In his foreword 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 his favorite photograph of Shade and calls his young roomer who snapped the picture “bad Bob:”
I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that had belonged to his aunt Maud (see line 86). I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised - not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture; and the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally we separated at once, and through a chink in the window curtains I saw bad Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut, and shabby valise, and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything save treason.
Bad Bob seems to hint at Ieremiya (Jeremy) Nedobobov, the wunderkind poet in Turgenev's article Shestiletniy oblichitel' ("The Six-Year-Old Denouncer," 1859) in Iskra ("Spark"), a satirical magazine with cartoons. Ieremiya is the son of Platon Nedobobov, a retired teacher of Russian literature who wrote the foreword to his son's poems. The surname Nedobobov combines Nedorosl' ("The Minor," 1782), a comedy by Denis Fonfizin (a Russian playwright, 1745-1792), with Nikolay Dobrolyubov (a radical critic, 1836-1861), the target of Turgenev's satire. The author of a remarkable book on surnames, Kinbote would know that Dobrolyubov is the one who lyubit dobro (loves good). Kinbote calls his one-time roomer "bad Bob." On September 24, 1782, Prince Grigoriy Potyomkin (a favorite of Empress Catherine II) praised Fonvizin after the premiere of his comedy The Minor, famously telling him: "Die, Denis, or don't write anything else, you won't write anything better!" Potyomkin's words are quoted by Ivan Petrovich Turkin (Kitten's father, the jovial punster) in Chekhov's story Ionych (1898):
— А теперь ты, Котик, сыграй что-нибудь, — сказал Иван Петрович дочери.
Подняли у рояля крышку, раскрыли ноты, лежавшие уже наготове. Екатерина Ивановна села и обеими руками ударила по клавишам; и потом тотчас же опять ударила изо всей силы, и опять, и опять; плечи и грудь у нее содрогались, она упрямо ударяла всё по одному месту, и казалось, что она не перестанет, пока не вобьет клавишей внутрь рояля. Гостиная наполнилась громом; гремело всё: и пол, и потолок, и мебель... Екатерина Ивановна играла трудный пассаж, интересный именно своею трудностью, длинный и однообразный, и Старцев, слушая, рисовал себе, как с высокой горы сыплются камни, сыплются и всё сыплются, и ему хотелось, чтобы они поскорее перестали сыпаться, и в то же время Екатерина Ивановна, розовая от напряжения, сильная, энергичная, с локоном, упавшим на лоб, очень нравилась ему. После зимы, проведенной в Дялиже, среди больных и мужиков, сидеть в гостиной, смотреть на это молодое, изящное и, вероятно, чистое существо и слушать эти шумные, надоедливые, но всё же культурные звуки, — было так приятно, так ново...
— Ну, Котик, сегодня ты играла, как никогда, — сказал Иван Петрович со слезами на глазах, когда его дочь кончила и встала. — Умри, Денис, лучше не напишешь.
"And now, Kitty, play us something," said Turkin to his daughter.
Some one raised the top of the piano, and opened the music which was already lying at hand. Katherine struck the keys with both hands. Then she struck them again with all her might, and then again and again. Her chest and shoulders quivered, and she obstinately hammered the same place, so that it seemed as if she were determined not to stop playing until she had beaten the keyboard into the piano. The drawing-room was filled with thunder; the floor, the ceiling, the furniture, everything rumbled. Katherine played a long, monotonous piece, interesting only for its intricacy, and as Startsev listened, he imagined he saw endless rocks rolling down a high mountainside. He wanted them to stop rolling as quickly as possible, and at the same time Katherine pleased him immensely, she looked so energetic and strong, all rosy from her exertions, with a lock of hair hanging down over her forehead. After his winter spent among sick people and peasants in Dialij, it was a new and agreeable sensation to be sitting in a drawing-room watching that graceful, pure young girl and listening to those noisy, monotonous but cultured sounds.
"Well, Kitty, you played better than ever to-day . exclaimed Turkin, with tears in his eyes when his daughter had finished and risen from the piano-stool. "Die Denis, you won't write anything better." (Chapter One)
As he speaks to Dr Startsev (Dmitri Ionych), Ivan Petrovich Turkin mentions rimskoe pravo (Roman law), and his wife Vera Iosifovna (Kitten's mother) tells Dr. Startsev that her husband is an Othello:
-- Здравствуйте пожалуйста, -- сказал Иван Петрович, встречая его на крыльце. -- Очень, очень рад видеть такого приятного гостя. Пойдёмте, я представлю вас своей благоверной. Я говорю ему, Верочка, -- продолжал он, представляя доктора жене, -- я ему говорю, что он не имеет никакого римского права сидеть у себя в больнице, он должен отдавать свой досуг обществу. Не правда ли, душенька?
-- Садитесь здесь, -- говорила Вера Иосифовна, сажая гостя возле себя. -- Вы можете ухаживать за мной. Мой муж ревнив, это Отелло, но ведь мы постараемся вести себя так, что он ничего не заметит.
"How do you do, if you please?" said Ivan Petrovich, meeting him on the steps. "Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verochka," he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife --"I tell him that he has no human right* to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society. Oughtn't he, darling?"
"Sit here," said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her. "You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous -- he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing." (chapter I)
*“he has no Roman law/right” in the original (in Russian pravo means “law” and “right”).
Kinbote's landlord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman law. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. Describing a conversation at the Faculty Club, Kinbote compares Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus (Shade's murderer) a lift to Kinbote's rented house in New Wye, to a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper:
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"
"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."
Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a "sympathetic ruler" had probably perished in prison.
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die--they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon--American History--"that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I heard," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time--"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere--"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to--what's his name--oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
Gerald Emerald and bad Bob (who also brings to mind Bobchinski, a landowner in Gogol's comedy Revizor, "The Inspector," 1836, and Boborykin, a Russian novelist, 1836-1921) seem to be one and the same person. In his foreword to Shade's poem, Kinbote mentions the Great Beaver (as Gerald Emerald called him):
Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be shattered. The thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Mrs. C., did not escape our notice as I was helping the tired old poet to find his galoshes after that dreary get-together party at your house. One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver." Of course I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. There was also the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, head of the department to which I was attached, begged me in a formal voice to be seated, then closed the door, and having regained, with a downcast frown, his swivel chair, urged me "to be more careful." In what sense, careful? A boy had complained to his adviser. Complained of what, good Lord? That I had criticized a literature course he attended ("a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity"). Laughing in sheer relief, I embraced my good Netochka, telling him I would never be naughty again. I take this opportunity to salute him. He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the president of the college) definitely knew.
In his sonnet Turgenev (1925) Igor Severyanin (a Russian poet, 1887-1941) calls Turgenev "a gray colossus, tired, old lion with the eyes of a dying gazelle:"
Седой колосс, усталый, старый лев
С глазами умирающей газели,
Он гордый дух, над ним всю жизнь висели
Утесы бед и смерть, оскалив зев…
Как внятен женских русских душ напев
Ему в его трагичной карусели
От Франции и до страны метели,
Где тлел к нему неправый, мелкий гнев…
Его натуре хрупкой однолюба,
Кому претило все, что в жизни грубо,
Верна любовь к певунье, в чье гнездо
Он впущен был, и — горькая победа, —
Ему давала в роли Людоеда
Тургеневу! — Полина Виардо…