Describing Izumrudov's visit to Gradus (Shade's murderer) in Nice, 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 the emerald waters of Zemblan northern shores:
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium – when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out – and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor – one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant "of the Umruds," an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulataed him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places – our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never – was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumrudov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew – to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
The emerald waters of Zemblan northern shores bring to mind kolechki izumrudnye (the emerald ringlets) on the lake's mirror-like surface in Sergey Esenin's poem Lebyodushka ("The She-Swan," 1917):
В это утро вместе с солнышком
Уж из тех ли темных зарослей
Выплывала, словно зоренька,
Белоснежная лебедушка.
Позади ватагой стройною
Подвигались лебежатушки.
И дробилась гладь зеркальная
На колечки изумрудные.
Tsarevna Lebed' (The Swan Princess) is a character in Pushkin's The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831). In Pushkin's fairy tale the merchants tell Saltan about the tame squirrel on Prince Gvidon's island that cracks golden-shelled nuts revealing kernels of pure emerald:
Белка песенки поёт
Да орешки всё грызёт;
А орешки не простые,
Скорлупы-то золотые,
Ядра – чистый изумруд;
Белку холят, берегут.
There the squirrel sings a ditty,
As she cracks a nut so pretty,
While the shells are solid gold,
Kernels—each an emerald bright;
Sentries guard it day and night.
Izumrudov visits Gradus in Nice on July 16, 1959. Pushkin’s first published poem, K drugu-stikhotvortsu ("To a Friend who Makes Verses"), appeared on July 16, 1814 (NS), in Vestnik Evropy ("The Messenger of Europe"), a prominent Russian literary magazine. The 15-year-old poet published it under the pseudonym "Alexander N.k.sh.p". In his poem (written in the Alexandrines) Pushkin says that Fortuny koleso (the wheel of Fortune) rolls past the poets (whom everybody praises but whom only magazines feed) and mentions Luis de Camões (a Portuguese poet, c. 1524-1580) as one of the great poets whose life ended in extreme poverty:
Поэтов — хвалят все, питают — лишь журналы;
Катится мимо их Фортуны колесо;
Родился наг и наг ступает в гроб Руссо;
Камоэнс с нищими постелю разделяет;
Костров на чердаке безвестно умирает,
Руками чуждыми могиле предан он:
Их жизнь — ряд горестей, гремяща слава — сон.
Camões is one of the seven sonneteers mentioned by Pushkin in his Sonet (“A Sonnet,” 1830). Pushkin's Sonnet has the epigraph from William Wordsworth: “Scorn not the sonnet, critic.” In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions his frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green:
I cannot understand why from the lake
I could make out our front porch when I'd take
Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree
Has intervened, I look but fail to see
Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space
Has caused a fold or furrow to displace
The fragile vista, the frame house between
Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green. (ll. 41-48)
Kolechko (cf. Esenin's izumrudnye kolechki) is a diminutive of kol'tso (ring). On February 18, 1831, during his wedding to Natalia Goncharov in Moscow's Church of the Great Ascension, Pushkin dropped his wedding ring on the floor (a bad omen). In his poem Kol’tso sushchestvovan’ya tesno (“The ring of existence is tight…” 1909) Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921) quotes the saying “all roads lead to Rome:”
Кольцо существованья тесно:
Как все пути приводят в Рим,
Так нам заранее известно,
Что всё мы рабски повторим.
И мне, как всем, всё тот же жребий
Мерещится в грядущей мгле:
Опять — любить Её на небе
И изменить ей на земле.
The ring of existence is tight:
just as all roads lead to Rome,
thus we know beforehand
that we shall slavishly repeat everything.
And I, like everybody, see the same lot
shimmer in the future mist:
again – to love her in heaven
and be unfaithful to her on earth.
In his memoirs Peterburgskie zimy (“The St. Petersburg Winters”) G. Ivanov (the author of an offensive article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review Chisla) describes his first visit to Blok in the fall of 1909 and says that, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda," Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is:
Зачем Блок писал длинные письма или вёл долгие разговоры со мной, желторотым подростком, с вечными вопросами о технике поэзии на языке? Время от времени какой-нибудь такой вопрос с моего языка срывался.
— Александр Александрович, нужна ли кода к сонету? — спросил я как-то. К моему изумлению, Блок, знаменитый «мэтр», вообще не знал, что такое кода…
In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome, mentions sonetto colla coda and in a footnote explains that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as “a sonnet with the tail” (con la coda), when the idea cannot not be expressed in fourteen lines and entails an appendix which is often longer than the sonnet itself:
В италиянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), когда мысль не вместилась и ведёт за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
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 writer whom, along with Gogol and Chekhov, Shade lists among Russian humorists) and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok.