Describing John Shade's last birthday, 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 buchmann, a little pillar of library books forgotten by Sybil Shade (the poet's wife):
Next morning, as soon as I saw Sybil drive away to fetch Ruby the maid who did not sleep in the house, I crossed over with the prettily and reproachfully wrapped up carton. In front of their garage, on the ground, I noticed a buchmann, a little pillar of library books which Sybil had obviously forgotten there. I bent towards them under the incubus of curiosity: they were mostly by Mr. Faulkner; and the next moment Sybil wags back, her tires scrunching on the gravel right behind me. I added the books to my gift and placed the whole pile in her lap. That was nice of me - but what was that carton? Just a present for John. A present? Well, was it not his birthday yesterday? Yes, it was, but after all are not birthdays mere conventions? Conventions or not, but it was my birthday too - small difference of sixteen years, that's all. Oh my! Congratulations. And how did the party go? Well, you know what such parties are (here I reached in my pocket for another book - a book she did not expect). Yes, what are they? Oh, people whom you've known all your life and simply must invite once a year, men like Ben Kaplun and Dick Colt with whom we went to school, and that Washington cousin, and the fellow whose novels you and John think so phony. We did not ask you because we knew how tedious you find such affairs. This was my cue.
"Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as 'a mirage of suspended gardens,' and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking 'human interest': it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing."
I am a very sly Zemblan. Just in case, I had brought with me in my pocket the third and last volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, Paris, 1954, of Proust's work, wherein I had marked certain passages on pages 269-271. Mme. de Mortemart, having decided that Mme. de Valcourt would not be among the "elected" at her soirée, intended to send her a note on the next day saying "Dear Edith, I miss you, last night I did not expect you too much (Edith would wonder: how could she at all, since she did not invite me?) because I know you are not overfond of this sort of parties which, if anything, bore you."
So much for John Shade's last birthday. (note to Line 181)
Buch means in German "book" and Mann is German for "man, male, husband." There is Buch in Buchanan (a surname of Scottish origin meaning "house of the canon," pronounced byoo-KAN-uhn). The 15th president of the United States, serving from 1857 to 1861, James Buchanan (1791-1868) was born on April 23, 1791. April 23 is William Shakespeare's and VN's birthday. Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus's birthday. While Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) were born in 1915. On July 5, 1915, Maurice Paléologue (the French Ambassador to Russia) recorded a notable entry in his memoirs. He detailed meeting with Sir George Buchanan (the British Ambassador to Russia, 1854-1924) and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov (1860-1927), to discuss the ongoing World War I military crises, including the Austro-German advance between the Bug and Vistula rivers and the tactical retreat of the Russian army. The French Ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue (1859-1944) brings to mind Sophia Paleologue (c. 1449-1503), a Byzantine princess from the Palaiologos imperial dynasty and the grand princess of Moscow as the second wife of Ivan III of Russia. Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. The politician James Buchanan and the diplomat George Buchanan bring to mind Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), a Scottish poet, novelist, and dramatist. As pointed out by Pushkin, England is the homeland of parody. In his poem Last Words of a Seventh-Rate Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (an English poet, 1837-1909) parodies Robert Buchanan's style. In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote quotes François Rabelais' soi-disant "last words:"
An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais' soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être. (Line 502: The grand potato)
In his parody Swinburne uses the phrase Peut-être (May be):
(I declined to give more, I remember, than fifty centeems to the waiter;
For I asked him if that was enough; and the jackanapes answered—Peut-être.
Ah, it isn't in you to draw up a menu such as ours was, though humble:
When I told Lady Shoreditch, she thought it a regular grand tout ensemble.)
On March 4, 1861, James Buchanan (the 15th president of the United States) was succeeded by Abraham Lincoln (the first U. S. president to be assassinated, 1809-1865). In 1832 James Buchanan was appointed Minister to Russia by President Jackson. At the beginning of Pushkin's little tragedy Pir vo vremya chumy ("A Feast in Time of Plague," 1830) Young Man mentions Jackson:
Молодой человек
Почтенный председатель! я напомню
О человеке, очень нам знакомом,
О том, чьи шутки, повести смешные,
Ответы острые и замечанья,
Столь едкие в их важности забавной,
Застольную беседу оживляли
И разгоняли мрак, который ныне
Зараза, гостья наша, насылает
На самые блестящие умы.
Тому два дня наш общий хохот славил
Его рассказы; невозможно быть,
Чтоб мы в своем веселом пированье
Забыли Джаксона! Его здесь кресла
Стоят пустые, будто ожидая
Весельчака — но он ушел уже
В холодные подземные жилища…
Хотя красноречивейший язык
Не умолкал еще во прахе гроба;
Но много нас еще живых, и нам
Причины нет печалиться. Итак,
Я предлагаю выпить в его память
С веселым звоном рюмок, с восклицаньем,
Как будто б был он жив.
Председатель
Он выбыл первый
Из круга нашего. Пускай в молчанье
Мы выпьем в честь его.
Молодой человек
Да будет так!
(Все пьют молча.)
Young Man
Esteemed chairman of the feast! I must remind you
Of a man we knew so well,
Of one whose jokes and funny tales,
His sharp-tongued ripostes and remarks,
So caustic in their amusing gravity,
Always gave life to our conversation at table,
And drove away that gloom which now
Infection, this guest of ours, sends
Upon the most brilliant minds.
Just two days ago our universal laughter praised
His narratives; it would be impossible
That we, in our merry revelry,
Forgot Jackson! And here his chair
Sits empty, as if awaiting
That merry man — but he is now descended
Into the cold, subterranean domains…
Although a tongue more eloquent than his
Has yet to fall silent in the dust of the tomb;
Yet there are still many of us among the living, and we
Have no cause for sorrow. So,
I propose to drink to his memory,
With the merry ringing of our glasses, and with exclamation,
As though he were still alive.
Chairman
He was the first to leave
Our circle. Let us now, in silence,
Drink to his honor.
Young Man
So let it be!
(All drink, silently.)
The characters in A Feast in Time of Plague include Mary, a fair-haired Scottish girl whom Walsingham (the Chairman of the Feast) asks to sing a sad Scottish ballad. At the end of Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin in reverse:
Моцарт
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! но нет; тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
Mozart
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother with the needs of lowly life;
all would surrender to free art.
(Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri, 1830, Scene II)
Mozart (1838) is a biographical essay by Vasiliy Botkin (1812-1869), the author of Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851). In Gogol's story Zapiski sumasshedshego ("The Notes of a Madman," 1835) Poprishchin imagines that he is King of Spain Ferdinand VIII. According to Kinbote, after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man'
In Spanish... (note to Line 275)