Describing Gradus’s day in New York, 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 agate type in which the Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry:"
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause). The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkam ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder. (note to Line 949)
Agate type brings to mind Agathos, one of the two interlocutors (the name of the second interlocutor is Oinos, "One") in E. A. Poe's dialogue The Power of Words (1845). In Agathos (the name means in Greek "Good") there is Athos (Count de la Fère's nickname), a character in Alexandre Dumas's novels The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (1847–1850). 20 + 10 = 30. The action in the third novel (the Vicomte de Bragelonne is Athos's adopted son) takes place thirly years after the events described in The Three Musketeers. According to Kinbote, John Shade and his wife were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
John Shade (whose birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus's birthday) was born in 1898 and is thirty years Queen Disa's senior (Duchess Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa was born in 1928). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double (both of them were born in 1915 and are seventeen years Shade's junior). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevski (1821-1881), a writer whom Shade lists among Russian humorists and who twice uses the word gradus (degree) in a letter to his brother written on his seventeenth birthday (Oct. 31, 1838). Tri rasskaza Edgara Poe ("Three Stories of Edgar Poe," 1861) is an introductry essay by Dostoevski that appeared in Vremya ("Time"), a magazine edited by brothers Dostoevski. Can the Double Murder? (1877) is a short story by Helena Blavatsy (a Russian and American mystic, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, born Helena von Hahn, 1831-1891). In his book on Helena Blavatsky, Sovremennaya zhritsa Izidy ("A Modern Priestess of Isis," 1892), Vsevolod Solovyov (1849-1903), Vsevolod Solovyov (1849-1903) mentions Edgar Poe (an American writer, 1809-1849, who, according to Helena Blavatsky, guessed many occult truths and principles with his mighty insight) and his fantasy The Power of Words:
В действительности мысль творит. Эдгар По в своём могучем прозрении отгадал много оккультных истин и принципов и, между прочим, развил это положение в своей фантазии: «Могущество слова». (Chapter XVII)
Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, Shade mentions the fantasies of Poe that he tore apart:
We heard cremationists guffaw and snort
At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort
As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.
We all avoided criticizing faiths.
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go.
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 623-634)
The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn brings to mind a Miss Rachel Home, VN's first English governess whom VN mentions in his postcript to Lolita (1955), On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956):
Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English—the language of my first governess in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home. The nymphet, now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying-her-mother idea also subsisted; but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel.
Describing the prison library, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in Lolita) mentions Agatha Christie's novel A Murder is Announced (1950):
They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y., G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. (1.8)
Miss Rachel Home brings to mind that incredibly agile medium, Daniel Home. whom VN mentions in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951):
Biarritz still retained its quiddity in those days. Dusty blackberry bushes and weedy terrains à vendre bordered the road that led to our villa. The Carlton was still being built. Some thirty-six years had to elapse before Brigadier General Samuel McCroskey would occupy the royal suite of the Hôtel du Palais, which stands on the site of a former palace, where in the sixties, that incredibly agile medium, Daniel Home, is said to have been caught stroking with his bare foot (in imitation of a ghost hand) the kind, trustful face of Empress Eugénie. On the promenade near the Casino, an elderly flower girl, with carbon eyebrows and a painted smile, nimbly slipped the plump torus of a carnation into the buttonhole of an intercepted stroller whose left jowl accentuated its royal fold as he glanced down sideways at the coy insertion of the flower. (Chapter Seven, 2)
In his book on Madame Blavatsky Vsevolod Solovyov mentions Daniel Home (whose surname Solovyov misspells "Hume"):
И так далее, и так далее — на семи огромных письмах (около 40 мелко исписанных страниц большого формата). Она кается и кощунствует, рассказывает такие истории, о которых всякий бы молчал, припутывает своих родных и знакомых, уверяет, что никому не хочет зла и всех прощает — и вдруг, срывая с себя личину доброты и кротости, показывает дьявольские когти. Она объявляет, что если Юм не замолчит, то она всеми мерами распространит и обнародует о нём самые ужасные и отвратительные вещи (она и поясняет при этом — что́ именно) — ибо «должна же она защищаться».
Она хочет запутать не только Юма, но и лиц, которые могут на него подействовать; её корреспондент знаком с этими лицами, а потому она просит его убедить их остановить Юма, заставить его молчать — не то и им будет плохо. Словом, это совершенно то же самое, что было в 1886 году по поводу разоблачений, сделанных мною, и что уже известно читателям из её «исповеди»; только тут ещё нет на сцене никаких махатм, никаких «теософических» чудес. Остальное — почти тождественно, но ещё грандиозней. Есть и комизм в её письмах — так Олкотта, среди самых горячих фраз с выражениями отчаянья, она совсем неожиданно величает не только «ослом», но и «ослиным дедушкой». (Chapter XXVIII)
On the other hand, agate type brings to mind the psychiatrist's agatovyi vzglyad (agate gaze) in VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930):
Так Лужин вернулся обратно из долгого путешествия, растеряв по дороге большую часть багажа, и лень было восстанавливать пропажу. Эти первые дни выздоровления были тихи и плавны; женщины в белом вкусно кормили его; приходил обворожительный бородач, и говорил приятные вещи, и смотрел агатовым взглядом, который теплом разливался по телу. Вскоре Лужин стал замечать, что в комнате бывает еще кто-то,-- трепетное, неуловимое присутствие. Раз, когда он проснулся, кто-то беззвучно и торопливо уходил, как бы знакомый шепот возник рядом и сразу погас. И в разговоре бородатого друга стали мелькать намеки на что-то таинственное и счастливое; оно было в воздухе вокруг него, и в осенней прелести окна, и дрожало где-то за дверью,-- загадочное, увертливое счастье. И Лужин постепенно стал понимать, что райская пустота, в которой витают его прозрачные мысли, со всех сторон заполняется. Но ему повезло: первым явилось наиболее счастливое видение его жизни.
Thus Luzhin came back from a long journey, having lost en route the greater part of his luggage, and it was too much bother to restore w^hat was lost. These hrst days of recovery were quiet and smooth: women in white gave him tasty food to eat; the bewitching bearded man came and said nice things to him and looked at him with his agate gaze, which bathed one’s body in warmth. Shortly Luzhin began to notice that there was someone else in the room— a palpitating, elusive presence. Once when he woke up someone noiselessly and hastily went away, and once when he half dozed, someone’s extremely light and apparently familiar whisper started beside him and immediately stopped. And hints began to flicker in the bearded man’s conversation about something mysterious and happy; it was in the air around him and in the autumn beauty of the window, and it trembled somewhere behind the tree— an enigmatic, evasive happiness. And Luzhin gradually began to realize that the heavenly void in which his transparent thoughts floated was being filled in from all sides. (Chapter Ten)
The doctor forbids Luzhin to read Dostoevski. At the beginning the novel Luzhin's French governess reads to the boy Alexandre Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo. In VN's novel, poor Luzhin goes mad and commits suicide by falling down from the bathroom window of a Berlin flat rented by his father-in-law. According to Kinbote, of the not many known ways to get rid of one's body to fall, to fall, to fall is the supreme method. Immediately after he finishes his work on Shade's poem, Kinbote (who seems to write his commentary, index and foreword to Shade's poem not in "Cedarn, Utana," but in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert writes his poem "Wanted" in Lolita) commits suicide. There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name that means in Russian “hope”).