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 his father's death Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) was adopted by another, totally unrelated Gradus:
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night. (Kinbote's note to Line 17)
In his essay On Vanity (Les Essais, Book III, chapter 9) Michel de Montaigne (a French philosopher, 1533-1592) quotes the words of Diogenes, who, when asked what sort of wine he liked the best, said “That of another:"
I am no philosopher; evils oppress me according to their weight, and they weigh as much according to the form as the matter, and very often more. If I have therein more perspicacity than the vulgar, I have also more patience; in short, they weigh with me, if they do not hurt me. Life is a tender thing, and easily molested. Since my age has made me grow more pensive and morose, nemo enim resistit sibi, cum caeperit impelli [for no man resists himself when he has begun to be driven forward], for the most trivial cause imaginable, I irritate that humor, which afterward nourishes and exasperates itself of its own motion; attracting and heaping up matter upon matter whereon to feed.
Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat.
The ever-falling drop hollows out a stone.
These continual tricklings consume and ulcerate me. Ordinary inconveniences are never light; they are continual and inseparable, especially when they spring from the members of a family, continual and inseparable.
When I consider my affairs at distance and in gross, I find, because perhaps my memory is none of the best, that they have gone on hitherto improving beyond my reason or expectation; my revenue seems greater than it is; its prosperity betrays me: but when I pry more narrowly into the business, and see how all things go,
Tum vero in curas animum diducimus omnes,
Indeed we lead the mind into all sorts of cares.
I have a thousand things to desire and to fear. To give them quite over, is very easy for me to do: but to look after them without trouble, is very hard. ’Tis a miserable thing to be in a place where everything you see employs and concerns you; and I fancy that I more cheerfully enjoy the pleasures of another man’s house, and with greater and a purer relish, than those of my own. Diogenes answered according to my humor him who asked him what sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,” said he.
A few minutes before Shade's death Kinbote invites the poet to a glass of Tokay (Kinbote's favorite wine) at his place. A Greek philosopher, Diogenes the Cynic (c. 413/403 – c. 324/321 BC), also known as Diogenes of Sinope, should not be confused with Diogenes Laërtius (a biographer of the Greek philosophers who lived in the 3d century AD). Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius report that Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedon, 356 - 323 BC) and Diogenes died on the same day, 10/11 June, 323 BC. The surname Shade and the Shadows (a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus, its member, to assassinate the exiled King) bring to mind Diogenes' reply to Alexander when the latter asked the philosopher (who lived in a barrel) if he wanted anything: "Stand out of my sunlight." It is said that Alexander was so struck by this, and admired so much the haughtiness and grandeur of the man who had nothing but scorn for him, that he said to his followers, who were laughing and jesting about the philosopher as they went away, "But truly, if I were not Alexander, I wish I were Diogenes." Alexander was a pupil of Aristoteles, a Greek philosopher whom Montaigne often quotes in his Essays and whom Kinbote mentiones in his commentary:
One of the five cabins of which this motor court consists is occupied by the owner, a blear-eyed, seventy-year-old man whose twisted limp reminds me of Shade. He runs a small gas station nearby, sells worms to fishermen, and usually does not bother me, but the other day he suggested I "grab any old book" from the shelf in his room. Not wishing to offend him, I cocked my head at them, to one side, and then to the other, but they were all dog-eared paperback mystery stories and did not rate more than a sigh and a smile. He said wait a minute - and took from a bedside recess a battered clothbound treasure. "A great book by a great guy," the Letters of Franklin Lane. "Used to see a lot of him in Rainier Park when I was a young ranger up there. You take it for a couple of days. You won't regret it!"
I did not. Here is a passage that curiously echoes Shade's tone at the end of Canto Three. It comes from a manuscript fragment written by Lane on May 17, 1921, on the eve of his death, after a major operation: "And if I had passed into that other land, whom would I have sought?... Aristotle! - Ah, there would be a man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man's life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above – smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line." (note to Line 810)
In his letters of November 4, 1823, and of July 5, 1824, from Odessa to Vyazemski Pushkin mentions Aristotle and his old nets:
La Vigne школьник Вольтера — и бьется в старых сетях Аристотеля — романтизма нет еще во Франции. А он-то и возродит умершую поэзию — помни мое слово — первый поэтический гений в отечестве Буало ударится в такую бешеную свободу, что что твои немцы. Покамест во Франции поэтов менее, чем у нас.
Век романтизма не настал еще для Франции — Лавинь бьется в старых сетях Аристотеля — он ученик трагика Вольтера, а не природы.
On November 4, 1836, Pushkin and his close friends in St. Petersburg received anonymous, insulting letters, known as "diplomas" of the "Order of Cuckolds," implying his wife Natalie was unfaithful with Georges d'Anthès (or, as some think, with Emperor Nicholas I). July 5 is Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’s birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). Iskander was the penname (after Alexander the Great) of Alexander Herzen (a Russian writer and memoirist, 1812-1870). After the 1917 October Revolution the Bolshaya Morskaya Street (where VN was born) in St. Petersburg was renamed Herzen Street.
In his Foreword to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions his brown beard. In Pushkin's poem Dvizhenie ("Motion," 1825) the bearded sage is Zeno of Elea and his opponent is Antisphenes of Athens (Diogenes' teacher, the founder of Cynic philosophy) or Diogenes himself (in Pushkin's time Diogenes was called Antisphenes):
Движенья нет, сказал мудрец брадатый.
Другой смолчал и стал пред ним ходить.
Сильнее бы не мог он возразить;
Хвалили все ответ замысловатый.
Но, господа, забавный случай сей
Другой пример на память мне приводит:
Ведь каждый день пред нами Солнце ходит,
Однако ж прав упрямый Галилей.
One bearded sage concluded: there's no motion.
Without a word, another walked before him.
He couldn’t answer better; all adored him
And all agreed that he disproved that notion.
But one can see it all in a different light,
For me, another funny thought comes into play:
We watch the sun move all throughout the day
And yet the stubborn Galileo had it right.
(tr. A. Kneller)
Pushkin's poem first appeared in 1826 in Urania, a pocket book for the lovers of literature of both sexes (dlya lyubiteley i lyubitel'nits) edited by Mikhail Pogodin. The muse of astronomy, Urania brings to mind Uranograd, as Amphitheatricus dubbed Onhava:
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). King Alfin's absent-mindedness knew no bounds. He was a wretched linguist, having at his disposal only a few phrases of French and Danish, but every time he had to make a speech to his subjects - to a group of gaping Zemblan yokels in some remote valley where he had crash-landed - some uncontrollable switch went into action in his mind, and he reverted to those phrases, flavoring them for topical sense with a little Latin. Most of the anecdotes relating to his naïve fits of abstraction are too silly and indecent to sully these pages; but one of them that I do not think especially funny induced such guffaws from Shade (and returned to me, via the Common Room, with such obscene accretions) that I feel inclined to give it here as a sample (and as a corrective). One summer before the first world war, when the emperor of a great foreign realm (I realize how few there are to choose from) was paying an extremely unusual and flattering visit to our little hard country, my father took him and a young Zemblan interpreter (whose sex I leave open) in a newly purchased custom-built car on a jaunt in the countryside. As usual, King Alfin traveled without a vestige of escort, and this, and his brisk driving, seemed to trouble his guest. On their way back, some twenty miles from Onhava, King Alfin decided to stop for repairs. While he tinkered with the motor, the emperor and the interpreter sought the shade of some pines by the highway, and only when King Alfin was back in Onhava, did he gradually realize from a reiteration of rather frantic questions that he had left somebody behind ("What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot). Generally speaking, in respect of any of my contributions (or what I thought to be contributions) I repeatedly enjoined my poet to record them in writing, by all means, but not to spread them in idle speech; even poets, however, are human.
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
The name of the capital of Kinbote's Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. De Caelo ("On the Heavens") is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BCE, it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world.
King Alfin (the father of Charles the Beloved), Samuel Shade (the poet's father) and Martin Gradus (the father of Shade's murderer) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Pyotr Botkin. His son, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). 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.