According to 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), he is known on the campus as the Great Beaver:
Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be shattered. The thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Mrs. C., did not escape our notice as I was helping the tired old poet to find his galoshes after that dreary get-together party at your house. One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver." Of course I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. There was also the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, head of the department to which I was attached, begged me in a formal voice to be seated, then closed the door, and having regained, with a downcast frown, his swivel chair, urged me "to be more careful." In what sense, careful? A boy had complained to his adviser. Complained of what, good Lord? That I had criticized a literature course he attended ("a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity"). Laughing in sheer relief, I embraced my good Netochka, telling him I would never be naughty again. I take this opportunity to salute him. He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the president of the college) definitely knew. (Foreword)
In his Preface to the 1921 edition of R. L. Stevenson's Moral Emblems (1882) Lloyd Osbourne (RLS's stepson) compares his stepfather to a beaver:
Thus ‘Moral Emblems’ came out; ninety copies, price sixpence. Its reception might almost be called sensational. Wealthy people in the Hotel Belvedere bought as many as three copies apiece. Friends in England wrote back for more. Meanwhile the splendid artist [RLS] was assiduously busy. He worked like a beaver, saying that it was the best relaxation he had ever found. The little boy [Lloyd] once overheard him confiding to a visitor: ‘I cannot tell you what a Godsend these silly blocks have been to me. When I can write no more, and read no more, and think no more, I can pass whole hours engraving these blocks in blissful contentment.’ These may not have been the actual words, but such at least was their sense.
Thus the second ‘Moral Emblems’ came out; ninety copies, price ninepence. The public welcomed it as heartily as the first, the little boy becoming so prosperous that he accumulated upwards of five pounds. But let it never be said that he spurned the humble mainstay of his beginnings. He printed the weekly programmes as usual, and bore the exactions of the black-bearded gentleman with fortitude. When he made such a trifling mistake, for instance, as ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Hells,’ he dutifully climbed the hill to his freezing room, and ran off a whole fresh set. Two francs fifty was two francs fifty. Every business man appreciates the comfort of a small regular order which can be counted on like the clock.
But one day there was no black-bearded gentleman. ‘Oh, he was dead. Had had a hemorrhage three days before and had died.’ I don’t know whether the little boy mourned for him particularly, but it was a shock to lose that two francs fifty centimes. The little boy was worried until he found a lady who had substituted herself for the gentleman with the black beard. She was a very kind lady; you could print anything for that lady, and ‘get away with it’ as Americans say. But she was frolicsome and lacked poise; she was vague about appointments, and had a disheartening way of saying: ‘Oh, bother,’ when the little boy appeared; she would insist on kissing him amid circumstances of the most odious publicity; was so abased a creature besides, that she often marred the programmes by making pen-and-ink corrections. In contrast, the little boy looked back on the black-bearded gentleman almost with regret.
"These silly blocks" bring to mind "the silly cognomen" (the Great Beaver) that evidentally applied to Kinbote. R. L. Stevenson's Moral Emblems make one think of the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay:
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 hough-magandy 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 express on 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 ll. 433-434)
Embla, a small old town with a wooden church surrounded by sphagnum bogs at the saddest, loneliest, northmost point of the misty peninsula, 149, 433. (Index)
Emblem, meaning "blooming" in Zemblan; a beautiful bay with bluish and black, curiously striped rocks and a luxurious growth of heather on its gentle slopes, in the southmost part of W. Zembla, 433. (Index)
Queen Disa's Mediterranean villa brings to mind R. L. Stevenson's poem Music at the Villa Marina. This Villa in Mentone, a resort in the south of France where RLS had been sent in 1873-74 for his health, was the residence of two Russian sisters, Mme Sophie Garschine and Mme Nadia Zassetsky. Colvin reports that RLS became 'quickly and warmly attracted' to these 'brilliantly accomplished and cultivated women,' the former being 'an exquisite musician' (1921: pp. 113-114). The poet addressed verses in Scots to them (above, p. 273).
The poet's wife, Sybil Shade, and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Her husband, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadia is a diminutive of Nadezhda (Hope). Nadezhda Nikolaevna (1885) is a short novel by Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88), the author of Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1878) and Krasnyi tsvetok ("The Red Flower," 1883). Chekhov dedicated to the memory of Garshin (who committed suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading to his apartment building) his story Pripadok ("A Nervous Breakdown," 1888).
The surname Lastochkin comes from lastochka (a swallow). Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (a poet who married Maria Botkin in 1857). "Swallows Travel To and Fro" is a poem by R. L. Stevenson:
Swallows travel to and fro,
And the great winds come and go,
And the steady breezes blow,
Bearing perfume, bearing love.
Breezes hasten, swallows fly,
Towered clouds forever ply,
And at noonday, you and I
See the same sunshine above.
Dew and rain fall everywhere,
Harvests ripen, flowers are fair,
And the whole round earth is bare
To the moonshine and the sun;
And the live air, fanned with wings,
Bright with breeze and sunshine, brings
Into contact distant things,
And makes all the countries one.
Let us wander where we will,
Something kindred greets us still;
Something seen on vale or hill
Falls familiar on the heart;
So, at scent or sound or sight,
Severed souls by day and night
Tremble with the same delight—
Tremble, half the world apart.