Alexey Sklyarenko: Speaking of
Pale Fire, the racehorse in a painting mentioned by Lucette (3.5): in
Russian, kon' (horse) rhymes with ogon' (fire). Cf. Pushkin,
The Bronze Horseman, Part Two, ll. 145-164):А в сем коне какой огонь!/Куда ты скачешь, гордый
конь,...What fire in yonder charger flames! /Proud
charger, whither art thou ridden...
JM: I must have lost track of
the source that identifies a painting with "Pale Fire" as a racehorse with "Tom
Cox Up". Can Alexey refresh my memory about it?
The only easy but very
distant link came in a sentence, written by Mary McCarthy in
her (non deranged!) appraisal of "Pale Fire" She writes:
"Nabokov's tenderness for human eccentricity, for
the freak, the "deviate," is partly the naturalist's taste for the curious. But
his fond, wry compassion for the lone black piece on the board goes deeper than
classificatory science or the collector's choplicking. Love is the burden of
Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as ...the straining of the soul's
black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of
separation (the room beyond, projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the
chess knight, that deviate piece, off the board's edge onto ghostly squares),
binds mortal men in a common pattern --the elderly couple watching TV in a
lighted room, and the "queer" neighbor watching them from his window. But it is
most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the
refugee, the "queen," the bird smashed on the window pane." TNR, " A
Bolt from the Blue" June 4, 1962