In his commentary 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 Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure who jumped or fell from the North Tower:
However, not all Russians are gloomy, and the two young experts from Moscow whom our new government engaged to locate the Zemblan crown jewels turned out to be positively rollicking. The Extremists were right in believing that Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, had succeeded in hiding those jewels before he jumped or fell from the North Tower; but they did not know he had had a helper and were wrong in thinking the jewels must be looked for in the palace which the gentle white-haired Bland had never left except to die. I may add, with pardonable satisfaction, that they were, and still are, cached in a totally different - and quite unexpected - corner of Zembla. (note to Line 681)
Baron Bland brings to mind Animula vagula blandula (Poor little, wandering, charming soul), the first line of a poem which appears in the Historia Augusta as the work of the dying emperor Hadrian (76-138 AD). "What emperor?" is the only memorable mot of King Alfin (Alfin the Vague, the father of Charles the Beloved):
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)
King Alfin's mild pure soul brings to mind Emperor Hadrian's animula. King Alfin is surnamed The Vague (cf. vagula, fem. diminutive of vagus, wandering). Alfin is an anagram of final (the final), the word used by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar, "The Gift," 1937) when he describes Yasha Chernyshevski's suicide:
Выход был теперь найден, и разговоры о нем стали особенно увлекательны. В середине апреля, на тогдашней квартире Чернышевских (родители мирно ушли в кино напротив), случилось кое-что, послужившее, по-видимому, окончательным толчком для развязки. Рудольф неожиданно подвыпил, разошелся, Яша силой отрывал его от Оли, и все это происходило в ванной комнате, и потом Рудольф, рыдая, подбирал высыпавшиеся каким-то образом из кармана штанов деньги, и как было тяжело, как стыдно всем, и каким заманчивым облегчением представлялся назначенный на завтра финал.
A solution had now been found and discussions of it became especially fascinating. In mid-April, at the flat the Chernyshevskis then had, something happened that apparently served as the final impulse for the dénouement. Yasha’s parents had peacefully left for the cinema across the street. Rudolf unexpectedly got drunk and let himself go, Yasha dragged him away from Olya and all this happened in the bathroom, and presently Rudolf, in tears, was picking up the money that had somehow fallen out of his trouser pockets, and what oppression all three felt, what shame, and how tempting was the relief offered by the finale scheduled for the next day. (Chapter One)
In Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") of The Gift Fyodor mentions a pathetic Latin intonation: animula, vagula, blandula:
Как в сумрачные сибирские годы одна из главных его эпистолярных струн это -- обращенное к жене и сыновьям заверение, всё на одной высокой, не совсем верной ноте, что денег вдосталь, денег не посылайте, так и в юности он просит родителей не заботиться о нем и умудряется жить на двадцать рублей в месяц; из них около двух с половиной уходит на булки, на печения (не терпел пустого чаю, как не терпел пустого чтения, т. е. за книгой непременно что-нибудь грыз: с пряниками читал "Записки Пиквикского Клуба", с сухарями -- "Журналь де деба"), а свечи да перья, вакса да мыло обходились в месяц в целковый: был, кстати, нечистоплотен, неряшлив, при этом грубовато возмужал, а тут еще дурной стол, постоянные колики, да неравная борьба с плотью, кончавшаяся тайным компромиссом, -- так что вид он имел хилый, глаза потухли, и от отроческой красоты ничего не осталось, разве лишь выражение чудной какой-то беспомощности, бегло озарявшее его черты, когда человек, им чтимый, обходился с ним хорошо ("он был ласков ко мне, юноше робкому, безответному", писал он потом о Иринархе Введенском, с трогательной латинской интонацией: анимула, вагула, бландула...); сам же не сомневался в своей непривлекательности, мирясь с мыслью о ней, но дичась зеркал; всё же иногда, собираясь в гости, особливо к своим лучшим друзьям, Лободовским, или желая узнать причину неучтивого взгляда, мрачно всматривался в свое отражение, видел рыжеватый пух, точно прилипший к щекам, считал наливные прыщи -- и тут же начинал их давить, да так жестоко, что потом не смел показываться.
Just as in the somber Siberian years one of his principal epistolary chords was the assurance addressed to his wife and children—always on the same high, but not quite correct note—that he had plenty of money, please don’t send money, so in his youth he begs his parents not to worry about him and contrives to live on twenty rubles a month; of this, about two and a half rubles went on white bread and on pastries (he could not bear tea alone, just as he could not bear reading alone; i.e., he invariably used to chew something with a book: over gingerbread biscuits he read The Pickwick Papers , over zwiebacks, the Journal des Débats ), while candles and pens, boot polish and soap came to a ruble: he was, let us note, unclean in his habits, untidy, and at the same time had matured grossly; add to this a bad diet, perpetual colic plus an uneven struggle with the desires of the flesh, ending in a secret compromise—and the result was that he looked sickly, his eyes had dimmed, and of his youthful beauty nothing remained except perhaps that expression of a kind of wonderful helplessness which fugitively lit up his face when a man he respected had treated him well (“he was kind to me—a youth timorous and submissive,” he later wrote of the scholar Irinarch Vvedenski, with a pathetic Latin intonation: animula, vagula, blandula…); he himself never doubted his unattractiveness, accepting the thought of it but fighting shy of mirrors: even so, when preparing to make a visit sometimes, especially to his best friends, the Lobodovskis, or wishing to ascertain the cause of a rude stare, he would peer gloomily at his reflection, would see the russety fuzz which looked as if stuck onto his cheeks, count the ripe pimples—and then begin to squeeze them, and at that so brutally that afterwards he did not dare to show himself.
The characters in The Gift include the Chernyshevski couple, Alexander Yakovlevich (who went mad after his son's suicide) and his wife Alexandra Yakovlevna. They have the same name and patronymic as goluboy vorishka (the bashful chiseller) and his wife in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stul’yev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928):
Завхоз 2-го дома Старсобеса был застенчивый ворюга. Всё существо его протестовало против краж, но не красть он не мог. Он крал, и ему было стыдно. Крал он постоянно, постоянно стыдился, и поэтому его хорошо бритые щёчки всегда горели румянцем смущения, стыдливости, застенчивости и конфуза. Завхоза звали Александром Яковлевичем, а жену его – Александрой Яковлевной. Он называл её Сашхен, она звала его Альхен. Свет не видывал ещё такого голубого воришки, как Александр Яковлевич.
The Assistant Warden of the Second Home of Stargorod Social Security Administration was a shy little thief. His whole being protested against stealing, yet it was impossible for him not to steal. He stole and was ashamed of himself. He stole constantly and was constantly ashamed of himself, which was why his smoothly shaven cheeks always burned with a blush of confusion, shame, bashfulness and embarrassment. The assistant warden's name was Alexander Yakovlevich, and his wife's name was Alexandra Yakovlevna. He used to call her Sashchen, and she used to call him Alchen. The world has never seen such a bashful chiseller as Alexander Yakovlevich. (chapter VIII “The Bashful Chiseller”)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and 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 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.