The wife of Charles the Beloved (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, the last self-exiled King of Zembla), Queen Disa is Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone:
Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her album and favorite trees, 49; married 1949, 80; her letters on ethereal paper with a watermark I cannot make out, her image torturing me in my sleep, 433. (Index)
In R. L. Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1882) the narrator (Jim Hawkins) mentions Hands' moan which told of pain and deadly weakness:
While I was thus looking and wondering, in a calm moment, when the ship was still, Israel Hands turned partly round and with a low moan writhed himself back to the position in which I had seen him first. The moan, which told of pain and deadly weakness, and the way in which his jaw hung open went right to my heart. But when I remembered the talk I had overheard from the apple barrel, all pity left me. (PART FIVE: MY SEA ADVENTURE, CHAPTER 25: I STRIKE THE JOLLY ROGER)
One of Long John Silver's pirates, Israel Hands is the Hispaniola's coxswain. His odd smile has in it something both of pain and weakness:
I was greatly elated with my new command, and pleased with the bright, sunshiny weather and these different prospects of the coast. I had now plenty of water and good things to eat, and my conscience, which had smitten me hard for my desertion, was quieted by the great conquest I had made. I should, I think, have had nothing left me to desire but for the eyes of the coxswain as they followed me derisively about the deck and the odd smile that appeared continually on his face. It was a smile that had in it something both of pain and weakness—a haggard old man’s smile; but there was, besides that, a grain of derision, a shadow of treachery, in his expression as he craftily watched, and watched, and watched me at my work. (ibid.)
According to Kinbote, he was elated upon learning that the suburban house (rented for his use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) stood next to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses he had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier:
And he was a very dear friend indeed! The calendar says I had known him only for a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music. Never shall I forget how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find; that the suburban house (rented for my use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) into which I moved on February 5, 1959, stood next to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier! Apart from this glamorous neighborhood, the Goldsworthian château, as I was soon to discover, had little to recommend it. The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath. By occluding the apertures upstairs I attempted to give more energy to the register in the living room but its climate proved to be incurably vitiated by there being nothing between it and the arctic regions save a sleezy front door without a vestige of vestibule - either because the house had been built in midsummer by a naïve settler who could not imagine the kind of winter New Wye had in store for him, or because old-time gentility required that a chance caller at the open door could satisfy himself from the threshold that nothing unseemly was going on in the parlor. (Foreword)
In a postscript to his letter of Nov. 4, 1898, to W. E. Henley Auguste Rodin (the sculptor) mentions "our friend Stevenson who was so dear:"
“How I wish I could have my child’s soul and fairy religion of yore to uphold me! My dear friend, I envy you if you have still your pen at the service of your thoughts. . . I congratulate you (on your book). We have the misfortunes that come with age; but you have compensations; and the respect shown to you by your younger contemporaries who accept your advice is no common thing. Good-bye, my dear great friend Affectionately yours, RODIN.
P.S. – And our friend Stevenson who was so dear, also lost on the way, leaving only his glorious name!”
On R. L. Stevenson's map of Treasue Island there is a compass rose:
Describing his wife, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes a Zemblan saying belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf ("A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony”):
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)
In a conversation with her husband Queen Disa mentions forty Arabian thieves:
They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner - though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.
"What are your plans?" she inquired. "Why can't you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I'll be going to Rome soon, you'll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow. (note to Lines 433-434)
Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves is a fairy tale in A Thousand and One Nights. R. L. Stevenson is the author of New Arabian Nights (1882), a collection of short stories. The name of their main character, Prince Florizel (the modern Harun al-Rashin), brings to mind Fleur de Fyler (Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting). Describing his brief cohabitation with Fleur de Fyler, Kinbote mentions Zemblan anatomy:
It was warm in the evening sun. She wore on the second day of their ridiculous cohabitation nothing except a kind of buttonless and sleeveless pajama top. The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy) irritated him, and while pacing about and pondering his coronation speech, he would toss towards her, without looking, her shorts or a terrycloth robe. Sometimes, upon returning to the comfortable old chair he would find her in it contemplating sorrowfully the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior) in the history book. He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty sunbeam; but after a while she tried to cuddle up to him, and he had to push away her burrowing dark curly head with one hand while writing with the other or detach one by one her little pink claws from his sleeve or sash. (note to Line 80)
Zemblan anatomy makes one think of the dissecting room (in Russian, anatomicheskiy teatr) in Dr Jekyll's house in R. L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In a conversation with Mr. Enfield (a character in Stevenson's novella) Mr. Utterson says "Tut-tut!" In a theological dispute with Shade Kinbote says "Tut-tut" and, to Kinbote's words "And the password is," Shade replies "Pity." In Treasure Island all pity leaves Jim Hawkins when he remembers the talk he had overheard from the apple barrel. The apple barrel brings to mind an empty barrow mentioned by Shade at the end of his poem:
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 985-999)
John Shade married Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet's wife, whose "real" name - as well as the "real" name of Kinbote's wife, Queen Disa - seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin) in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Old Dr. Sutton was born in 1877 and was forty-two in 1919 (the year in which VN left Russia forever).