Describing John Shade's last birthday party (to which he was not invited), 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 a bad crapula (hangover in Zemblan):
Now there is nothing a lonesome man relishes more than an impromptu birthday party, and thinking - nay, feeling certain - that my unattended telephone had been ringing all day, I blithely dialed the Shades' number, and of course it was Sybil who answered.
"Bon soir, Sybil."
"Oh, hullo, Charles. Had a nice trip?"
"Well, to tell the truth -"
"Look, I know you want John but he is resting right now, and I'm frightfully busy. He'll call you back later, okay?"
"Later when - tonight?"
"No, tomorrow, I guess: There goes that doorbell. Bye-bye." Strange. Why should Sybil have to listen to doorbells when, besides the maid and the cook, two white-coated hired boys were around? False pride prevented me from doing what I should have done—taken my royal gift under my arm and serenely marched over to that inhospitable house. Who knows—I might have been rewarded at the back door with a drop of kitchen sherry. I still hoped there had been a mistake, and Shade would telephone. It was a bitter wait, and the only effect that the bottle of champagne I drank all alone now at this window, now at that, had on me was a bad crapula (hangover). (note to Line 181)
Crapula seems to combine Crapülinski (from crapule, Fr., “villain; rabble, mob”), one of the two Poles in Heinrich Heine’s poem Zwei Ritter (“Two Knights,” 1851), with the kraplaki (madder dyes; Krapplack is German for 'madder lacquer') used by Vasiliy Surikov (a Russian painter, 1848-1916):
На вопрос мой о палитре Василий Иванович отвечал:
«Я употребляю обыкновенно охры, кобальт, ультрамарин, сиену натуральную и жженую, оксид-руж, кадмий темный и оранжевый, краплаки, изумрудную зелень и индейскую желтую. Тело пишу только охрами, краплаком и кобальтом. Изумрудную зелень употребляю только в драпировки – никогда в тело. Черные тона составляю из ультрамарина, краплака и индейской желтой. Иногда употребляю персиковую черную. Умбру редко. Белила – кремницкие». (from Maximilian Voloshin's essay Surikov included in volume III of Voloshin's book Liki tvorchestva, "Faces of Creativity," 1917)
According to Surikov, he paints the body only with the ochres, madder dye and cobalt. A blue color pigment, cobalt brings to mind Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort mentioned by Kinbote in his index to Shade's poem:
Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks, now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text.
Izumrudnaya zelen' (the emerald green, a pigment Surikov uses only when painting drapery) reminds one of Izumrudov, one of the greater Shadows who visits Gradus (Shade's murderer) in Nice and tells him the King's new name and address in America:
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium – when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out – and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor – one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant "of the Umruds," an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulataed him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places – our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never – was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumrudov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew – to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
The wife of Charles the Beloved, Queen Disa (into whose Mediterranean villa Andronnikov and Niagarin, the two Soviet spies, had broken) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. In a poem about painters Victor Wind (in VN’s novel Pnin, 1957, the son of Eric Wind and Liza Bogolepov, Pnin's wife) mentions madders and Mona Lisa's nun-pale lips:
To the latest issue of the school magazine Victor had contributed a poem about painters, over the nom de guerre Moinet, and under the motto 'Bad reds should all be avoided; even if carefully manufactured, they are still bad' (quoted from an old book on the technique of painting but smacking of a political aphorism). The poem began:
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa's
lips that you had made so red. (Chapter Four, 5)
The Russian word for madder (the plant Rubia tinctorum) is marena. In marena there are mare (sea in Latin) and arena. At the beginning of his poem Umirayushchiy gladiator ("The Dying Gladiator," 1836) Lermontov mentions shirokaya arena (the broad arena):
Я вижу перед собой лежащего гладиатора…
Байрон.
Ликует буйный Рим… торжественно гремит
Рукоплесканьями широкая арена:
А он — пронзенный в грудь — безмолвно он лежит,
Во прахе и крови скользят его колена…
И молит жалости напрасно мутный взор:
Надменный временщик и льстец его сенатор
Венчают похвалой победу и позор…
Что знатным и толпе сраженный гладиатор?
Он презрен и забыт… освистанный актер.
I see before me the gladiator lie...
Byron.
Rejoices rowdy Rome… Triumphantly replies
With thundering applause the great arena: but
He – pierced through the chest – silently he lies,
His knees slide in the dust and blood…
And vainly beg for mercy his dim eyes:
The haughty regent and a senator, his adulator,
Crown with their praise the triumph and demise…
What is to the elite and mob a vanquished gladiator?
He is an actor whistled off, forgotten and despised.
(tr. Emil Sharafutdinov)
The first part of Lermontov's poem is a rendering of Byron's poem The Dying Gladiator. Pollice Verso (1872) is a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, featuring the eponymous Roman gesture directed to the winning gladiator. Lermontov is the author of The Demon (1829-40). The Demon Seated and The Demon Downcast are paintings by Vrubel.
Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Grand Duchess Sofia at the Novodevichiy Convent (1698) is a painting (1879) by Ilya Repin (1844-1930):
Grand Duchess Sofia (1657-1704) was the elder half-sister of Peter I (who confined her in a cloister). O Repine (On Repin) is an essay by Voloshin included in volume III of Liki tvorchestva ("Faces of Creativity"). Liki is plural of lik (obs., face). In his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833) Pushkin mentions lik (the face) of the half-planet’s ruler:
Кругом подножия кумира
Безумец бедный обошёл
И взоры дикие навёл
На лик державца полумира.
The poor madman walked around
The idol’s pedestal
And looked wildly at the face
Of the half-planet’s ruler. (Part Two)
The hero of Pushkin's poem, poor Eugene goes mad after the death of his sweetheart in the disastrous Neva flood of 1824. 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). Nadezhda means "hope." There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 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. Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915).
In Voloshin's poem Krov' ("Blood," 1907) lik rhymes with Dvoynik (the Double):
В моей крови — слепой Двойник.
Он редко кажет дымный лик, —
Тревожный, вещий, сокровенный.
Приникнул ухом… Где ты, пленный?
И мысль рванулась… и молчит.
На дне глухая кровь стучит…
Стучит — бежит… Стучит — бежит…
Слепой огонь во мне струит.
Огонь древней, чем пламя звезд,
В ней память тёмных, старых мест.
В ней пламень чёрный, пламень древний.
В ней тьма горит, в ней света нет,
Она властительней и гневней,
Чем вихрь сияющих планет.
Слепой Двойник! Мой Пращур пленный!
Властитель мне невнятных грёз!
С какой покинутой вселенной
Ты тайны душные принёс?
Зачем во тьму кровосмешений,
К соприкасаньям алых жал
Меня — Эдипа, ты послал
Искать зловещих откровений?
Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski (a writer whom Shade lists among Russian humorists). Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932) is the author of Corona Astralis (1909), a garland of sonnets. It brings to mind Corona Australis (a constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere), the korona-vorona-korova (crown-crow-cow) series of misprints and the Zemblan crown jewels vainly looked for by Andronnikov and Niagarin. When Kinbote visits Villa Disa, his wife asks him about the crown jewels and he reveals to her their unusual hiding place:
No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains; but the part concerning Garh displeased her as if, paradoxically, she would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome hough-magandy with the wench. She told him sharply to skip such interludes, and he made her a droll little bow. But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant express on appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared. That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. "I do have some business matters to discuss," he said. "And there are papers you have to sign." Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the roses. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white mantilla, brought certain documents from Disa's boudoir. Upon hearing the King's mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by his excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycines. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot. (note to Lines 433-434)
In an interview to Alfred Appel (included in Strong Opinions, 1974) VN says that the Zemblan crown jewels are hidden in the ruins of some old barracks near Kobaltana (mentioned by Kinbote in his index to Shade's poem). In his commentary and index Kinbote mentions Odon's epileptic half-brother Nodo, a cardsharp and despicable traitor. In Russian, marked cards are called kraplyonye karty. The Russian word for cardsharp, shuler, is Schüler (schoolboy in German) minus the umlaut. In the surname Crapülinski there is the umlaut. Heinrich Heine is the author of K.-Jammer (“Hangover,” 1851):
Diese graue Wolkenschar
Stieg aus einem Meer von Freuden;
Heute muß ich dafür leiden,
Daß ich gestern glücklich war.
Ach, in Wermut hat verkehrt
Sich der Nektar! Ach, wie quälend,
Katzenjammer, Hundeelend
Herz und Magen mir beschwert!
Heine's poem Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam ("A pine is standing lonely") was translated (very inaccurately) into Russian by Lermontov.
See also the updated (much more interesting!) version of my recent post "Mon Blon, Blue Review & Kobaltana in Pale Fire."