In his Foreword 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 two charming identical twins:
I wanted to know if he did not mind being taken the longer way, with a stop at Community Center where I wanted to buy some chocolate-coated cookies and a little caviar. He said it was fine with him. From the inside of the supermarket, through a plate-glass window, I saw the old chap pop into a liquor store. When I returned with my purchases, he was back in the car, reading a tabloid newspaper which I had thought no poet would deign to touch. A comfortable burp told me he had a flask of brandy concealed about his warmly coated person. As we turned into the driveway of his house, we saw Sybil pulling up in front of it. I got out with courteous vivacity. She said: "Since my husband does not believe in introducing people, let us do it ourselves: You are Dr. Kinbote, aren't you? And I am Sybil Shade." Then she addressed her husband saying he might have waited in his office another minute: she had honked and called, and walked all the way up, et cetera. I turned to go, not wishing to listen to a marital scene, but she called me back: "Have a drink with us," she said, "or rather with me, because John is forbidden to touch alcohol." I explained I could not stay long as I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis, with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy.
The characters in Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four (1890) featuring Sherlock Holmes include Thaddeus Sholto (the son of Major Sholto) and his identical twin brother Bartholomew (the discoverer of the Great Agra treasure). Shade's poem is divided into four cantos:
Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto. (Foreword)
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints. (note to Line 27)
This Case of the Reversed Footprints and two charming identical twins with whom Kinbote plans to play table tennis bring to mind Conan Doyle's story A Case of Identity (1891). At the end of the story Holmes quotes to Watson a Persian saying:
'I cannot completely follow your reasoning in this case,' I said.
'Well, it was clear from the first, that Mr Hosmer Angel had a very good reason for his actions, and that the only man who could really profit from the situation was the stepfather: he wanted to keep the hundred pounds a year. Then it was very suggestive that Mr Windibank and Mr Hosmer Angel were never together, and so were the dark glasses, the soft voice and the moustache; they all suggested a disguise. The final point was the typed signature. This made me think that the handwriting of the man must be very familiar to Miss Sutherland, and that if she saw even a small portion of it, she would recognise it.'
'And how did you verify these ideas?' I asked.
'First I wrote to Mr Windibank's firm. 'In the letter I described Mr Angel after I had eliminated everything that could be a disguise, like the glasses, the moustache and the voice, and I asked them if they had an employee like that. They wrote back to me and said that I had described Mr James Windibank. Then I wrote to Mr Windibank to invite him here, and as I expected he typed his reply to me. Then I compared his letter with the letters of Mr Angel. Voila tout!'
'And Miss Sutherland?' I asked.
'If I tell her, she will not believe me,' replied Holmes. 'Maybe you remember this Persian saying, "It is dangerous to take a tiger cub from its mother, and it is dangerous to take a delusion from a woman.'" (Part II)
This Persian saying brings to mind Zemblan proverbs quoted by Kinbote in his Foreword and Commentary to Shade's poem:
As mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem, the depth charge of Shade's death blasted such secrets and caused so many dead fish to float up, that I was forced to leave New Wye soon after my last interview with the jailed killer. The writing of the commentary had to be postponed until I could find a new incognito in quieter surroundings, but practical matters concerning the poem had to be settled at once. I took a plane to New York, had the manuscript photographed, came to terms with one of Shade's publishers, and was on the point of clinching the deal when, quite casually, in the midst of a vast sunset (we sat in a cell of walnut and glass fifty stories above the progression of scarabs), my interlocutor observed: "You'll be happy to know, Dr. Kinbote, that Professor So-and-so [one of the members of the Shade committee] has consented to act as our adviser in editing the stuff."
Now "happy" is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy. Promptly I refastened the catch of my briefcase and betook myself to another publisher. (Foreword)
Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before; and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf, "A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony." And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa's case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all. (note to Lines 433-434)
Many years ago - how many I would not care to say - I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"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)
Kinbote's Zemblan sayings bring to mind Netherlandish Proverbs (also called Flemish Proverbs, The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World), a 1559 oil-on-oak-panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that depicts a scene in which humans and, to a lesser extent, animals and objects, offer literal illustrations of Dutch-language proverbs and idioms. In his poem O doblestyakh, o podvigakh, o slave (“About valor, about feats, about glory…” 1908) Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921) mentions his beloved's siniy plashch (the blue cloak):
О доблестях, о подвигах, о славе
Я забывал на горестной земле,
Когда твое лицо в простой оправе
Передо мной сияло на столе.
Но час настал, и ты ушла из дому.
Я бросил в ночь заветное кольцо.
Ты отдала свою судьбу другому,
И я забыл прекрасное лицо.
Летели дни, крутясь проклятым роем,
Вино и страсть терзали жизнь мою...
И вспомнил я тебя пред аналоем,
И звал тебя, как молодость свою...
Я звал тебя, но ты не оглянулась,
Я слезы лил, но ты не снизошла;
Ты в синий плащ печально завернулась,
В сырую ночь ты из дому ушла.
Не знаю, где приют своей гордыне
Ты, милая, ты, нежная, нашла...
Я крепко сплю, мне снится плащ твой синий,
В котором ты в сырую ночь ушла...
Уж не мечтать о нежности, о славе,
Все миновалось, молодость прошла!
Твое лицо в его простой оправе
Своей рукой убрал я со стола.
About glory, valor, feats, and fame
I was forgetting in this sorrow place,
Until in front of me, in a'simple frame,
Stood on the table your enchanting face.
But it has come, the day of loss and danger.
The sacred ring in the dark night I threw,
Your destiny was given to a stranger,
And I forgot your charming face and you.
Like some cursed swarm, my days were whirling 'nd flying,
My life was tortured by passions and by wine,
And then, before the lectern, almost dying,
I called you back, as if the youth of mine.
I called you back but you did not look round,
I have shed tears, you didn't condescend.
You ruefully wrapped yourself in a blue gown,
And went away to night, confirming th'end.
I do not know, my darling, where you found
A shelter for your love and for your pride.
I'm fast asleep and only dream about
That gown, you disappeared in in the night.
To dream about glory, I'm not able.
All 's in the past, and over is the game.
I have removed from my poor life and table
Your charming face in the unartful frame.
(transl. V. Gurvich)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). 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"). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a 1909 poem by Alexander Blok a 1846 short novel by Fyodor Dostoevski, a writer whom Shade listed among Russian humorists:
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 three main characters in Pale Fire, 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). 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.