Describing his contacts with publishers, 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) compares himself to an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links:
Imagine a soft, clumsy giant; imagine a historical personage whose knowledge of money is limited to the abstract billions of a national debt; imagine an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links! This is to say - oh, hyperbolically - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first touchingly carefree and chummy, with expansive banterings and all sorts of amiable tokens. I have no reason to suppose that anything will ever happen to prevent this initial relationship with good old Frank, my present publisher, from remaining a permanent fixture. (Foreword)
Golconda is a ruined city in Southern India known for its diamond industry. In her travelogue Iz peshcher i debrey Indostana ("From the Caves and Wilds of Hindustan," 1883) Helena Blavatsky (a Russian and American mystic, the co-founder of Theosophy, 1831-1891) mentions the palaces of Hyderabad and Golconda that transfer the traveler right into a magic setting from A Thousand and One Nights:
Итак, нам приходилось ещё около семи недель колесить с места на место, на выбор: по Бомбейскому ли президентству, по Северо-Западным провинциям, или же по Раджастхану. Что выбрать? Куда ехать? Пред подобным изобилием интереснейших местностей мы колебались, как известное животное между двумя стойлами. Мы так много наслышались о дворцах Хайдарабада и Голконды, прямо переносящих путешественника в волшебную обстановку из Тысячи и одной ночи, что серьёзно стали было собираться повернуть наших слонов к верхнему Синду и ехать в Хайдарабад, в территорию низама. Нам хотелось посмотреть на этот "город льва", построенный в 1589 году великолепным Мухамед-Кули-Кутб-Шахом, которому всё так приелось на свете, что ему могла надоесть даже Голконда с её волшебными замками и сокровищами. Хайдарабад славится своими зданиями, остатками прежнего величия; по словам Мир-Абу-Талиба, хранителя царских сокровищ, Мухамед-Кули-Шах истратил на украшение города в первые годы своего 34-летнего царствования баснословную сумму в 2 800 000 фунтов стерлингов на английские деньги, хотя самая работа сооружений не стоила ему ни одного пайса... Теперь, за исключением этих памятников величия, Хайдарабад имеет вид кучи сора и навоза; но зато, по отзывам очевидцев, "Британская резиденция" по-прежнему славится в нём на всю страну и недаром зовётся Версалем Индии. История этой резиденции весьма курьёзна и ясно характеризует англо-индийские нравы. (Letter XIX)
The title of Mme Blavatsky's travelogue, Iz peshcher i debrey Indostana ("From the Caves and Wilds of Hindustan"), brings to mind the Rippleson Caves mentioned by Kinbote in his commentary and index to Shade's poem:
It was a lovely breezy afternoon with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing."
"War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at every now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon.
"All one could do at short notice," said Odon, plucking at his cheek to display how the varicolored semi-transparent film adhered to his face, altering its contours according to stress. "A polite person," he added, "does not, normally, examine too closely a poor fellow's disfigurement."
"I was looking for shpiks [plainclothesmen]" said the King. "All day," said Odon, "they have been patrolling the quay. They are dining at present."
"I'm thirsty and hungry," said the King. "That's young Baron Mandevil - chap who had that duel last year. Let's go now."
"Couldn't we take him too?"
"Wouldn't come - got a wife and a baby. Come on, Charlie, come on, Your Majesty."
"He was my throne page on Coronation Day."
Thus chatting, they reached the Rippleson Caves. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note. (note to Line 149)
Rippleson Caves, sea caves in Blawick, named after a famous glass maker who embodied the dapple-and-ringle play and other circular reflections on blue-green sea water in his extraordinary stained glass windows for the Palace, 130, 149. (Index)
and "some peripheral debris" mentioned by Shade when he describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem:
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)
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”). Astral Bodies, or Doppelgangers is a dialogue by Helena Blavatsky published in her magazine Lucifer. It begins as follows:
M. C. Great confusion exists in the minds of people about the various kinds of apparitions, wraiths, ghosts, or spirits. Ought we not to explain once for all the meaning of these terms? You say there are various kinds of "doubles" what are they?
H. P. B. Our occult philosophy teaches us that there are three kinds of "doubles," to use the word in its widest sense. First, man has his "double" or shadow, properly so called, around which the physical body of the fetus — the future man — is built. The imagination of the mother, or an accident which affects the child, will affect also the astral body. The astral and the physical both exist before the mind is developed into action, and before the Atma awakes. This occurs when the child is seven years old, and with it comes the responsibility attaching to a conscious sentient being. This "double" is born with man, dies with him, and can never separate itself far from the body during life, and though surviving him, it disintegrates, pari passu, with the corpse. It is this which is sometimes seen over the graves like a luminous figure of the man that was, during certain atmospheric conditions. From its physical aspect it is, during life, man's vital double, and after death, only the gases given off from the decaying body. But, as regards its origin and essence, it is something more. This double is what we have agreed to call Linga-sarira, but which I would propose to call, for greater convenience, "Protean" or "Plastic Body."
Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double and a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization).