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 the poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, and points out that Lukin comes from Luke:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 99) VN mentions the little-known playwright Vladimir Lukin (1737-94), the author of Shchepetil’nik (“The Trinklet Dealer,” 1765), a one-act comedy not devoid of talent. In Chapter One (XXIII: 6) of EO Pushkin mentions London shchepetil’nyi (London the trinkleter):
Изображу ль в картине верной
Уединённый кабинет,
Где мод воспитанник примерной
Одет, раздет и вновь одет?
Всё, чем для прихоти обильной
Торгует Лондон щепетильной
И по Балтическим волнам
За лес и сало возит нам,
Всё, что в Париже вкус голодной,
Полезный промысел избрав,
Изобретает для забав,
Для роскоши, для неги модной, —
Всё украшало кабинет
Философа в осьмнадцать лет.
Shall I present a faithful picture
of the secluded cabinet,
here the exemplary pupil of fashions
is dressed, undressed, and dressed again?
Whatever, for the copious whim,
London the trinkleter deals in
and o’er the Baltic waves
conveys to us for timber and for tallow;
whatever avid taste in Paris,
a useful trade having selected,
invents for pastimes,
for luxury, for modish mollitude;
all this adorned the cabinet
of a philosopher at eighteen years of age.
Mod vospitannik primernyi (the exemplary pupil of fashions) in the stanza's line 3 brings to mind Shade’s Aunt Maud (a poet and a painter with a taste for realistic objects interlaced with grotesque growths and images of doom) who brought the poet up. London (1794) is a poem by William Blake:
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
The Chimney-sweepers make one think of a chimney-sweep who bumps up against Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin, the main character in Gogol's story Shinel' ("The Carrick," 1842), and blackens his shoulder, after he left Petrovich (the tailor who refuses to repair Akakiy Akakievich’s old overcoat):
Вышед на улицу, Акакий Акакиевич был как во сне. "Этаково-то дело этакое, - говорил о н сам себе, - я, право, и не думал, чтобы оно
вышло того...- а потом, после некоторого молчания, прибавил: - Так вот как! наконец вот что вышло, а я, право, совсем и предполагать не мог, чтобы оно было этак". Засим последовало опять долгое молчание, после которого он произнёс: "Так этак-то! вот какое уж, точно, никак неожиданное, того... этого бы никак... этакое-то обстоятельство!" Сказавши это, он, вместо того чтобы идти домой, пошел совершенно в противную сторону, сам того не подозревая. Дорогою задел его все м нечистым своим боком трубочист и вычернил все плечо ему; целая шапка извести высыпалась на него с верхушки строившегося дома. Он ничего этого не заметил...
Akakiy Akakievich went out into the street as if in a dream. "Such an affair!" he said to himself: "I did not think it had come to --" and then after a pause, he added, "Well, so it is! see what it has come to at last! and I never imagined that it was so!" Then followed a long silence, after which he exclaimed, "Well, so it is! see what already -- nothing unexpected that -- it would be nothing -- what a strange circumstance!" So saying, instead of going home, he went in exactly the opposite direction without himself suspecting it. On the way, a chimney-sweep bumped up against him, and blackened his shoulder, and a whole hatful of rubbish landed on him from the top of a house which was building. He did not notice it...
The surname Bashmachkin comes from bashmachnik (shoemaker, cobbler). Gogol's schoolmate in Nezhin, Platon Lukashevich (1809-87) is the author of Ob'yasnenie assiriyskikh imyon ("The Interpretation of Assyrian Names," 1868). Kinbote is the author of a book on surnames.
William Blake (1757-1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. St. Luke the Painter is a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti included in his sonnet sequence The House of Life:
Give honor unto Luke Evangelist;
For he it was (the aged legends say)
Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray.
Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,
She looked through these to God and was God's priest.
And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,
And she sought talismans, and turned in vain
To soulless self-reflections of man's skill,
Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again,
Ere the night cometh and she may not work.
A poet and a painter, D. G. Rossetti is the author of the drawing “Tennyson Reading Maud.” Empress Maud is a drawing by William Blake. In his Commentary Kinbote pairs Tennyson with Housman:
Alfred Housman (1859-1939), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) in representing, perhaps (no, delete this craven "perhaps"), the highest achievement of English poetry in a hundred years, says somewhere (in a foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs obstructed his barbering; but since both Alfreds certainly used an Ordinary Razor, and John Shade an ancient Gillette, the discrepancy may have been due to the use of different instruments. (note to Line 920)
According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he picked up Rita one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did - and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband - and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was - and no doubt still is - a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
The Tyger is a poem by William Blake. In Gerontion T. S. Eliot mentions Christ the tiger who came in depraved May:
Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
As a young man in Paris, Humbert composed parodies of Eliot:
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry and many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
…Fräulen von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise ” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties - and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. (1.5)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says that she twisted words:
She twisted words: pot, top
Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."
She called you a didactic katydid.
She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll. 347-356)
According to Kinbote, it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest:”
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet's expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips," and "T.S. Eliot," "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. (note to Lines 347-348)
In Lolita, Rita's brother is the mayor and boaster of Grainball City. Grainball = grain + ball = brain + Gall. A German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was William Blake's contemporary. Rita's brother seems to be a cross between Khlestakov (a boaster whom everybody mistakes for an inspector traveling incognito) and the Town Mayor, the characters in Gogol's Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836). "A bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus" mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary brings to mind the real Inspector whose arrival is announced at the end of Gogol's play:
Жандарм. Приехавший по именному повелению из Петербурга чиновник требует вас сей же час к себе. Он остановился в гостинице.
Произнесённые слова поражают как громом всех. Звук изумления единодушно взлетает из дамских уст; вся группа, вдруг переменивши положение, остаётся в окаменении.
GENDARME. The Inspector-General sent by Imperial command has arrived, and requests your attendance at once. He awaits you in the inn.
(They are thunderstruck at this announcement. The ladies utter simultaneous ejaculations of amazement; the whole group suddenly shift their positions and remain as if petrified.)
According to Kinbote, he writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword to Shade's poem in a log cabin in Cedarn, Utana. But it seems that Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus's "real" name) actually writes them in the same madhouse near Quebec where Humbert writes his poem "Wanted."