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) mentions Gradus’s puny ghost, shargar:
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft – and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:
Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of Tanagra and the first three letters of "dust" form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. "Simple chance!" the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. "Leningrad used to be Petrograd?" "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?"
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.
Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels. We saw him last on the late afternoon of July 10th when he returned from Lex to his hotel in Geneva, and there we left him.
For the next four days Gradus remained fretting in Geneva. The amusing paradox with these men of action is that they constantly have to endure long stretches of otiosity that they are unable to fill with anything, lacking as they do the resources of an adventurous mind. As many people of little culture, Gradus was a voracious reader of newspapers, pamphlets, chance leaflets and the multilingual literature that comes with nose drops and digestive tablets; but this summed up his concessions to intellectual curiosity, and since his eyesight was not too good, and the consumability of local news not unlimited, he had to rely a great deal on the torpor of sidewalk cafes and on the makeshift of sleep.
How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimation, and the star that no party member can ever reach.
On Wednesday morning, still without news, Gradus telegraphed headquarters saying that he thought it unwise to wait any longer and that he would be staying at Hotel Lazuli, Nice. (note to Line 596)
The puny ghost of Shade's murderer makes one think of the beginning of Marx's and Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848):
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
The word shargar (Shargar is the hero’s nickname) is explained in George MacDonald’s novel Robert Falconer (1868):
Robert went out into the thin drift, and again crossing the wide desolate-looking square, turned down an entry leading to a kind of court, which had once been inhabited by a well-to-do class of the townspeople, but had now fallen in estimation. Upon a stone at the door of what seemed an outhouse he discovered the object of his search.
'What are ye sittin' there for, Shargar?'
Shargar is a word of Gaelic origin, applied, with some sense of the ridiculous, to a thin, wasted, dried-up creature. In the present case it was the nickname by which the boy was known at school; and, indeed, where he was known at all. (Chapter IV “Shargar”)
Falconer brings to mind Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716-91), a French sculptor who executed a colossal statue of Peter the First in bronze, known as the Bronze Horseman. At the beginning of Part One of his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833) Pushkin mentions omrachennyi Petrograd (the ensombered Petrograd):
Над омраченным Петроградом
Дышал ноябрь осенним хладом.
Over the ensombered Petrograd
November breathed with autumn chill.
In 1914, when World War I broke out, St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd, and in 1924, soon after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus." In Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman” poor Eugene goes mad after the death of his beloved in the disastrous Neva flood of 1824 and is pursued by the ghost of the tsar's equestrian statue. VN was born (like Pushkin's Onegin, upon the Neva's banks) in 1899, a hundred years after Pushkin's birth. The poet in Pale Fire, John Shade was born in 1898. Shade's birthday, July 5, is also the birthday of Kinbote and Gradus (both of whom were born in 1915). According to Kinbote, Shade began Canto Two on July 5, 1959, the day on which Gradus left Zembla for Western Europe. A Scottish author, George McDonald (1824-1905) is the author of Lilith: A Romance (1895). Its protagonist, Mr. Vane, brings to mind VN's story The Vane Sisters (1951). Cynthia's younger sister, Sybil Vane is a namesake of Sybil Shade (the poet's wife). Shade's wife Sybil and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa is a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. The characters in McDonald's Lilith include Lona (Vane's love who turns out to be Lilith's daughter and who is killed by her own mother) and a small boy named Odu. The latter brings to mind Odon (stage name of Donald O'Donnell), a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the King to escape from Zembla. At the end of his Commentary Kinbote says that he may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square):
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, health heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
McDonald's Lilith reminds one of VN's poem Lilit (1928) and of Arnor's sculpture Lilith Calling Back Adam:
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains.
/ / / /
On sagaren werem tremkin tri stana
/ / / /
Verbalala wod gev ut tri phantana
(I have marked the stress accents.) (note to Line 80)
Among the creatures that Goethe’s Faust sees on the Brocken is Adam’s first wife Lilith:
Faust: Wer ist denn das?
Mephistopheles: Betrachte sie genau!
Lilith ist das.
Faust: Wer?
Mephistopheles: Adams erste Frau.
Nimm dich in acht vor ihren schönen Haaren,
Vor diesem Schmuck, mit dem sie einzig prangt.
Wenn sie damit den jungen Mann erlangt,
So läßt sie ihn so bald nicht wieder fahren.
Faust: Who's that there?
Mephisto: Take a good look.
Lilith.
Faust: Lilith? Who is that?
Mephisto: Adam's wife, his
first.
Beware of her.
Her beauty's one boast is her dangerous hair.
Then Lilith winds it tight around young men;
She doesn't soon let go of them again. (Faust, Part One, “The Walpurgis Night”)
This scene is immediately preceded by Mephistopheles’ words:
Der ganze Strudel strebt nach oben;
Du glaubst zu schieben, und du wirst geschoben.
The whirlpool swirls to get above:
Thou’rt shoved thyself, imagining to shove.
In a letter of Jan. 4, 1858, to Vasiliy Botkin Leo Tolstoy quotes the second line:
Человек везде человек, т. е. слаб. Нечто мученики, только одни мученики непосредственно действовали для добра. Т. е. делали то самое добро, которое хотели делать. А эти все деятели — рабы самих себя и событий. Хотят звезды или славы, а выходит государственная польза, а государственная польза выходит зло для всего человечества. А хотят государственной пользы, выходит кому-нибудь звезда и на ней останавливается. Glaubst zu schieben und wirst geschoben.
The "real" name of three main characters in Pale Fire (the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus) is Botkin. 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 (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.