Describing his rented house, 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 landlord’s four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee):
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)
Candida means in Latin "snow-white." Oratio in Toga Candida is a speech given by Marcus Tullius Cicero (a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and Academic skeptic, 103 BC - 43 BC) during his election campaign in 64 BC for the consulship of 63 BC. On the other hand, in Book VIII of his Metamorphoses (8 AD) Ovid mentions hostile gradus (one of the three main characters in Pale Fire, Jakob Gradus is Shade's murderer) and candida Dictaei tentoria (the white tents of the Dictaean king):
impetus est illi, liceat modo, ferre per agmen
virgineos hostile gradus, est impetus illi
turribus e summis in Cnosia mittere corpus 40
castra vel aeratas hosti recludere portas,
vel siquid Minos aliud velit. utque sedebat
candida Dictaei spectans tentoria regis,
'laeter,' ait 'doleamne geri lacrimabile bellum,
in dubio est; doleo, quod Minos hostis amanti est.
Her impulse was to run, though only a girl, and if it had been allowed, through the enemy lines; her impulse was to throw herself from the top of the tower into the Cretan camp, to open the bronze gates to their army, or anything else Minos might wish.
As she sat gazing at the white tents of the Dictaean king, she said ‘I am not sure whether I should show joy or grief at this miserable war. I grieve because Minos is the enemy of one who loves him, but if there had been no war, he would never have been known to me!
In his commentary Kinbote mentions Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure who jumped or fell from the North Tower of the royal palace in Onhava:
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)
The gentle white-haired 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). In Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") of VN's novel Dar (The Gift, 1937) 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.
Vagula (fem. diminutive of vagus, wandering) makes one think of King Alfin the Vague, the father of Charles the Beloved. King Alfin makes one think of Alphina, Judge Goldsworth's youngest daughter. 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”). Ovid's curse poem Ibis ends in a coda (ll. 639-644, promise of an iambic followup should Ibis not cease and desist). Written during Ovid's years in exile at the port of Tomis on the Black Sea (AD 8–14), Ibis is "a stream of violent but extremely learned abuse", modeled on a lost poem of the same title by the Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus.
K Ovidiyu (To Ovid, 1821) is an elegy of Pushkin. In his epistle To Baratynsky. From Bessarabia (1822) Pushkin mentions Naso's shade (To these days Naso's shade/ Is still looking for the Danubian banks):
Сия пустынная страна
Священна для души поэта:
Она Державиным воспета
И славой русскою полна.
Ещё доныне тень Назона
Дунайских ищет берегов;
Она летит на сладкий зов
Питомцев Муз и Аполлона,
И с нею часто при луне
Брожу вдоль берега крутого;
Но, друг, обнять милее мне
В тебе Овидия живого.
Pushkin mentions Naso in Eugene Onegin (Chapter One, VIII):
Всего, что знал еще Евгений,
Пересказать мне недосуг;
Но в чем он истинный был гений,
Что знал он тверже всех наук,
Что было для него измлада
И труд, и мука, и отрада,
Что занимало целый день
Его тоскующую лень, —
Была наука страсти нежной,
Которую воспел Назон,
За что страдальцем кончил он
Свой век блестящий и мятежный
В Молдавии, в глуши степей,
Вдали Италии своей.
All Eugene knew besides
I have no leisure to recount;
but where he was a veritable genius,
what he more firmly knew than all the arts,
what since his prime had been to him
toil, torment, and delight,
what occupied the livelong day
his fretting indolence —
was the art of soft passion
which Naso sang,
wherefore a sufferer
his brilliant and unruly span
he ended, in Moldavia,
deep in the steppes, far from his Italy.
In Chapter Eight (I: 3-4) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin says that at the Lyceum he would eagerly read Apuleius and did not read Cicero:
В те дни, когда в садах Лицея
Я безмятежно расцветал,
Читал охотно Апулея,
А Цицерона не читал,
В те дни, в таинственных долинах,
Весной, при кликах лебединых,
Близ вод, сиявших в тишине,
Являться Муза стала мне.
Моя студенческая келья
Вдруг озарилась: Муза в ней
Открыла пир младых затей,
Воспела детские веселья,
И славу нашей старины,
И сердца трепетные сны.
И свет ее с улыбкой встретил;
Успех нас первый окрылил;
Старик Державин нас заметил
И, в гроб сходя, благословил.
In those days when in the Lyceum's gardens
I bloomed serenely,
would eagerly read Apuleius,
did not read Cicero;
in those days, in mysterious valleys,
in springtime, to the calls of swans,
near waters shining in the stillness,
the Muse began to visit me.
My student cell was all at once
radiant with light: in it the Muse
opened a banquet of young fancies,
sang childish gaieties,
and glory of our ancientry,
and the heart's tremulous dreams.
And with a smile the world received her;
the first success provided us with wings;
the aged Derzhavin noticed us — and blessed us
as he descended to the grave.
In Chapter Two (XXXVII: 6) of EO Lenski visits the grave of Dmitri Larin (Tatiana's and Olga's father) and quotes Hamlet's words:
Своим пенатам возвращенный,
Владимир Ленский посетил
Соседа памятник смиренный,
И вздох он пеплу посвятил;
И долго сердцу грустно было.
«Poor Yorick!16 — молвил он уныло, —
Он на руках меня держал.
Как часто в детстве я играл
Его Очаковской медалью!
Он Ольгу прочил за меня,
Он говорил: дождусь ли дня?..»
И, полный искренней печалью,
Владимир тут же начертал
Ему надгробный мадригал.
Restored to his penates,
Vladimir Lenski visited
his neighbor's humble monument,
and to the ashes consecrated
a sigh, and long his heart was melancholy.
“Poor Yorick!”16 mournfully he uttered, “he
hath borne me in his arms.
How oft I played in childhood
with his Ochákov medal!
He destined Olga to wed me;
he used to say: ‘Shall I be there
to see the day?’ ” and full of sincere sadness,
Vladimir there and then set down for him
a gravestone madrigal.
16. Poor Yorick! — Hamlet's exclamation over the skull of the fool (see Shakespeare and Sterne) [Pushkin's note].
Hamlet's friend Horatio makes one think of Cicero's Oratio in Toga Candida. "Poor Yorick!" (Hamlet's exclamation over the skull of the fool) brings to mind "poor King, poor Kinbote" (as Kinbote calls himself at the end of his commentary):
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
"Poor King, poor Kinbote" makes one think of "Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire" (a line in Shade's variant cited by Kinbote in his commentary):
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):
Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire
What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cf. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)
Kinbote is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’s “real” name). 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 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.