In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) Shade describes a winter evening and mentions the gradual and dual blue:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
The gradual and dual blue brings to mind not only Gradus (Shade's murderer), but also Le Dualisme, c'est la monarchie (1854), a French fragment by Alexander Herzen (a Russian writer and thinker, 1812-1870). The monarch (Danaus plexippus) is a milkweed butterfly known for its bright orange and black wings and long seasonal migrations. Shade’s commentator, Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla (a distant northern land). Herzen is the author of Soroka-vorovka ("The Thieving Magpie," 1848), a novella that tells the tragic story of Aneta, a gifted young serf actress whose talent and spirit are crushed by the brutal realities of the Russian serfdom system. La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1817) is an opera by Gioachino Rossini (an Italian composer, 1792-1868). In "The Fragments of Onegin's Journey" [XXVII] Pushkin describes his life in Odessa in 1823-1824, compares Rossini to Orpheus (a legendary musician who descended into the Underworld of Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice) and rhymes Rossini (a name that comes from rosso, red in Italian) with siniy (blue in Russian):
Но уж темнеет вечер синий,
Пора нам в оперу скорей:
Там упоительный Россини,
Европы баловень ― Орфей.
Не внемля критике суровой,
Он вечно тот же, вечно новый,
Он звуки льёт ― они кипят,
Они текут, они горят,
Как поцелуи молодые,
Все в неге, в пламени любви,
Как зашипевшего аи
Струя и брызги золотые...
Но, господа, позволено ль
С вином равнять dо-rе-mi-sоl?
But darker grows already the blue evening.
Time to the opera we sped:
there 'tis the ravishing Rossini,
the pet of Europe, Orpheus.
Not harking to harsh criticism,
he is ever selfsame, ever new;
he pours out melodies, they seethe,
they flow, they burn
like youthful kisses,
all sensuousness, in flames of love,
like, at the fuzzing point, Ay's
stream and gold spurtles...
but, gentlemen, is it permitted
to equalize do-re-mi-sol with wine?
Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck (a German composer, 1714-1787). In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri mentions the great Gluck:
Что говорю? Когда великий Глюк
Явился и открыл нам новы тайны
(Глубокие, пленительные тайны),
Не бросил ли я все, что прежде знал,
Что так любил, чему так жарко верил,
И не пошел ли бодро вслед за ним
Безропотно, как тот, кто заблуждался
И встречным послан в сторону иную?
And what of that? When the great Gluck
Came and discovered for us new secrets
(Deep, fascinating secrets),
Did I not leave all I had known before,
And loved so much, and trusted with such fervor,
To follow him, submissively and gaily,
Like one who has gone errant yet encounters
A man to set him on a different course? (Scene I)
At the end of Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
Mozart (1838) is a biographical essay by Vasiliy Botkin (1812-1869), a friend and coeval of Herzen. Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) in reverse. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer 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.