In his commentary and index 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 young Baron Radomir Mandevil (a man of fashion and Zemblan patriot):
Three hours later he trod level ground. Two old women working in an orchard unbent in slow motion and stared after him. He had passed the pine groves of Boscobel and was approaching the quay of Blawick; when a black police car turned out on a transverse road and pulled up next to him: "The joke has gone too far," said the driver. "One hundred clowns are packed in Onhava jail, and the ex-King should be among them. Our local prison is much too small for more kings. The next masquerader will be shot at sight. What's your real name, Charlie?"
"I'm British. I'm a tourist," said the King. "Well, anyway, take off that red fufa. And the cap. Give them here." He tossed the things in the back of the car and drove off.
The King walked on; the top of his blue pajamas tucked into his skiing pants might easily pass for a fancy shirt. There was a pebble in his left shoe but he was too fagged out to do anything about it.
He recognized the seashore restaurant where many years earlier he had lunched incognito with two amusing, very amusing, sailors. Several heavily armed Extremists were drinking beer on the geranium-lined veranda, among the routine vacationists, some of whom were busy writing to distant friends. Through the geraniums, a gloved hand gave the King a picture postcard on which he found scribbled: Proceed to R. C. Bon voyage! Feigning a casual stroll, he reached the end of the embankment.
It was a lovely breezy afternoon. with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing."
"War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at every now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon.
"All one could do at short notice," said Odon, plucking at his cheek to display how the varicolored semi-transparent film adhered to his face, altering its contours according to stress. "A polite person," he added, "does not, normally, examine too closely a poor fellow's disfigurement."
"I was looking for shpiks [plainclothesmen]" said the King. "All day," said Odon, "they have been patrolling the quay. They are dining at present."
"I'm thirsty and hungry," said the King. "That's young Baron Mandevil - chap who had that duel last year. Let's go now."
"Couldn't we take him too?"
"Wouldn't come - got a wife and a baby. Come on, Charlie, come on, Your Majesty."
"He was my throne page on Coronation Day."
Thus chatting, they reached the Rippleson Caves. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note. (note to Line 149)
and Baron Mirador Mandevil (an experimentalist, madman and traitor), Baron Radomir's cousin:
The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
Mandevil, Baron Mirador, cousin of Radomir Mandevil (q. v.), experimentalist, madman and traitor, 171.
Mandevil, Baron Radomir, b .1925, man of fashion and Zemblan patriot; in 1936, K's throne page, 130; in 1958, disguised, 149. (Index)
In his Krug chteniya ("A Calendar of Wisdom," 1906), a collection of insights and wisdom, Count Leo Tolstoy (a Russian writer, 1828-1910) quotes the words of Bernard Mandeville (an Anglo-Dutch social philosopher, 1670-1733), the author of The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714):
24-е сентября
Извинительно бы было не оставлять мясоедения, если бы оно было необходимо и оправдывалось какими бы то ни было соображениями. Но этого нет. Это просто дурное дело, не имеющее в наше время никакого оправдания.
1
Какая борьба за существование или какое неудержимое безумие понудило вас обагрить ваши руки кровью, чтобы питаться мясом животных? Зачем вы, пользующиеся всем необходимым и всеми удобствами существования, делаете это? Зачем клевещете вы на землю, как будто она не в состоянии без мяса животных питать вас?
Плутарх.
Если бы мы не были так слепо подчинены поработившему нас обычаю, то никто из сколько-нибудь чутких людей не мог бы помириться с мыслью, что для нашего прокормления приходится ежедневно убивать такое множество животных, несмотря на то, что благодетельная земля наделяет нас самыми разнообразными растительными сокровищами.
Бернар де-Мандевиль.
3
Вы спрашиваете меня, на каком основании Пифагор воздерживался от употребления мяса животных? Я, с своей стороны, не понимаю, какого рода чувство, мысль или причина руководила тем человеком, который впервые решился осквернить свой рот кровью и позволил своим губам прикоснуться к мясу убитого существа. Я удивляюсь тому, кто допустил на своем столе искаженные формы мертвых тел и потребовал для своего ежедневного питания то, что еще так недавно представляло собою существа, одаренные движением, пониманием и голосом.
Плутарх.
4
Извинением для тех жалких существ, которые первые прибегли к мясоедению, может служить полное отсутствие и недостаток средств для жизни, так как они (первобытные народы) приобрели кровожадные привычки не из потворства своим прихотям и не для того, чтобы предаться ненормальному сластолюбию среди избытка всего необходимого, а из нужды. Но какое может быть оправдание нам в наше время?
По Плутарху.
5
Как на одно из доказательств того, что мясная пища не свойственна человеку, можно указать на равнодушие к ней детей и на предпочтение, которое они всегда оказывают овощам, молочным блюдам, печеньям, фруктам и т. п.
Руссо.
6
Баран гораздо менее предназначен для человека, чем человек для тигра, так как тигр — животное плотоядное, а человек не создан таковым.
Ритсон.
————
Большая разница между человеком, не имеющим другой пищи, кроме мяса, или таким, который ничего не слыхал о грехе мясоедения и наивно верит в Библию, разрешающую поедание животных, и всяким грамотным человеком нашего времени, живущим в стране, где есть овощи и молоко, который знает всё то, что высказано учителями человечества против мясоедения. Такой человек совершает великий грех, продолжая делать то, что уже не может не признавать дурным.
September 24
It would be possible to eat meat if it were justified by any serious considerations. But it isn’t; and meat eating is simply a bad thing that exists without any justification at all.
What nature of struggle for existence or kind of madness forces you to shed blood with your hands in order to eat animals? Why do this, if you have all the comforts of life?
—Plutarch
If it were not so blindly accepted as a part of our customs and traditions, how could any sensitive person accept the thought that in order to feed ourselves we should kill such a huge number of animals, in spite of the fact that our earth gives us so many different treasures from plants?
There is a big difference between, on the one hand, a person who does not have access to any food except meat, and on the other, an educated person of today who lives in a country which has vegetables and milk in abundance, and who is instructed against meat eating. The educated person sins greatly if he continues to behave in a way he knows is wrong. (abridged English version)
Baran (a ram) mentioned by Tolstoy brings to mind the two Barons Mandevil in Pale Fire and Ramsdale, in VN's novel Lolita (1955) a small town in New England where Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) lives with her mother Charlotte. Like Plutarch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Joseph Ritson (the authors whom Tolstoy quotes in his Calendar of Wisdom, under the date September 24), Bernard Mandeville (whose name Tolstoy spells Bernar de-Mandevil') was a confirmed vegetarian. According to Kinbote, a story about an Italian despot who was killed piecemeal in the public square and whose body was eaten by the crowd made of him a vegetarian for life:
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving. (note to Line 171)
The Russian title of Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom, Krug chteniya (literally: "circle of reading") brings to mind the philosopher Adam Krug, the main character in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947). The narrator and main character in Lolita, Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale on September 24, 1952:
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was –? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen –
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)
Humbert Humbert thinks of the French phrase vient de mourir. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his first erotic experience and quotes the words of his father, "Tolstoy vient de mourir:"
High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother.
“Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters. (Chapter Ten, 3)
Leo Tolstoy died on November 7, 1910 (OS), in Astapovo (at the house of the railway station master). Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name seems to be John Ray, Jr.) was born in 1910, in Paris. Describing Gradus's visit to Oswin Bretwit (the former Zemblan consul) in Paris, Kinbote mentions Baron A. (one of the lesser Shadows) who had a father-in-law called Baron B.:
I, too, was wont to draw my poet’s attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky. Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture.
The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows’ neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit’s father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to “young” Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:
Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent. (note to Line 286)
Gradus visits Oswin Bretwit on July 7, 1959. Under the date July 7 of his Krug chteniya Tolstoy writes:
7-е июля
Отрицать бога — значит отрицать себя как духовное, разумное существо.
1
Бога и душу я знаю не путем определения, но совершенно другим путем. Определение разрушает во мне это знание. Я несомненно знаю, что есть бог и что моя душа есть. Но это знание несомненно для меня потому только, что я неизбежно приведен к нему. К несомненности знания бога я приведен вопросом: откуда я? К знанию души я приведен вопросом: что я такое?
Откуда я?
Я родился от своей матери, а та от бабушки, от прабабушки, а самая последняя от кого? И я неизбежно прихожу к богу.
Кто такой я?
Ноги — не я, руки — не я, голова — не я, чувства — не я, даже мысли — не я. Что же я?
Я — я, — моя душа.
С какой бы стороны я ни пришел к богу, будет то же самое: начало моей мысли, моего разума — бог; начало моей любви — он же; начало вещественности — он же.
То же и с понятием души. Обращусь ли я к своему стремлению к истине, я знаю, что стремление к истине есть невещественная основа меня — моя душа; обращусь ли я на чувство своей любви к добру, я тоже причину этой любви нахожу в своей душе.
2
Самый неверующий человек, хочет он или не хочет этого, признает бога. Он не может не признавать того, что есть закон его жизни, — закон, которому он может подчиняться или от которого может уклоняться. Вот это-то признание высшего, недоступного человеку и известного ему закона своей жизни и есть бог или хотя проявление его.
3
Бог проявляется в лучших мыслях, в правде речи, в искренности поступка и духом своим дает благоденствие и вечность миру.
Зендавеста.
4
Бог есть. Мы не должны и нам не нужно это доказывать. Всякая попытка доказать его бытие есть уже кощунство; всякое же отрицание его есть безумие. Бог живет в нашей совести, в сознании человечества, в окружающей нас вселенной. Наше сознание, наша совесть взывает к нему во все наиболее торжественные минуты горя и радости. Отрицать бога под сводом звездного неба ночи, у гроба дорогих людей или при казни мученика может только или очень жалкий, или очень преступный человек.
Мадзини.
5
Жизнь мира совершается по чьей-то воле, — кто-то этою жизнью всего мира и нашими жизнями делает свое какое-то дело. Тот, кто это делает, и есть то, что мы называем богом.
To deny God is to deny yourself as a spiritual and intellectual being.
July 7
I know God and soul not by their definition, but in another way entirely. Striving to define God destroys this knowledge in me. I know that God exists, that my soul exists; this knowledge is clear to me because I was given it. I have not the slightest doubt about the existence of God, if I ask: What am I? Who am I? My legs are not me; my arms are not me; my head is not me; my feelings are not me; even my thought is not me. Then what am I? I am myself, I am my soul. No matter which side I approach this question, I inevitably come to God. The beginning of my life is God, the beginning of my existence is God. The same with the soul. If I want to know the truth, I know that at the beginning of all is my soul; if I want to understand my feeling of love and necessity for goodness, then I again find the source of this in my soul.
God exists. We should not prove this; to deny God is madness. God lives in my conscience, in the conscience of all humanity, in all our universe, and we talk to God in the most important moments of sadness or joy.
—GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
Life in this world goes according to somebody’s will—someone performs special actions upon all life in this world, and touches all our lives. That which performs these actions is what we call God. (abridged English version)
Unlike Shade (an atheist whose God died young), Kinbote does believe in God. Unlike Kinbote, Shade does not love vegetables:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
Beginning a salad, is to Shade like stepping into sea water on a chilly day. According to Humbert Humbert, his father was "a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes:"
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)