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 became a vegetarian after reading a story about an Italian despot:
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was a member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages - not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
The name of Shade's murderer, Gradus means in Russian "degree." Barometr na gradus nizhe ("Barometer is One Degree Lower") is Herzen's brief note in Kolokol ("The Bell," June 1, 1866) apropos of the removal of Prince Suvorov (the Field Marshal's grandson) from the position of Military Governor-General of St. Petersburg:
Благородная фигура князя Суворова исчезает с первого плана действий. Это уж «шах» самому себе. Обер-полицмейстер с.-петербургский подчиняется III отделению, как и вся Россия.
A Russian writer and thinker, Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) was the son of Ivan Yakovlev (a rich Russian landowner and retired guards captain, 1767-1846, whom Napoleon asked to deliver a peace-offer letter to Alexander I from occupied and destroyed by fire Moscow) and Henriette Louise Haag (a Jewish girl from Stuttgart, 1795-1851). Den Haag is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. On August 20, 1672, the former Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, Johan de Witt, and his brother Cornelis were brutally murdered, mutilated, and partially eaten by an angry mob in The Hague (a painting by Jan de Baen). In Du Développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie ("On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia," 1851), Herzen says that it is a shame to recognize the tsarism only under the 59th degree of northern latitude and mentions despotism:
Какой позор -- в 1849 году,-- утратив все, на что надеялись, все, что приобрели, близ трупов расстрелянных, повешенных, близ тех, кого заковали в цепи, сослали без суда, при виде этих несчастных, гонимых из страны в страну, которым оказывают гостеприимство, как евреям в средние века, которым бросают, как собакам, кусок хлеба, чтобы заставить их продолжать свой путь,-- какой позор,-- в 1849 году узнавать царизм лишь под 59 градусом северной широты! Поносите сколько вам будет угодно и осыпайте упреками петербургское самодержавие и печальное постоянство нашей безропотности, но поносите деспотизм повсюду и распознавайте его, в какой бы форме он ни проявлялся. Оптический обман, при помощи которого рабству придавали видимость свободы, рассеялся. (Chapter I. "Russia and Europe")
Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus) "Vinogradus" and "Leningradus." The former capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924) sits near the 59th parallel north (specifically at 59°57′ N). According to Kinbote, New Wye (a small University town in New England) is situated at the latitude of Palermo (the capital of and largest city in Sicily, 38°7′ N):
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handfuls of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuña collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me. (Foreword)
Describing his first meeting with Shade, Kinbote mentions his vegetarianism:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned a harassed schoolmarm who cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitute:
In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation which I had collected in order to refer to them in the presence of people whom my friendship with the poet might interest or annoy. His and my reader will, I trust, excuse me for breaking the orderly course of these comments and letting my illustrious friend speak for himself.
Book reviewers being mentioned, he said: "I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate. I regard both the demolishment and the rave with like detachment."
Kinbote: "I suppose you dismiss the first as the blabber of a blockhead and the second as a kind soul's friendly act?"
Shade: "Exactly."
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."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron."
Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull."
Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"
Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane."
The respective impacts and penetrations of Marxism and Freudism being talked of, I said: "The worst of two false doctrines is always that which is harder to eradicate."
Shade: "No, Charlie, there are simpler criteria: Marxism needs a dictator, and a dictator needs a secret police, and that is the end of the world; but the Freudian, no matter how stupid, can still cast his vote at the poll, even if he is pleased to call it [smiling] political pollination."
Of students' papers: "I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive."
Kinbote: "For instance?"
"Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: 'The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration.' I am also in the habit of lowering a student's mark catastrophically if he uses 'simple' and 'sincere' in a commendatory sense; examples: 'Shelley's style is always very simple and good'; or 'Yeats is always sincere.' This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool."
Kinbote: "But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school?"
"That's where the broom should begin to sweep. A child should have thirty specialists to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude."
Kinbote: "Yes. I agree." (note to Line 172)
In Herzen's main work, Byloe i dumy ("Bygone and Meditations," 1870), there is a chapter on Vasiliy Botkin (a Russian writer and critic, 1812-1869), the author of Mozart (a biographical essay, 1838) and Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851). In his draft Shade says: "I like my name: Shade, ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish" (note to line 275). In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse.