At the beginning of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Rabelais’s great Maybe, “the grand potato:”
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. (ll. 500-509)
In his note to Line 502 (the grand potato) Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais' soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être.
"The grand potato" brings to mind VN’s story Kartofel’nyi el’f (“The Potato Elf,” 1929). Its main character, Fred Dobson, is a circus dwarf. The Russian word for 'dwarf' is karlik. According to Kinbote, on his deathbed the king's uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) called his nephew "Karlik:”
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla—partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle’s raucous dying request: “Teach, Karlik!” Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
VN's story The Potato Elf makes one think of a shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) mentioned by Kinbote when he describes the King's escape from Zembla:
He was still chuckling over the wench's discomfiture when he came to the tremendous stones amassed around a small lake which he had reached once or twice from the rocky Kronberg side many years ago. Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but, oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulderblades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on. But his heart was a conical ache poking him from below in the throat, and after a while he stopped again to take stock of conditions and decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks. He elected the second route and in due course reached the pass. (note to Line 149)
Uncontrollable fear caused by elves, alfear brings to mind Ibsen's play Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf, 1894). The main character in Ibsen's play A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem, 1879), Nora Helmer is a namesake of Nora, the wife of the conjuror Shock in The Potato Elf. Shock and a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) make one think of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the main character in Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, 1882). Ibsen is the author of Brand, play in verse (1865). Brand-Ibsen (1907) is an assay by I. Annenski included in his Second Book of Reflections (1909). In a letter of October 17, 1908, to Ekaterina Mukhin, Annenski (a poet who wrote under the penname Nik. T-o, "Mr. Nobody") says that people who ceased to believe in God but continue to fear the devil created this otzyvayushchiysya kalamburom (smacking of a pun) terror before the smell of sulfuric pitch, Le grand Peut-Etre:
Люди, переставшие верить в бога, но продолжающие трепетать чёрта... Это они создали на языке тысячелетней иронии этот отзывающийся каламбуром ужас перед запахом серной смолы - Le grand Peut-Etre. Для меня peut-etre - не только бог, но это всё, хотя это и не ответ, и не успокоение…