In a conversation at the Faculty Club, Gerald Emerald (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus, Shade's murderer, a lift to Kinbote's rented house in New Wye) calls the young King of Zembla "quite the fancy pansy", and Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that Gerald Emerald is "a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket:"
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"
"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."
Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a "sympathetic ruler" had probably perished in prison.
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die--they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon--American History--"that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I heard," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time--"
"What a pity I cannot prove my point," muttered the tenacious German visitor. "If only there was a picture here. Couldn't there be somewhere--"
"Sure," said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to--what's his name--oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously].
"Flatman," quipped I. "Yes," I went on, turning to Pardon, "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian."
"Aren't we, too trying to teach Russian in our schools?" said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, are young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
"Quite the fancy pansy" and "a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket" bring to mind a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies mentioned by Humbert Humbert in VN's novel Lolita (1955):
That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of food crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put up at Chestnut Court - nice cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees, an old swing - and a tremendous sunset which the tried child ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam because it was only thirty miles north from her home town but on the following morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again the sidewalk where she had played hopscotch some five years before. For obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip, even though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way - to remain in the car and not look up old friends. My relief at her abandoning the project was spoiled by the thought that had she felt I were totally against the nostalgic possibilities of Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not have given up so easily. On my mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too and complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed till teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt better she suggested we just continue westward. I must say she was very sweet and languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I decided to go and fetch her a toothsome picnic lunch in Kasbeam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of a hill, and from our window you could see the road winding down, and then running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chestnut trees, towards the pretty town, which looked singularly distinct and toylike in the pure morning distance. One could make out an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle, and a dog, a bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those pilgrims and mules winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue hills and red little people. I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down, eventually meeting the cyclist - a plain plump girl with pigtails, followed by a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. (2.16)
Humbert and Lolita visit Kasbeam during their second road trip across the USA in June 1949. It seems that the old barber's baseball-playing son died in World War One (1914-1918). In his Poeza o tysyacha pervom znakomstve (“A Poem about the Thousand and First Acquaintance,” 1914) Igor Severyanin (penname of Igor Lotaryov, 1887-1941) mentions Joy, the hostess's St. Bernard:
Лакей и сен-бернар — ах, оба баритоны! —
Встречали нас в дверях ответом на звонок.
Камелии. Ковры. Гостиной сребротоны.
Два пуфа и диван. И шесть безшумных ног.
Мы двое к ней пришли. Она была чужою.
Он знал ее, но я представлен в этот раз.
Мне сдержанный привет, и сен-бернару Джою
Уйти куда-нибудь и не мешать — приказ.
Салонный разговор, удобный для аббата,
Для доблестной ханжи и столь же для гетер.
И мы уже не мы: Альфред и Травиата.
И вот уже оркестр. И вот уже партер.
Так: входим в роли мы совсем непроизвольно.
Но режет сердце мне точеный комплимент.
Как больно говорить! Как нестерпимо больно,
Когда предвидишь вот любой, любой момент!
Все знаем наперед: и будет то, что смято
Когда-то, кем-то, как и где — не все равно ль?
И в ужасе, в тоске, — Альфред и Травиата, —
Мы шутим — как тогда! Лелея нашу боль…
In his "poeza" Severyanin ("Mr. Northerner") compares himself to Alfred (Alfredo Germont, the tenor romantic lead in Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata, 1853), and his hostess to Violetta Valery (the Traviata). The surname Verdi is of Italian origin, directly translating to "green" (plural of verde), originating from the Latin viridis. In the adjective viridis there is the noun vir (Lat., an adult male person). In the draft, Pushkin's mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne ("A Little House in Kolomna," 1830) has a motto from Ovid's Metamorphoses (IV, 279-80): Modo vir, modo femina (Now a man, now a woman). Modo (Lat., just now) brings to mind Odon's half-brother Nodo (a cardsharp and despicable traitor). There is modo in Quasimodo, a character in Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831). The libretto of Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851) written by Francesco Maria Piave is based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse ("The King Amuses Himself," 1832). In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert Gumbert mentions Victor Hugo, the author of L'Art d'être grand-père ("The Art of Being a Grandfather," 1877):
Мне теперь думается, что было большой ошибкой вернуться на восток и отдать ее в частную гимназию в Бердслее, вместо того чтобы каким-нибудь образом перебраться через мексиканскую границу, благо было так близко, и притаиться годика на два в субтропическом парадизе, после чего я мог бы преспокойно жениться на маленькой моей креолке; ибо, признаюсь, смотря по состоянию моих гланд и ганглий, я переходил в течение того же дня от одного полюса сумасшествия к другому - от мысли, что около 1950-ro года мне придется тем или иным способом отделаться от трудного подростка, чье волшебное нимфетство к тому времени испарится, - к мысли, что при некотором прилежании и везении мне, может быть, удастся в недалеком будущем заставить ее произвести изящнейшую нимфетку с моей кровью в жилах, Лолиту Вторую, которой было бы восемь или девять лет в 1960-ом году, когда я еще был бы dans la force de l'age; больше скажу - у подзорной трубы моего ума или безумия, хватало силы различить в отдалении лет un vieillard encore vert (или это зелёненькое - просто гниль?), странноватого, нежного, слюнявого д-ра Гумберта, упражняющегося на бесконечно прелестной Лолите Третьей в "искусстве быть дедом", воспетом Виктором Гюго.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated - to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert - or was it green rot? - bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. (2.3)