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) says that the poet's mother was born Caroline Lukin:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
The maiden name of Shade's mother brings to mind Ole Lukøje (1841), a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen (the son of a shoemaker) based upon a folk tale telling of a mysterious mythic creature of the Sandman who gently takes children to sleep and, depending on how good or bad they were, shows them various dreams.
Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.
Ole Lukøje's name is actually composed of two parts: Ole is a common Danish masculine name, and Lukøje a compound of the Danish words for 'close' and 'eye'. In the tale, he visits a boy called Hjalmar every night for a whole week and tells him stories. Ole Lukøje is later revealed to be a dream god, and in his final tale on Sunday he tells of his brother, likewise called Ole Lukøje but also Death, who closes the eyes of those he visits and takes them away with him.
Shade's murderer, Gradus has a loosely folded umbrella in one hand:
Although Gradus availed himself of all varieties of locomotion - rented cars, local trains, escalators, airplanes - somehow the eye of the mind sees him, and the muscles of the mind feel him, as always streaking across the sky with black traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained glide high over sea and land. The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade's poem itself, the very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor. Never before has the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form (for other images of that transcendental tramp's approach see note to line 17). (note to Lines 131-132)
Ole Lukøje on Death:
"I will show you my brother. He is also called Ole-Luk-Oie but he never visits any one but once, and when he does come, he takes him away on his horse, and tells him stories as they ride along. He knows only two stories.
"One of these is so wonderfully beautiful, that no one in the world can imagine anything at all like it; but the other is just as ugly and frightful, so that it would be impossible to describe it."
Then Ole-Luk-Oie lifted Hjalmar up to the window. "There now, you can see my brother, the other Ole-Luk-Oie; he is also called Death.
"You see, he doesn't look as bad as in the picture books, where he is a skeleton! No, now his coat is embroidered with silver, and he wears the splendid uniform of a hussar, and a mantle of black velvet flies behind him, over the horse. Look, how he gallops along."
The eldest daughter of King Frederick VI of Denmark, Princess Caroline (1793–1881) met a young, 17-year-old Hans Christian Andersen in 1822. The Princess and the Pea (Prinsessen på Ærten, 1835) is a literary fairy tale by Andersen. Describing Gradus' career, Kinbote mentions Leningradus (in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd, and in 1924, after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad) and his peashooter:
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages--not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
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.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
On July 5, 1959, Gradus leaves Onhava (the capital of Zembla) on the Copenhagen plane:
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to ll. 1-4)
Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark (Andersen's home country). July 5 is Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). Empress Maria Feodorovna (the wife of Alexander III, mother of Nicholas II, 1847-1928) returned to her native Denmark in 1919 after fleeing revolutionary Russia via the Crimean Peninsula and London aboard the British ship HMS Marlborough. Among the people who were executed with the last Russian tsar's family in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, was Dr. Eugene Botkin (1865-1918). Jakob Gradus has the same first name as Yakov Yurovsky (1878-1938), commander of the guard at Ipatiev House during the murder of the Romanov family on the night of 17 July 1918. He is known as the chief executioner of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his family and four of their servants. Yurovsky was responsible for the distribution of weapons, ordering the family to the cellar room, announcing the execution to the family, and the disposal of the eleven bodies.
According to Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames), Lukin comes from Luke. The characters in Gorki's play Na dne ("The Lower Depths," 1902) include the old pilgrim Luka (a Tolstoy-like figure). Maxim Gorki (penname of Aleksey Peshkov, 1868-1936) is the author of V. I. Lenin (1924), an obituary essay. Lev Tolstoy kak zerkalo russkoy revolyutsii ("Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of Russian Revolution," 1908) is an article by Lenin. In his commentary and index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), the mirror maker of genius.