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), the King escaped from the palace by the secret passage that leads to the theater’s green room. Describing the discovery of the secret passage, Kinbote mentions the three transverse streets, Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley:
As soon as Monsieur Beauchamp had sat down for a game of chess at the bedside of Mr. Campbell and had offered his raised fists to choose from, the young Prince took Oleg to the magical closet. The wary, silent, green-carpeted steps of an escalier dérobé led to a stone-paved underground passage. Strictly speaking it was "underground" only in brief spells when, after burrowing under the southwest vestibule next to the lumber room, it went under a series of terraces, under the avenue of birches in the royal park, and then under the three transverse streets, Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley, that still separated it from its final destination. Otherwise, in its angular and cryptic course it adapted itself to the various structures which it followed, here availing itself of a bulwark to fit in its side like a pencil in the pencil hold of a pocket diary, there running through the cellars of a great mansion too rich in dark passageways to notice the stealthy intrusion. Possibly, in the intervening years, certain arcane connections had been established between the abandoned passage and the outer world by the random repercussions of work in surrounding layers of masonry or by the blind pokings of time itself; for here and there magic apertures and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane, could be deduced from a pool of sweet, foul ditch water, bespeaking a moat, or from a dusky odor of earth and turf, marking the proximity of a glacis slope overhead; and at one point, where the passage crept through the basement of a huge ducal villa, with hothouses famous for their collections of desert flora, a light spread of sand momentarily changed the sound of one's tread. Oleg walked in front: his shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton moved alertly, and his own erect radiance, rather than his flambeau, seemed to illume with leaps of light the low ceiling and crowding wails. Behind him the young Prince's electric torch played on the ground and gave a coating of flour to the back of Oleg's bare thighs. The air was musty and cold. On and on went the fantastic burrow. It developed a slight ascending grade. The pedometer had tocked off 1,888 yards, when at last they reached the end. The magic key of the lumber room closet slipped with gratifying ease into the keyhole of a green door confronting them, and would have accomplished the act promised by its smooth entrance, had not a burst of strange sounds coming from behind the door caused our explorers to pause. Two terrible voices, a man's and a woman's, now rising to a passionate pitch, now sinking to raucous undertones, were exchanging insults in Gutnish as spoken by the fisherfolk of Western Zembla. An abominable threat made the woman shriek out in fright. Sudden silence ensued, presently broken by the man's murmuring some brief phrase of casual approval ("Perfect, my dear," or "Couldn't be better") that was more eerie than anything that had come before. (note to Line 130)
Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley clearly hint at Shakespeare's plays Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. On the other hand, the Coriolan Overture (German: Coriolan-Ouvertüre or Ouvertüre zu Coriolan), Op. 62, is a composition written by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1807 for Heinrich Joseph von Collin's 1804 tragedy Coriolan. In his memoir essay P. I. Tchaikovsky (1952) Leonid Sabaneyev (a music critic and memoirist, 1881-1968) says that, when he was young, Beethoven was for him God:
Из разговоров с Танеевым и из бесед между Танеевым и Чайковским я был очень хорошо осведомлен о музыкальных вкусах Петра Ильича. Эти вкусы и симпатии плохо вязались с моими, правда еще детскими – но уже определенными. Я в те времена был фанатическим «бетховенцем»: Бетховен был для меня – Бог. И на почтительном расстоянии за ним следовали остальные «великие» композиторы. Следуя авторитету моего кумира, я оперную и вокальную музыку считал вообще музыкой второго, низшего ранга. Таким образом Чайковский, да и вся русская музыка попадали для меня в сферу второстепенную, а симфонии Чайковского (их тогда было пять) я считал хуже бетховенских и не совсем похожими на симфонии (в чем, пожалуй, был даже и прав). А Петр Ильич как-то при мне сказал Танееву:
– Я боюсь музыки Бетховена, как боятся большой и страшной собаки.
