In his poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl") 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) in his commentary the society poet and sculptor Arnor mentions a dream king in the sandy wastes of time and three hundred camels:
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin. (note to Line 80)
Sagaren seems to hint at the Sahara (a desert spanning across North Africa). On ságaren werém (in the sandy wastes of time) brings to mind sredi pustyn’ vremyon (among the wastes of times) in Gumilyov’s poem about Théophile Gautier:
Вперёд, всегда вперёд, и вдруг заметит глаз
Немного зелени, обрадовавшей нас:
Лес кипарисовый и плиты снега чище.
Чтоб отдохнули мы среди пустынь времён,
Господь оазисом нам указал кладбище:
Больные путники, вкусить спешите сон.
…To make us take a rest among the wastes of times,
The Lord as an oasis pointed to us at cemetery:
Sick travelers, hurry up to taste of sleep.
Describing his African travels, Gumilyov says that he did not notice the crossing of the Equator, because he was reading on his camel and reading Baudelaire:
Пересечения экватора я не заметил, я читал на моем верблюде и читал Бодлера.
Charles Baudelaire dedicated his book Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Théophile Gautier:
Dédicace
Au poète impeccable
Au parfait magicien ès lettres françaises
A mon très-cher et très-vénéré
Maître et ami
Théophile Gautier
Avec les sentiments
De la plus profonde humilité
Je dédie
Ces fleurs maladives
C.B.
Dedication
To the impeccable poet
To the pefect magician of French letters
To my very dear and very revered
Master and friend
Théophile Gautier
With sentiments
Of the most profound humility
I dedicate
These unhealthy flowers
C.B.
A posthumous third edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, with a preface by Théophile Gautier and including 14 previously unpublished poems, was issued in 1868. The daughter of Countess de Fyler (Queen Blenda's lady-in-waiting), Fleur de Fyler is 'Defiler of Flowers:'
No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains; but the part concerning Garh displeased her as if, paradoxically, she would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome houghmagandy with the wench. She told him sharply to skip such interludes, and he made her a droll little bow. But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared. That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. "I do have some business matters to discuss," he said. "And there are papers you have to sign." Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the roses. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white mantilla, brought certain documents from Disa's boudoir. Upon hearing the King's mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by his excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycines. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot. (note to Lines 433-434)
In Chapter One (XXXI: 1-4) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin eulogizes female feet and mentions pustynya (a desert) and nozhki (little feet) that trample veshnie tsvety (vernant blooms):
Когда ж и где, в какой пустыне,
Безумец, их забудешь ты?
Ах, ножки, ножки! где вы ныне?
Где мнёте вешние цветы?
So when and where, in what desert, will you
forget them, madman? Little feet,
ah, little feet! Where are you now?
Where do you trample vernant blooms?
At the end of Chapter One (L: 8-14) of EO Pushkin says that it is time to leave the dreary shore and to sigh for somber Russia beneath the sky of his Africa:
Пора покинуть скучный брег
Мне неприязненной стихии,
И средь полуденных зыбей,
Под небом Африки моей,11
Вздыхать о сумрачной России,
Где я страдал, где я любил,
Где сердце я похоронил.
'Tis time to leave the dreary shore
of the element inimical to me,
and 'mid meridian ripples
beneath the sky of my Africa,11
to sigh for somber Russia,
where I suffered, where I loved,
where I buried my heart.
11. See the first edition of Eugene Onegin. (Pushkin's note)
Pushkin (whose maternal great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, c. 1696-1781, was the blackamoor and godson of Peter I) had African blood. The poet's mother, Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkin, born Gannibal, is a namesake of Nadezhda Botkin (Hazel Shade's "real" name). After her tragic death, her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer). Nadezhda means “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.