In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and says that he is ready to become a floweret or a fat fly, but never, to forget:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato. I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber). You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state.
I love great mountains. From the iron gate
Of the ramshackle house we rented there
One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair,
That one could only fetch a sigh, as if
It might assist assimilation. Iph
Was a larvorium and a violet:
A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget. (ll. 501-524)
According to Shade, IPH missed what mostly interests the preterist. In his 1926 travelogue Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America”), V. V. Mayakovski (a futurist poet, 1893-1930) describes his 18-day transatlantic journey from La Coruña, Spain, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, aboard the French liner Espagne and compares the ship to a fly crawling over a mirror surface:
Океан — дело воображения.
И на море не видно берегов, и на море волны больше, чем нужны в домашнем обиходе, и на море не знаешь, что под тобой.
Но только воображение, что справа нет земли до полюса и что слева нет земли до полюса, впереди совсем новый, второй свет, а под тобой, быть может, Атлантида, — только это воображение есть Атлантический океан. Спокойный океан скучен. 18 дней мы ползем, как муха по зеркалу. Хорошо поставленное зрелище было только один раз; уже на обратном пути из Нью-Йорка в Гавр. Сплошной ливень вспенил белый океан, белым заштриховал небо, сшил белыми нитками небо и воду. Потом была радуга. Радуга отразилась, замкнулась в океане, и мы, как циркачи, бросались в радужный обруч. Потом — опять плавучие губки, летучие рыбки, летучие рыбки и опять плавучие губки Сарагоссова моря, а в редкие торжественные случаи — фонтаны китов. И все время надоедающая (даже до тошноты) вода и вода.
Океан надоедает, а без него скушно.
Потом уже долго-долго надо, чтобы гремела вода, чтоб успокаивающе шумела машина, чтоб в такт позванивали медяшки люков.
In his commentary and index to Shade's poem, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius:
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all the time, had him attend table-turning seances with an experienced American medium, seances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly struggled at all. The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower. This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. For other needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to mend a broken viola d'amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father's ample chair, his legs over its arm, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order.
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.
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur's naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland.
He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young – little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.
On the third night a great stomping and ringing of arms came from the inner stairs, and there burst in the Prime Councilor, three Representatives of the People, and the chief of a new bodyguard. Amusingly, it was the Representatives of the People whom the idea of having for queen the granddaughter of a fiddler infuriated the most. That was the end of Charles Xavier's chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus). With their white suitcases and obsolete musical instruments the two ladies wandered back to the annex of the Palace. There followed a sweet twang of relief - and then the door of the anteroom slid open with a merry crash and the whole heap of putti tumbled in. (note to Line 80)
Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius, the patron saint of Bokay in the mountains of Zembla, 80; life span not known. (Index)
Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting, Fleur de Fyler (defiler of flowers) brings to mind a floweret mentioned by Shade in Canto Three of his poem ("I'm ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly, but never, to forget"). Sudarg of Bokay is Jakob Gradus (the name of Shade's murderer) in reverse. Describing his arrival in Havana on July 5, 1925, Mayakovski uses the word gradus (degree):
Третий класс теперь ненавидел первый еще и за то, что ему прохладнее на градус.
The third class now hated the first class for enjoying a temperature one degree cooler.
According to Kinbote, Gradus left Onhava (the beautiful capital of Zembla) on the Copenhagen plane on July 5, 1959:
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptations to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)
July 5 is Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus, seem to represent three different aspects of mad Botkin's personality. 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 in Russian "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. In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy ("No, I'm not Byron, I'm another," 1832) Mikhail Lermontov (a Russian poet and novelist, 1814-1841) mentions nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) that lies in his soul as in the ocean:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Еще неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Gloomy ocean, who can
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
The first chapter of Mayakovski's travelogue My Discovery of America is entitled 18 dney okeana ("18 Days of the Ocean"). According to Kinbote, it took Shade 20 days to write his last poem:
We possess in result a complete calendar of his work. Canto One was begun in the small hours of July 2 and completed on July 4. He started the next canto on his birthday and finished it on July 11. Another week was devoted to Canto Three. Canto Four was begun on July 19, and as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949-999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft. This is extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions, and does not follow the lines of the card as rigidly as the Fair Copy does. Actually, it turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface. It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading. This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans - who affirmed without having seen the manuscript of the poem that it "consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a definite text" - is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet's work was interrupted by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator.
Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: "None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Nonsense again! Aside from the veritable clarion of internal evidence ringing throughout Canto Four, there exists Sybil Shade's affirmation (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband "never intended to go beyond four parts." For him the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in pardonable self-approbation while his discreet companion kept trying in vain to adapt the swing of a long-limbed gait to the disheveled old poet's jerky shuffle. Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if all this were not enough - and it is, it is enough - I have had the dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.) (Foreword)
Canto Four of Shade's poem was begun on July 19. July 19 is Mayakovski's birthday. Like Shade, Mayakovski loathed bullfighting (described in the Mexican chapter of My Discovery of America). VN's father was born on July 20, 1869, in Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin). In the last stanza of his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, o without regret," 1927) Georgiy Ivanov (a Russian poet, 1894-1958, the author of an insulting article on Sirin in Chisla) mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire):
Как в Грецию Байрон, о, без сожаленья,
Сквозь звёзды и розы, и тьму,
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья:
- И ты не поможешь ему.
Сквозь звёзды, которые снятся влюблённым,
И небо, где нет ничего,
В холодную полночь - платком надушённым.
- И ты не удержишь его.
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья,
Как Байрон за бледным огнём,
Сквозь полночь и розы, о, без сожаленья:
- И ты позабудешь о нём.
Btw., Colonel Peter Gusev (King Alfin's "aerial adjutant") brings to mind Lyudogus' (man-goose) Mayakovski. A preterist is one who collects cold nests. Actually, Preterism is a Christian eschatological view or belief that interprets some (partial preterism) or all (full preterism) prophecies of the Bible as events which have already been fulfilled in history.