke
Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin,
Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin.
I'm in the class of fussy bimanists.
As a discreet ephebe in tights assists
A female in an acrobatic dance,
My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance.
Now I shall speak... Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
Making the little hairs all stand on end
As in the enlarged animated scheme
Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream. (ll. 887-922)
In "A Small House in Kolomna" Parasha’s mother unexpectedly returns home from a church and faints when she sees the cook Mavra shaving in front of Parasha’s mirror:
Пред зеркальцем Параши, чинно сидя,
Кухарка брилась. Что с моей вдовой?
«Ах, ах!» — и шлёпнулась. Её увидя,
Та, второпях, с намыленной щекой
Через старуху (вдовью честь обидя),
Прыгнула в сени, прямо на крыльцо,
Да ну бежать, закрыв себе лицо. (XXXVI)
In the poem’s last stanza Pushkin uses a phrase brit’ borodu sebe (to shave one’s beard):
Вот вам мораль: по мненью моему,
Кухарку даром нанимать опасно;
Кто ж родился мужчиною, тому
Рядиться в юбку странно и напрасно:
Когда-нибудь придётся же ему
Брить бороду себе, что несогласно
С природой дамской... Больше ничего
Не выжмешь из рассказа моего». (XL)
According to Ilya Surguchyov (a writer, 1881-1956), in 1905 Joseph Stalin (who was wanted by the police) for several months served as a cook in the house of his family in Stavropol. "Wife work" (as Kinbote calls sewing) brings to mind Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluev (1901-32). In November, 1932, she committed suicide by shooting herself. The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus. Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (Pushkin's boss in Odessa and a target of his epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
Stalin's nom de guerre was Koba (after the main character in Kazbeghi's novel The Patricide). Koba makes one think of koda (a coda in Russian spelling). 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 (1862) by Yakov Polonski, the author of Prishli i stali teni nochi ("The shadows of the night came and mounted guard at my door," 1842), a poem that was appriciated by Gogol. The terrible name of the leader of the Shadows (a regicidal organization whose member Gradus is) seems to hint at Stalin.
Koba + morda + Odon/Nodo = koda + obman + odor/door
morda - Ross., muzzle, mug; snout
Odon - world-famous Zemblan actor and patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla
obman - deceit, deception