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), his tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house:"
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (Kinbote’s note to Line 71)
Kinbote's Scottish tutor, Walter Campbell, has the same first name as Sir Walter Scott (a Scottish writer, 1771-1832). In the 1893 American edition of Walter Scott's novel The Pirate (1821) hurley-house is glossed as "a term applied to a large house that is so much in disrepair as to be nearly in a ruinous state." In Walter Scott's novel, it describes the dilapidated, structurally compromised manor of the eccentric Yellowley family. Triptolemus Yellowley (an eccentric, bookish Scottish "factor" obsessed with modernizing agriculture) and his peevish, penny-pinching sister, Barbara ("Baby") Yellowley bring to mind zheltovatyi dom ("the semi-loony bin," literally: "a yellowish house"), as in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski (poor Yasha's father) playfully calls the madhouse in which he had been kept for over three months already:
"Знаешь, - сказала Елизавета Павловна, осторожно-легко сходя с лестницы и не оборачивая опущенной головы к сыну, - я, кажется, просто куплю гильзы и табак, а то так выходит дороговатенько", - и тотчас добавила тем же голосом: "Господи, как ее жалко". И точно, нельзя было Александру Яковлевну не пожалеть. Её муж вот уже четвертый месяц содержался в приюте для ослабевших душой, в "желтоватом доме", как он сам игриво выражался в минуты просвета. Ещё в октябре Федор Константинович как то и посетил его там. В разумно обставленной палате сидел пополневший, розовый, отлично выбритый и совершенно сумасшедший Александр Яковлевич, в резиновых туфлях, и непромокаемом плаще с куколем. "Как, разве вы умерли?" - было первое, что он спросил, - скорее недовольно, чем удивленно. Состоя "председателем общества борьбы с потусторонним", он всё изобретал различные средства для непропускания призраков (врач, применяя новую систему "логического потворства", не препятствовал этому) и теперь, исходя вероятно из другой ее непроводности, испытывал резину, но повидимому результаты до сих пор получались скорее отрицательные, потому что, когда Федор Константинович хотел было взять для себя стул, стоявший в сторонке, Чернышевский раздраженно сказал: "Оставьте, вы же отлично видите, что там уже сидят двое", - и это "двое", и шуршащий, всплескивающий при каждом его движении плащ, и бессловесное присутствие служителя, точно это было свидание в тюрьме, и весь разговор больного показались Федору Константиновичу невыносимо карикатурным огрублением того сложного, прозрачного, еще благородного, хотя и полубезумного, состояния души, в котором так недавно Александр Яковлевич общался с утраченным сыном. Тем ядрено-балагурным тоном, который он прежде приберегал для шуток - а теперь говорил всерьез, - он стал пространно сетовать, всё почему-то по-немецки, на то, что люди-де тратятся на выдумывание зенитных орудий и воздушных отрав, а не заботятся вовсе о ведении другой, в миллион раз более важной борьбы. У Федора Константиновича была на окате виска запекшаяся ссадина, - утром стукнулся о ребро парового отопления, второпях доставая из-под него закатившийся колпачок от пасты. Вдруг оборвав речь, Александр Яковлевич брезгливо и беспокойно указал пальцем на его висок, "Was haben Sie da?", - спросил он, болезненно сморщась, - а затем нехорошо усмехнулся и, всё больше сердясь и волнуясь, начал говорить, что его не проведешь, - сразу признал, мол, свежего самоубийцу. Служитель подошел к Федору Константиновичу и попросил его удалиться. И идя через могильно-роскошный сад, мимо жирных клумб, где в блаженном успении цвели басисто-багряные георгины, по направлению к скамейке, на которой его ждала Чернышевская, никогда не входившая к мужу, но целые дни проводившая в непосредственной близости от его жилья, озабоченная, бодрая, всегда с пакетами, - идя по этому пестрому гравию между миртовых, похожих на мебель, кустов и принимая встречных посетителей за параноиков, Федор Константинович тревожно думал о том, что несчастье Чернышевских является как бы издевательской вариацией на тему его собственного, пронзенного надеждой горя, - и лишь гораздо позднее он понял всё изящество короллария и всю безупречную композиционную стройность, с которой включалось в его жизнь это побочное звучание.
“You know,” said Elizaveta Pavlovna, stepping lightly but cautiously down the stairs and not turning her lowered head toward her son, “I think I’ll just buy cigarette papers and tobacco, otherwise it comes out so dear,” and immediately she added in the same voice: “Goodness, how sorry I am for her.” And indeed, it was impossible not to pity Mme. Chernyshevski. Her husband had been kept over three months already in an institute for the mentally ailing, in “the semi-loony bin” as he himself playfully expressed it in moments of lucidity. As long ago as October Fyodor had once visited him there. In the sensibly furnished ward sat a fatter, rosier, beautifully shaven and completely insane Chernyshevski, in rubber slippers and a waterproof cloak with a hood. “Why, are you dead?” was the first thing he asked, more discontent than surprised. In his capacity as “Chairman of the Society for Struggle With the Other World” he was continually devising methods to prevent permeation by ghosts (his doctor, employing a new system of “logical connivance,” did not oppose this) and now, probably on the basis of its nonconductive quality in another sphere, he was trying out rubber, but evidently the results achieved so far were mainly negative since, when Fyodor was about to take a chair for himself which was standing to one side, Chernyshevski said irritably: “Leave it alone, you see very well there are two sitting on it already,” and this “two,” and the rustling cloak which plashed up with every movement, and the wordless presence of the attendant, as if this had been a meeting in prison, and the whole of the patient’s conversation seemed to Fyodor an unbearable, caricatured vulgarization of that complex, transparent and still noble though half-insane state of mind in which Chernyshevski had so recently communicated with his lost son. With the broad-comedy inflections he had formerly reserved for jokes—but which he now used in earnest—he launched into extensive lamentations, all for some reason in German, over the fact that people were wasting money to invent antiaircraft guns and poison gases and not caring at all about the conduct of another, million times more important, struggle. Fyodor had a healed-over scrape on the side of his temple—that morning he had knocked it against one of the ribs of a radiator in hastily recovering the top of a toothpaste tube which had rolled underneath it. Suddenly breaking off his speech, Chernyshevski pointed squeamishly and anxiously at his temple. “Was haben Sie da?” he asked, with a grimace of pain, and then smiled unpleasantly, and growing more and more angry and agitated, began to say that you could not get by him—he had recognized right away, he said, a recent suicide. The attendant came up to Fyodor and asked him to leave. And walking through the funereally luxuriant garden, past unctuous beds in which bass-toned, dark crimson dahlias were blooming in blessed sleep and eternal repose, toward the bench where he was awaited by Mme. Chernyshevski (who never went in to her husband but spent whole days in the immediate vicinity of his quarters, preoccupied, brisk, always with packages)—walking over the variegated gravel between myrtle shrubs resembling furniture and taking the visitors he passed for paranoiacs, troubled Fyodor kept pondering over the fact that the misfortune of the Chernyshevskis appeared to be a kind of mocking variation on the theme of his own hope-suffused grief, and only much later did he understand the full refinement of the corollary and all the irreproachable compositional balance with which these collateral sounds had been included in his own life. (Chapter Two)
The Chernyshevski couple in “The Gift” have the same name and patronymic as goluboy vorishka (the bashful chiseller) and his wife in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stul’yev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928):
Завхоз 2-го дома Старсобеса был застенчивый ворюга. Всё существо его протестовало против краж, но не красть он не мог. Он крал, и ему было стыдно. Крал он постоянно, постоянно стыдился, и поэтому его хорошо бритые щёчки всегда горели румянцем смущения, стыдливости, застенчивости и конфуза. Завхоза звали Александром Яковлевичем, а жену его – Александрой Яковлевной. Он называл её Сашхен, она звала его Альхен. Свет не видывал ещё такого голубого воришки, как Александр Яковлевич.
The Assistant Warden of the Second Home of Stargorod Social Security Administration was a shy little thief. His whole being protested against stealing, yet it was impossible for him not to steal. He stole and was ashamed of himself. He stole constantly and was constantly ashamed of himself, which was why his smoothly shaven cheeks always burned with a blush of confusion, shame, bashfulness and embarrassment. The assistant warden's name was Alexander Yakovlevich, and his wife's name was Alexandra Yakovlevna. He used to call her Sashchen, and she used to call him Alchen. The world has never seen such a bashful chiseller as Alexander Yakovlevich. (chapter VIII “The Bashful Chiseller”)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned “those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:”
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
After the suicide of his son Yasha, Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski went mad and began to see the ghost of his dead son. After the tragic death of his daughter, Nadezhda Botkin (Hazel Shade's "real" name), her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent), went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. 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. According to Kinbote, he writes his commentary, index and foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. But it seems that, actually, he writes them in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) writes his poem "Wanted" after Lolita's abduction from - or, more likely, death in - the Elphinstone hospital.