In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri calls Mozart "a god:"
Сальери.
Какая глубина!
Какая смелость и какая стройность!
Ты, Моцарт, бог, и сам того не знаешь;
Я знаю, я.
Моцарт.
Ба! право? может быть...
Но божество мое проголодалось.
Salieri
What profundity!
What symmetry and what audacity!
You, Mozart, are a god -- and you don't know it.
But I, I know.
Mozart
Well! rightly? well, perhaps...
But My Divinity has gotten hungry.
(Scene I; tr. G. Gurarie)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
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.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." 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.
1,888 yards between the Onhava Palace and the Royal Theater seem to correspond to 1888, the year of Iris Acht’s death:
One August day, at the beginning of his third month of luxurious captivity in the South West Tower, he was accused of using a fop's hand mirror and the sun's cooperative rays to flash signals from his lofty casement. The vastness of the view it commanded was denounced not only as conducive to treachery but as producing in the surveyor an airy sense of superiority over his low-lodged jailers. Accordingly, one evening the King's cot-and-pot were transferred to a dismal lumber room on the same side of the palace but on its first floor. Many years before, it had been the dressing room of his grandfather, Thurgus the Third. After Thurgus died (in 1900) his ornate bedroom was transformed into a kind of chapel and the adjacent chamber, shorn of its full-length multiple mirror and green silk sofa, soon degenerated into what it had now remained for half a century, an old hole of a room with a locked trunk in one corner and an obsolete sewing machine in another. It was reached from a marble-flagged gallery, running along its north side and sharply turning immediately west of it to form a vestibule in the southwest corner of the Palace. The only window gave on an inner court on the south side. This window had once been a glorious dreamway of stained glass, with a fire-bird and a dazzled huntsman, but a football had recently shattered the fabulous forest scene and now its new ordinary pane was barred from the outside. On the west-side wall, above a whitewashed closet door, hung a large photograph in a frame of black velvet. The fleeting and faint but thousands of times repeated action of the same sun that was accused of sending messages from the tower, had gradually patinated this picture which showed the romantic profile and broad bare shoulders of the forgotten actress Iris Acht, said to have been for several years, ending with her sudden death in 1888, the mistress of Thurgus. In the opposite, east-side wall a frivolous-looking door, similar in turquoise coloration to the room's only other one (opening into the gallery) but securely hasped, had once led to the old rake's bedchamber; it had now lost its crystal knob, and was flanked on the east-side wall by two banished engravings belonging to the room's period of decay. They were of the sort that is not really supposed to be looked at, pictures that exist merely as general notions of pictures to meet the humble ornamental needs of some corridor or waiting room: one was a shabby and lugubrious Fête Flammande after Teniers; the other had once hung in the nursery whose sleepy denizens had always taken it to depict foamy waves in the foreground instead of the blurry shapes of melancholy sheep that it now revealed. (note to Line 130)
The king Thurgus the Third (surnamed the Turgid) seems to be a cross between the tsar Alexander the Third (a personal friend of Leonid Sabaneyev's father, the author of a popular book on fishing) and Ivan Turgenev (the writer whom the critic Yuli Ayhenvald calls “a specialist in rendezvous”). Turgenev is the author of Dym ("Smoke," 1866). In several poems from his cycle "Italian Verses" (1909) Alexander Blok compares Florence to dymnyi iris (a smoky iris). Iris Acht was strangled by her lover:
Acht, Iris, celebrated actress, d .1888, a passionate and powerful woman, favorite of Thurgus the Third (q. v.), 130. She died officially by her own hand; unofficially, strangled in her dressing room by a fellow actor, a jealous young Gothlander, now, at ninety, the oldest, and least important, member of the Shadows (q. v.) group. (Index)
In Shakespeare's play, Othello strangles Desdemona. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Lastochka is Russian for "swallow." At the beginning of a letter of March 16, 1890, to Modest Tchaikovsky (the composer’s brother and librettist) Chekhov asks the permission to scratch off the thirteenth lastochka (swallow) on the notepaper:
Позвольте зачеркнуть тринадцатую ласточку, дорогой Модест Ильич: несчастливое число.
In 1888 Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Academy Prize (cf. Academy Boulevard in Onhava, the capital of Kinbote's Zembla) for his story Step' ("The Steppe"). In a letter of Oct. 9, 1888, to Mme Lintvaryov Chekhov says that the prize award will be officially announced at the Academy on October 19:
Получил я известие, что Академия наук присудила мне Пушкинскую премию в 500 р. Это, должно быть, известно уже Вам из газетных телеграмм. Официально объявят об этом 19-го октября в публичном заседании Академии с подобающей случаю классической торжественностью. Это, должно быть, за то, что я раков ловил.
Премия, телеграммы, поздравления, приятели, актёры, актрисы, пьесы — всё это выбило меня из колеи. Прошлое туманится в голове, я ошалел; тина и чертовщина городской, литераторской суеты охватывают меня, как спрут-осьминог. Всё пропало! Прощай лето, прощайте раки, рыба, остроносые челноки, прощай моя лень, прощай голубенький костюмчик.
Прощай, покой, прости, мое довольство!
Всё, всё прости! Прости, мой ржущий конь,
И звук трубы, и грохот барабана,
И флейты свист, и царственное знамя,
Все почести, вся слава, всё величье
И бурные тревоги славных войн!
Простите вы, смертельные орудья,
Которых гул несется по земле,
Как грозный гром бессмертного Зевеса!
Если когда-нибудь страстная любовь выбивала Вас из прошлого и настоящего, то то же самое почти я чувствую теперь. Ах, нехорошо всё это, доктор, нехорошо! Уж коли стал стихи цитировать, то, стало быть, нехорошо!
Chekhov quotes Othello’s speech in Shakespeare’s Othello (3.3) in Veynberg’s translation:
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove's dead clamours counterfeit,
Farewell!
In the next scene (3.4) of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello mentions a two-hundred-year-old Egyptian sibyl who gave his mother a magic handkerchief:
'Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sewed the work.
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.
A two-hundred-year-old Egyptian sibyl brings to mind Sybil Shade, the poet's wife whom Kinbote calls Sybil Swallow. In Shakespeare’s historical play Richard III (Act 5, scene 2) Richmond says:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
1888 is the year of Garshin's death (the author of The Red Flower and Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Vsevolod Garshin committed suicide by throwing himself over the banisters). In Garshin's story Trus ("The Coward," 1879) the narrator compares himself to palets ot nogi (a toe of the foot) of some immense organism that has decided to cut him off and throw him away:
Огромному неведомому тебе организму, которого ты составляешь ничтожную часть, захотелось отрезать тебя и бросить. И что можешь сделать против такого желания ты, ...ты палец от ноги?..
Some immense organism you know not of, but of which you form an insignificant part, has decided to cut you off and throw you away. And what can you do against such a desire, you-- "a toe of the foot"?
In Shakespeare's Coriolanus Menenius compares the first citizen to a great toe:
The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members; for examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o' the common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you
And no way from yourselves. What do you think,
You, the great toe of this assembly?
First Citizen
I the great toe! why the great toe? (Act One, scene 1)
In a letter of July 5, 1905, to Ekaterina Mukhin Innokentiy Annenski speaks of Chekhov (who died a year ago) and mentions garshinskiy palets nogi (Garshin’s "toe of the foot"):
Господи, и чьим только не был он другом: и Маркса, и Короленки, Максима Горького, и Щеглова, и Гнедича, и Елпатьевского, и актрис, и архиереев, и Батюшкова... Всем угодил - ласковое теля... И всё это теперь об нём чирикает, вспоминает и плачет, а что же Чехов создал? Где у него хотя бы гаршинский палец ноги. Что он любил, кроме парного молока и мармелада? Нет... нет, надо быть справедливым... У него есть одна заслуга... Он показал силу нашей разговорной речи, как стихии чисто и даже строго литературной. Это большая заслуга, но не написал ли он, чего доброго, уж слишком много, чтобы вложить настроение в нашу прозу до биллиардных терминов и телеграфных ошибок включительно... Читайте Достоевского, любите Достоевского, - если можете, а не можете, браните Достоевского, но читайте по-русски его и по возможности только его...
Acht is German for "eight." At the beginning of his poem ∞ (1904) Nik. T-o (Annenski’s penname) compares the infinity symbol to 8 toppled over:
Девиз Таинственной похож
На опрокинутое 8:
Она - отраднейшая ложь
Из всех, что мы в сознаньи носим.
In his essay Ob Annenskom (“On Annenski,” 1921) Vladislav Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Ilyich Golovin (the main character in Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1886) and points out that Annenski regarded his penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”) as a translation of Greek Outis, the pseudonym under which Odysseus concealed his identity from Polyphemus (the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey):
Чего не додумал Иван Ильич, то знал Анненский. Знал, что никаким директорством, никаким бытом и даже никакой филологией от смерти по-настоящему не загородиться. Она уничтожит и директора, и барина, и филолога. Только над истинным его "я", над тем, что отображается в "чувствах и мыслях", над личностью -- у неё как будто нет власти. И он находил реальное, осязаемое отражение и утверждение личности -- в поэзии. Тот, чьё лицо он видел, подходя к зеркалу, был директор гимназии, смертный никто. Тот, чьё лицо отражалось в поэзии, был бессмертный некто. Ник. Т-о -- никто -- есть безличный действительный статский советник, которым, как видимой оболочкой, прикрыт невидимый не
кто. Этот свой псевдоним, под которым он печатал стихи, Анненский рассматривал как перевод греческого "утис", никто, -- того самого псевдонима, под которым Одиссей скрыл от циклопа Полифема своё истинное имя, свою подлинную личность, своего некто. Поэзия была для него заклятием страшного Полифема -- смерти. Но психологически это не только не мешало, а даже способствовало тому, чтобы его вдохновительницей, его Музой была смерть.
According to Hodasevich, Annenski’s Muse was death. Just before Shade’s death Kinbote asks the poet, if the muse has been kind to him:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (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”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski, a poem (1904) by Annenski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok.
Coriolanus Lane makes one think of the first and antepenultimate lines of Shade's poem:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain (Line 1)
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (Line 999)
In Canto Four of his poem Shade describes the last day of his life and says that he loves the consonne d'appui (intrusive consonant):
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (ll. 963-976)
Academy Boulevard in Pale Fire also brings to mind Onegin edet na bul'var (Onegin drives to the boulevard), a line in Chapter One (XV: 11) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Бывало, он еще в постеле:
К нему записочки несут.
Что? Приглашенья? В самом деле,
Три дома на вечер зовут:
Там будет бал, там детский праздник.
Куда ж поскачет мой проказник?
С кого начнет он? Все равно:
Везде поспеть немудрено.
Покамест в утреннем уборе,
Надев широкий боливар,
Онегин едет на бульвар
И там гуляет на просторе,
Пока недремлющий брегет
Не прозвонит ему обед.
It happened, he'd be still in bed
when little billets would be brought him.
What? Invitations? Yes, indeed,
to a soiree three houses bid him:
here, there will be a ball; elsewhere, a children's fete.
So whither is my scamp to scurry?
Whom will he start with? Never mind:
'tis simple to get everywhere in time.
Meanwhile, in morning dress,
having donned a broad bolivar3,
Onegin drives to the boulevard
and there goes strolling unconfined
till vigilant Bréguet
to him chimes dinner.
3. Hat à la Bolivar. (Pushkin's note)