In an unused variant quoted by 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) Shade mentions events, strange happenings, that strike the mind as emblematic:
After this, in the draft (dated July 3), come a few unnumbered lines that may have been intended for some later parts of the poem. They are not actually deleted but are accompaied by a question mark in the margin and encircled with a wavy line encroaching upon some of the letters:
There are events, strange happenings, that strike
The mind as emblematic. They are like
Lost similes adrift without a string,
Attached to nothing. Thus that northern king,
Whose desperate escape from prison was
Brought off successfully only because
Some forty of his followers that night
Impersonated him and aped his flight -
He never would have reached the western coast had not a fad spread among his secret supporters, romantic, heroic daredevils, of impersonating the fleeing king. They rigged themselves out to look like him in red sweaters and red caps, and popped up here and there, completely bewildering the revolutionary police. Some of the pranksters were much younger than the King, but this did not matter since his pictures in the huts of mountain folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could buy worms, ginger bread and zhiletka blades, had not aged since his coronation. A charming cartoon touch was added on the famous occasion when from the terrace of the Kronblik Hotel, whose chairlift takes tourists to the Kron glacier, one merry mime was seen floating up, like a red moth, with a hapless, and capless, policeman riding two seats behind him in dream-slow pursuit. It gives one pleasure to add that before reaching the staging point, the false king managed to escape by climbing down one of the pylons that supported the traction cable (see also notes to lines 149 and 171). (note to Line 70)
In a letter of March 23, 1882, to Edmund Gosse R. L. Stevenson (who stayed with his wife and stepson in Davos, Chalet am Stein) says that he is sending Gosse a cut that represents the Hero and the Eagle, and is emblematic of Cortez first viewing the Pacific Ocean, which (according to the bard Keats) it took place in Darien:
MY DEAR WEG, - And I had just written the best note to Mrs. Gosse that was in my power. Most blameable.
I now send (for Mrs. Gosse).
BLACK CANYON.
Also an advertisement of my new appearance as poet (bard, rather) and hartis on wood. The cut represents the Hero and the Eagle, and is emblematic of Cortez first viewing the Pacific Ocean, which (according to the bard Keats) it took place in Darien. The cut is much admired for the sentiment of discovery, the manly proportions of the voyager, and the fine impression of tropical scenes and the untrodden WASTE, so aptly rendered by the hartis.
I would send you the book; but I declare I'm ruined. I got a penny a cut and a halfpenny a set of verses from the flint-hearted publisher, and only one specimen copy, as I'm a sinner. - was apostolic alongside of Osbourne.
I hope you will be able to decipher this, written at steam speed with a breaking pen, the hotfast postman at my heels. No excuse, says you. None, sir, says I, and touches my 'at most civil (extraordinary evolution of pen, now quite doomed - to resume - ) I have not put pen to the Bloody Murder yet. But it is early on my list; and when once I get to it, three weeks should see the last bloodstain - maybe a fortnight. For I am beginning to combine an extraordinary laborious slowness while at work, with the most surprisingly quick results in the way of finished manuscripts. How goes Gray? Colvin is to do Keats. My wife is still not well. - Yours ever,
R. L. S.
Hartis (a Greek word) means "map." The author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), R. L. Stevenson is alluding to Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816):
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
In Canto One of his poem Shade describes Aunt Maud's room and mentions from the local Star a curio, Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
The sea that Homer ruled as his demesne (in Keats' sonnet) brings to mind "from his demesne to mine," a phrase used by Kinbote when he describes the last moments of Shade's life:
One minute before his death, as we were crossing from his demesne to mine and had begun working up between the junipers and ornamental shrubs, a Red Admirable (see note to line 270) came dizzily whirling around us like a colored flame. Once or twice before we had already noticed the same individual, at that same time, on that same spot, where the low sun finding an aperture in the foliage splashed the brown sand with a last radiance while the evening's shade covered the rest of the path. One's eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its setting upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next morning sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banister on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it. (note to Lines 993-995)
At the end of Canto Four of his poem Shade mentions a Vanessa butterfly:
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. 993-999)
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”). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. The “real” name of the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus 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). Nadezhda means "hope." There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 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.
Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). The action in VN's play Sobytie ("The Event," 1938) takes place on the fifty birthday (August 28, 1938, Leo Tolstoy's hundred-and-tenth birthday) of Antonina Pavlovna Opayashin, the lady writer. At her birthday party Antonina Pavlovna says that she has two daughters, Lyubov (Love) and Vera (Faith), but, alas, no Nadezhda:
Входит Элеонора Шнап: фиолетовое платье, пенсне.
Антонина Павловна.
Как любезно, что вы зашли. Я, собственно, просила не разглашать, но, по-видимому, скрыть невозможно.
Элеонора Шнап.
К сожаленью, об этом уже говорит вес, вес город.
Антонина Павловна.
Именно, к сожалению! Очень хорошо. Я сама понимаю, что этим нечего гордиться: только ближе к могиле. Это моя дочь Вера. Любовь, вы, конечно, знаете, моего зятя тоже, а Надежды у меня нет.
Элеонора Шнап.
Божмой! Неужели безнадежно?
Антонина Павловна.
Да, ужасно безнадежная семья. (Смеется.) А до чего мне хотелось иметь маленькую Надю с зелеными глазками. (Act Two)
Antonina Pavlovna's name and patronymic hints at A. P. Chekhov. According to Kinbote, Shade listed Chekhov 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)
Dostoevski is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). An English poet, author and critic (and Ibsen's English translator), Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) brings to mind Dr. Lagosse (a character in VN's novel Ada, 1969, old Van's physician). Edmund Gosse's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907) reminds one of Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862). In his Commentary Kinbote (the grandson of King Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid) mentions heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi) being planted by his black gardener:
I am happy to report that soon after Easter my fears disappeared never to return. Into Alphina's or Betty's room another lodger moved, Balthasar, Prince of Loam, as I dubbed him, who with elemental regularity fell asleep at nine and by six in the morning was planting heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi). This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land. (note to Line 62)
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor describes his first love and mentions a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope in his mistress’s bedroom:
По вечерам я провожал её домой. Эти прогулки мне когда-нибудь пригодятся. В её спальне был маленький портрет царской семьи, и пахло по-тургеневски гелиотропом. Я возвращался за-полночь, благо гувернёр уехал в Англию, -- и никогда я не забуду того чувства лёгкости, гордости, восторга и дикого ночного голода (особенно хотелось простокваши с чёрным хлебом), когда я шёл по нашей преданно и даже льстиво шелестевшей аллее к тёмному дому (только у матери -- свет) и слышал лай сторожевых псов.
Those walks will come in handy sometime. In her bedroom there was a little picture of the Tsar's family and a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope. I used to return long after midnight (my tutor, fortunately, had gone back to England), and I shall never forget that feeling of lightness, pride, rapture and wild night hunger (I particularly yearned for curds-and-whey with black bread) as I walked along our faithfully and even fawningly soughing avenue toward the dark house (only Mother had a light on) and heard the barking of the watchdogs. (Chapter Three)