According to 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), Professor Blue (the college astronomer mentioned by Shade in Canto Two and Canto Three of his poem) was nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle:
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet's entourage – for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag. (note to Line 627: The great Starover Blue)
Colonel Starbottle and Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord who is on sabbatical in England) bring to mind Mr. Justice Harbottle, the third story in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's collection of three short stories and two novellas In a Glass Darkly (1872). A cruel judge in the Court of Common Pleas, Elijah Harbottle, finds himself under attack by vengeful spirits, and in a disturbing dream he is condemned to death by a monstrous doppelgänger. The story is set between 1746 and 1748 and is retold by a Londoner, called Anthony Harman, from the account related in letters by an elderly friend.
In his foreword to Shade's poem Kinbote quotes the words of Professor Hurley, the Head of the English Department at Wordsmith University who used a phrase "in a glass, darkly:"
Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: "None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Nonsense again! Aside from the veritable clarion of internal evidence ringing throughout Canto Four, there exists Sybil Shade's affirmation (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband "never intended to go beyond four parts." For him the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in pardonable self-approbation while his discreet companion kept trying in vain to adapt the swing of a long-limbed gait to the disheveled old poet's jerky shuffle. Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if all this were not enough - and it is, it is enough - I have had the dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.)
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”).
Colonel Starbottle has the same military rank as Colonel Peter Gusev (King Alfin's "aerial adjutant") and Colonel Montacute, the pilot of an airplane from which Kinbote parachutes near Baltimore:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. (note to Line 691)
The Colonel's name seems to hint at Montague (Romeo's family name in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet). On the other hand, Miss Montague is a character (the hero's fiancée) in The Familiar, the second story in Sheridan Le Fanu's collection In a Glass Darkly. A sea captain, living in Dublin, is stalked by "The Watcher", a strange dwarf who resembles a person from his past. He starts to hear accusatory voices all about him and eventually his fears solidify in the form of a sinister bird, a pet owl owned by his fiancée, Miss Montague.
The Russian word for "dwarf" is karlik. According to Kinbote, on his deathbed Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) called his nephew (king Charles the Beloved) "Karlik:"
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fngers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla - partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39 - 40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongs-skugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
Describing Conmal's career, Kinbote mentions Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose name seems to be a cross between Jane Austen (an English writer, 1775-1817) and Sheridan Le Fanu (an Irish writer 1814-1873):
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)
Duke of Aros, Conmal (1855-1955) lived to reach the age of one hundred. Jane Austen was born in 1775 and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (who was born in the same year as Lermontov) died in 1873 (almost one hundred years after Miss Austen's birth). The king's uncle, Conmal brings to mind Uncle Silas (1864), Sheridan Le Fanu's most famous novel. Its title character makes one think of Count Salias (Evgeniy Salias de Turnemir, a Russian writer, 1840-1908, best known for his adventure novels based upon various episodes of Russian history of the 18th and early 19th centuries). In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) describes his imaginary dialogue with Koncheyev (the rival poet) and mentions, among other writers, Graf Salias:
«Ну, это не так интересно», – сказал Федор Константинович, который во время этой тирады (как писали Тургенев, Гончаров, Граф Салиас, Григорович, Боборыкин), кивал головой с одобрительной миной. «Вы очень хорошо определили мои недостатки, – продолжал он, – и они соответствуют моим претензиям к себе, – хотя, конечно, у меня распорядок другой, – некоторые пункты сливаются, а другие еще подразделены. Но кроме недочетов, которые вы отметили, я знаю за собой по крайней мере еще три, – они-то может быть самые главные. Да только я вам никогда их не скажу, – и в следующей моей книге не будет их. Хотите теперь – поговорим о ваших стихах?».
«Нет, пожалуйста, не надо, – со страхом сказал Кончеев. – У меня есть основание думать, что они вам по душе, но я органически не выношу их обсуждения. Когда я был мал, я перед сном говорил длинную и мало понятную молитву, которой меня научила покойная мать, – набожная и очень несчастная женщина, – она-то, конечно, сказала бы, что эти две вещи несовместимы, но ведь и то правда, что счастье не идет в чернецы. Эту молитву я помнил и повторял долго, почти до юности, но однажды я вник в ее смысл, понял все ее слова, – и как только понял, сразу забыл, словно нарушил какие-то невосстановимые чары. Мне кажется, что то же самое произойдет с моими стихами, – что если я начну о них осмысленно думать, то мгновенно потеряю способность их сочинять. Вы-то, я знаю, давно развратили свою поэзию словами и смыслом, – и вряд ли будете продолжать ею заниматься. Слишком богаты, слишком жадны. Муза прелестна бедностью».
