Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that IPH borrowed some peripheral debris from mystic visions:
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)
"Some peripheral debris" bring to mind Iz peshcher i debrey Indostana ("From the Caves and Wilds of Hindustan," 1883), a travelogue by Helena Blavatsky (a Russian and American mystic, 1831-1891, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society). At the beginning of her book Mme Blavatsky says that between the officially investigated India and the underground, real India there is a difference similar to the one that exists between Russia in the novels of Dumas-père and the real russkaya Russia:
Индия – страна легенд и таинственных уголков. Нет в ней развалины, нет памятника или леска, чтобы не было у него своей истории. А главное, как обыкновенно ни опутана последняя паутиной народной фантазии, все гуще свиваемой с каждым последующим поколением, но трудно, однако, указать хоть на одну такую, которая не была бы основана на каком-нибудь историческом факте. С терпением, а главное с помощью ученых браминов, раз войдя в их доверие и дружбу, всегда возможно докопаться до истины. Но уж, конечно, не англичанам, с их высокомерием и явно выказываемым презрением к «побежденной расе», ожидать чего-либо подобного. Поэтому-то между официально расследованной Индией и (если дозволено так выразиться) подземной, настоящей Индией такая же разница, как между Россией в романах Дюма-père и настоящей русской Россией. (Letter I)
Shade's IPH (of If, as Shade and his colleagues called it) brings to mind the Château d'If, a prison on a small island 1,5 km offshore from Marseille, one of the settings of Alexandre Dumas's adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). At the beginning of VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930) Luzhin's French governess reads to the boy Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo:
Больше всего его поразило то, что с понедельника он будет Лужиным. Его отец - настоящий Лужин, пожилой Лужин, Лужин, писавший книги, - вышел от него, улыбаясь, потирая руки, уже смазанные на ночь прозрачным английским кремом, и своей вечерней замшевой походкой вернулся к себе в спальню. Жена лежала в постели. Она приподнялась и спросила: "Ну что, как?" Он снял свой серый халат и ответил: "Обошлось. Принял спокойно. Ух... Прямо гора с плеч". "Как хорошо...- сказала жена, медленно натягивая на себя шелковое одеяло. - Слава Богу, слава Богу..."
Это было и впрямь облегчение. Все лето - быстрое дачное лето, состоящее в общем из трех запахов: сирень, сенокос, сухие листья - все лето они обсуждали вопрос, когда и как перед ним открыться, и откладывали, откладывали, дотянули до конца августа. Они ходили вокруг него, с опаской суживая круги, но, только он поднимал голову, отец с напускным интересом уже стучал по стеклу барометра, где стрелка всегда стояла на шторме, а мать уплывала куда-то в глубь дома оставляя все двери открытыми, забывая длинный, неряшливый букет колокольчиков на крышке рояля. Тучная француженка, читавшая ему вслух "Монте-кристо" и прерывавшая чтение, чтобы с чувством воскликнуть "бедный, бедный Дантес!", предлагала его родителям, что сама возьмет быка за рога, хотя быка этого смертельно боялась. Бедный, бедный Дантес не возбуждал в нем участия, и, наблюдая ее воспитательный вздох, он только щурился и терзал резинкой ватманскую бумагу, стараясь поужаснее нарисовать выпуклость ее бюста.
Через много лет, в неожиданный год просветления, очарования, он с обморочным восторгом вспомнил эти часы чтения на веранде, плывущей под шум сада. Воспоминание пропитано было солнцем и сладко-чернильным вкусом тех лакричных палочек, которые она дробила ударами перочинного ножа и убеждала держать под языком. И сборные гвоздики, которые он однажды положил на плетеное сидение кресла, предназначенного принять с рассыпчатым потрескиванием ее грузный круп, были в его воспоминании равноценны и солнцу, и шуму сада, и комару, который, присосавшись к его ободранному колену, поднимал в блаженстве рубиновое брюшко. Хорошо, подробно знает десятилетний мальчик свои коленки,- расчесанный до крови волдырь, белые следы ногтей на загорелой коже, и все те царапины, которыми расписываются песчинки, камушки, острые прутики. Комар улетал, избежав хлопка, француженка просила не егозить; с остервенением, скаля неровные зубы,- которые столичный дантист обхватил платиновой проволокой,- нагнув голову с завитком на макушке, он чесал, скреб всей пятерней укушенное место,- и медленно, с возрастающим ужасом, француженка тянулась к открытой рисовальной тетради, к невероятной карикатуре.
What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin. His father--the real Luzhin, the elderly Luzhin, the writer of books--left the nursery with a smile, rubbing his hands (already smeared for the night with transparent cold cream), and with his suede-slippered evening gait padded back to his bedroom. His wife lay in bed. She half raised herself and said: "Well, how did it go?" He removed his gray dressing gown and replied: "We managed. Took it calmly. Ouf... that's a real weight off my shoulders." "How nice..." said his wife, slowly drawing the silk blanket over her. "Thank goodness, thank goodness..."
It was indeed a relief. The whole summer--a swift country summer consisting in the main of three smells: lilac, new-mown hay, and dry leaves--the whole summer they had debated the question of when and how to tell him, and they had kept putting if off so that it dragged on until the end of August. They had moved around him in apprehensively narrowing circles, but he had only to raise his head and his father would already be rapping with feigned interest on the barometer dial, where the hand always stood at storm, while his mother would sail away somewhere into the depths of the house, leaving all the doors open and forgetting the long, messy bunch of bluebells on the lid of the piano. The stout French governess who used to read The Count of Monte Cristo aloud to him (and interrupt her reading in order to exclaim feelingly "poor, poor Dantes!") proposed to the parents that she herself take the bull by the horns, though this bull inspired mortal fear in her. Poor, poor Dantes did not arouse any sympathy in him, and observing her educational sigh he merely slitted his eyes and rived his drawing paper with an eraser, as he tried to portray her protuberant bust as horribly as possible.
Many years later, in an unexpected year of lucidity and enchantment, it was with swooning delight that he recalled these hours of reading on the veranda, buoyed up by the sough of the garden. The recollection was saturated with sunshine and the sweet, inky taste of the sticks of licorice, bits of which she used to hack off with blows of her penknife and persuade him to hold under his tongue. And the tacks he had once placed on the wickerwork seat destined, with crisp, crackling sounds, to receive her obese croup were in retrospect equivalent with the sunshine and the sounds of the garden, and the mosquito fastening onto his skinned knee and blissfully raising its rubescent abdomen. A ten-year-old boy knows his knees well, in detail--the itchy swelling that had been scrabbled till it bled, the white traces of fingernails on the suntanned skin, and all those scratches which are the appended signatures of sand grains, pebbles and sharp twigs. The mosquito would fly away, evading his slap; the governess would request him not to fidget; in a frenzy of concentration, baring his uneven teeth--which a dentist in St. Petersburg had braced with platinum wire--and bending his head with its heliced crown, he scratched and scraped at the bitten place with all five fingers--and slowly, with growing horror, the governess stretched toward the open drawing book, toward the unbelievable caricature. (Chapter 1)
The main character in VN's novel, Luzhin is a chess maestro. In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes a game of chess with his wife Sybil:
"What is that funny creaking - do you hear?"
"It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear."
"If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light.
I hate that wind! Let's play some chess." "All right."
"I'm sure it's not the shutter. There - again."
"It is a tendril fingering the pane."
"What glided down the roof and made that thud?"
"It is old winter tumbling in the mud."
"And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned."
Who rides so late in the night and the wind?
It is the writer's grief. It is the wild
March wind. It is the father with his child. (ll. 653-664)
A question in Shade’s poem, "And now what shall I do?”, brings to mind “What shall I do now? What shall I do?”, a line in A Game of Chess, Part II of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922):
‘What is that noise?’
The wind under the door.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
Nothing again nothing.
Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?’
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?’
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
In his poem A Cooking Egg (1917) T. S. Eliot mentions Madame Blavatsky:
En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues…
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
······
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit's experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me . . .
······
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder's Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s
"And have talk with Coliolanus" (a line in T. S. Eliot's poem) brings to mind "the talks with Socrates and Proust in cypress walks" in Canto Two of Shade's poem and Coriolanus Lane in Onhava (the capital of Kinbote's Zembla):
As soon as Monsieur Beauchamp had sat down for a game of chess at the bedside of Mr. Campbell and had offered his raised fists to choose from, the young Prince took Oleg to the magical closet. The wary, silent, green-carpeted steps of an escalier dérobé led to a stone-paved underground passage. Strictly speaking it was "underground" only in brief spells when, after burrowing under the southwest vestibule next to the lumber room, it went under a series of terraces, under the avenue of birches in the royal park, and then under the three transverse streets, Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley, that still separated it from its final destination. Otherwise, in its angular and cryptic course it adapted itself to the various structures which it followed, here availing itself of a bulwark to fit in its side like a pencil in the pencil hold of a pocket diary, there running through the cellars of a great mansion too rich in dark passageways to notice the stealthy intrusion. Possibly, in the intervening years, certain arcane connections had been established between the abandoned passage and the outer world by the random repercussions of work in surrounding layers of masonry or by the blind pokings of time itself; for here and there magic apertures and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane, could be deduced from a pool of sweet, foul ditch water, bespeaking a moat, or from a dusky odor of earth and turf, marking the proximity of a glacis slope overhead; and at one point, where the passage crept through the basement of a huge ducal villa, with hothouses famous for their collections of desert flora, a light spread of sand momentarily changed the sound of one's tread. Oleg walked in front: his shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton moved alertly, and his own erect radiance, rather than his flambeau, seemed to illume with leaps of light the low ceiling and crowding wails. Behind him the young Prince's electric torch played on the ground and gave a coating of flour to the back of Oleg's bare thighs. The air was musty and cold. On and on went the fantastic burrow. It developed a slight ascending grade. The pedometer had tocked off 1,888 yards, when at last they reached the end. The magic key of the lumber room closet slipped with gratifying ease into the keyhole of a green door confronting them, and would have accomplished the act promised by its smooth entrance, had not a burst of strange sounds coming from behind the door caused our explorers to pause. Two terrible voices, a man's and a woman's, now rising to a passionate pitch, now sinking to raucous undertones, were exchanging insults in Gutnish as spoken by the fisherfolk of Western Zembla. An abominable threat made the woman shriek out in fright. Sudden silence ensued, presently broken by the man's murmuring some brief phrase of casual approval ("Perfect, my dear," or "Couldn't be better") that was more eerie than anything that had come before.
Without consulting each other, the young Prince and his friend veered in absurd panic and, with the pedometer beating wildly, raced back the way they had come. "Ouf!" said Oleg once the last shelf had been replaced. "You're all chalky behind," said the young Prince as they swung upstairs. They found Beauchamp and Campbell ending their game in a draw. It was near dinner time. The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded already by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves. (note to Line 130)
The characters in Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo include M. Beauchamp, the well-known journalist and Chief Editor of l’Impartial, and friend of Albert de Morcerf. In Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions empires of rhyme and Indies of calculus:
But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call
When morning finds us marching to the wall
Under the stage direction of some goon
Political, some uniformed baboon?
We'll think of matters only known to us -
Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;
Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern
Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;
And while our royal hands are being tied,
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles, and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it. (ll. 597-608)
On the other hand, the Château d'If in Dumas's novel brings to mind the Goldsworth château, as Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) calls his rented house:
The Goldsworth château had many outside doors, and no matter how thoroughly I inspected them and the window shutters downstairs at bedtime, I never failed to discover next morning something unlocked, unlatched, a little loose, a little ajar, something sly and suspicious-looking. One night the black cat, which a few minutes before I had seen rippling down into the basement where I had arranged toilet facilities for it in an attractive setting, suddenly reappeared on the threshold of the music room, in the middle of my insomnia and a Wagner record, arching its back and sporting a neck bow of white silk which it could certainly never have put on all by itself. I telephoned 11111 and a few minutes later was discussing possible culprits with a policeman who relished greatly my cherry cordial, but whoever had broken in had left no trace. (note to Line 62)