“Oh, that is less interesting,” said Fyodor, who during this tirade (as Turgenev, Goncharov, Count Salias, Grigorovich and Boborykin used to write) had been nodding his head with an approving mien. “You diagnosed my shortcomings very well,” he continued, “and they correspond to my own complaints against myself, although, of course, I put them in a different order—some of the points run together while others are subdivided further. But besides the defects you have noted in my book, I am aware of at least three more—they, perhaps, are the most important of all. Only I’ll never tell you them—and they won’t be there in my next book. Do you want to talk about your poetry now?”
“No thank you, I’d rather not,” said Koncheyev fearfully. “I have reasons for thinking that you like my work, but I am organically averse to discussing it. When I was small, before sleep I used to say a long and obscure prayer which my dead mother—a pious and very unhappy woman—had taught me (she, of course, would have said that these two things are incompatible, but even so it’s true that happiness doesn’t take the veil). I remembered this prayer and kept saying it for years, almost until adolescence, but one day I probed its sense, understood all the words—and as soon as I understood I immediately forgot it, as if I had broken an unrestorable spell. It seems to me that the same thing might happen to my poems—that if I try to rationalize them I shall instantly lose my ability to write them. You, I know, corrupted your poetry long ago with words and meaning—and you will hardly continue writing verse now. You are too rich, too greedy. The Muse’s charm lies in her poverty.” (Chapter Five)
In the surname Salias there is alias (an assumed, alternative, or false name used in place of a person's legal name). Shade's murderer, Jakob Gradus is alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.:
Gradus, Jakob, 1915-1959; alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.; a Jack of small trades and a killer, 12, 17; lynching the wrong people, 80; his approach synchronized with S 's work on the poem, 120, 131; his election and past tribulations, 171; the first lap of his journey, Onhava to Copenhagen, 181, 209; to Paris, and meeting with Oswin Bretwit, 286; to Geneva, and talk with little Gordon at Joe Lavender's place near Lex, 408; calling headquarters from Geneva, 469; his name in a variant, and his wait in Geneva, 596; to Nice, and his wait there, 697; his meeting with Izumrudov in Nice and discovery of the King's address, 741; from Paris to New York, 873; in New York, 949; his morning in New York, his journey to New Wye, to the campus, to Dulwich Rd., 949; the crowning blunder, 1000. (Index)
The characters in Sheridan Le Faun's last novel Willing to Die (1873) that explores the mystery of suicide include Laura Grey, Ethel Ware's governess. The three Colonels in Pale Fire bring to mind Sheridan Le Fanu's novel The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O'Brien (1847). The characters in R. L. Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1883) include O'Brien, the red-nightcap-wearing pirate in Long John Silver's crew. A policeman in Blawick asks the king to take off his red fufa and red cap:
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 of 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. (note to Line 149)
In the same note of his commentary Kinbote mentions a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) that had donned a cap of red wool in his honor:
He was still chuckling over the wench's discomfiture when he came to the tremendous stones amassed around a small lake which he had reached once or twice from the rocky Kronberg side many years ago. Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but; oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulderblades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on. But his heart was a conical ache poking him from below in the throat, and after a while he stopped again to take stock of conditions and decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks. He elected the second route and in due course reached the pass. (ibid.)
The main antagonist in Treasure Island, Long John Silver is one-legged. Describing the Shadows (a regicidal organization), Kinbote mentions a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg trying to make anti-matter:
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. (Index)
Baron Radomir Mandevil (who was a throne page of Charles the Beloved at his coronation) brings to Count Salias de Turnemir (or Tournemire). Count Salias's mother (born Elizaveta Sukhovo-Kobylin, 1815-1992) was also a writer (who wrote under the penname Evgeniya Tur). Count Salias's uncle, Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) was a playwright (who was accused of murder and fled Russia). His ancestors were the relatives of Mikhail Romanov (the first Russian tsar of the Romanov family, "offspring of Koshka and Kobyla"). Koshka means in Russian "cat," kobyla means "mare." Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. The surname Gusev comes from gus' (goose). Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov, the author of Loshadinaya familiya ("The Horsey Name," 1885), a humorous short story. According to Kinbote, Shade listed Chekhov (a writer who met Sukhovo-Kobylin when they both lived in Nice) 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 Quare Gander (1840) is a Gothic story by Sheridan Le Fanu. On the other hand, the surname Gusev brings to mind gusenitsy angelov ("the caterpillars of angels") mentioned by VN in his poem Net, bytie - ne zybkaya zagadka! ("No, life is not a flimsy mystery!", 1923):
Нет, бытие - не зыбкая загадка!
Подлунный дол и ясен, и росист.
Мы - гусеницы ангелов; и сладко
въедаться с краю в нежный лист.
Рядись в шипы, ползи, сгибайся, крепни,
и чем жадней твой ход зеленый был,
тем бархатистей и великолепней
хвосты освобожденных крыл.
Describing King Alfin's death in an airplane crash, Kinbote mentions the angels who netted King Alfin's mild pure soul:
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)