In his commentary to Shade's poem 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) describes the Prince's cohabitation with Fleur de Fyler (the younger daughter of Countess de Fyler, Queen Blenda's lady-in-waiting) and mentions a rather kitschy prattle and the Prince's kamergrum (groom of the chamber):
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin.
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all the time, had him attend table-turning séances with an experienced American medium, séances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly struggled at all. The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower. This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. For other needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to mend a broken viola d'amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father's ample chair, his legs over its arm, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order. (note to Line 80)
In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale Children's Prattle (Børnesnak, 1859) a beautiful little girl's father is groom of the Chambers:
At a rich merchant’s house there was a children’s party, and the children of rich and great people were there. The merchant was a learned man, for his father had sent him to college, and he had passed his examination. His father had been at first only a cattle dealer, but always honest and industrious, so that he had made money, and his son, the merchant, had managed to increase his store. Clever as he was, he had also a heart; but there was less said of his heart than of his money. All descriptions of people visited at the merchant’s house, well born, as well as intellectual, and some who possessed neither of these recommendations.
Now it was a children’s party, and there was children’s prattle, which always is spoken freely from the heart. Among them was a beautiful little girl, who was terribly proud; but this had been taught her by the servants, and not by her parents, who were far too sensible people.
Her father was groom of the Chambers, which is a high office at court, and she knew it. “I am a child of the court,” she said; now she might just as well have been a child of the cellar, for no one can help his birth; and then she told the other children that she was well-born, and said that no one who was not well-born could rise in the world. It was no use to read and be industrious, for if a person was not well-born, he could never achieve anything. “And those whose names end with ‘sen,’” said she, “can never be anything at all. We must put our arms akimbo, and make the elbow quite pointed, so as to keep these ‘sen’ people at a great distance.” And then she stuck out her pretty little arms, and made the elbows quite pointed, to show how it was to be done; and her little arms were very pretty, for she was a sweet-looking child.
But the little daughter of the merchant became very angry at this speech, for her father’s name was Petersen, and she knew that the name ended in “sen,” and therefore she said as proudly as she could, “But my papa can buy a hundred dollars’ worth of bonbons, and give them away to children. Can your papa do that?”
“Yes; and my papa,” said the little daughter of the editor of a paper, “my papa can put your papa and everybody’s papa into the newspaper. All sorts of people are afraid of him, my mamma says, for he can do as he likes with the paper.” And the little maiden looked exceedingly proud, as if she had been a real princess, who may be expected to look proud.
But outside the door, which stood ajar, was a poor boy, peeping through the crack of the door. He was of such a lowly station that he had not been allowed even to enter the room. He had been turning the spit for the cook, and she had given him permission to stand behind the door and peep in at the well-dressed children, who were having such a merry time within; and for him that was a great deal. “Oh, if I could be one of them,” thought he, and then he heard what was said about names, which was quite enough to make him more unhappy. His parents at home had not even a penny to spare to buy a newspaper, much less could they write in one; and worse than all, his father’s name, and of course his own, ended in “sen,” and therefore he could never turn out well, which was a very sad thought. But after all, he had been born into the world, and the station of life had been chosen for him, therefore he must be content.
And this is what happened on that evening.
Many years passed, and most of the children became grown-up persons.
There stood a splendid house in the town, filled with all kinds of beautiful and valuable objects. Everybody wished to see it, and people even came in from the country round to be permitted to view the treasures it contained.
Which of the children whose prattle we have described, could call this house his own? One would suppose it very easy to guess. No, no; it is not so very easy. The house belonged to the poor little boy who had stood on that night behind the door. He had really become something great, although his name ended in “sen,”—for it was Thorwaldsen.
And the three other children—the children of good birth, of money, and of intellectual pride,—well, they were respected and honored in the world, for they had been well provided for by birth and position, and they had no cause to reproach themselves with what they had thought and spoken on that evening long ago, for, after all, it was mere “children’s prattle.”
Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was a Danish-Icelandic sculptor and medalist. It is believed that Pushkin's poem K byustu zavoevatelya ("To the Bust of the Conqueror," 1828-29) was inspired by Thorvaldsen's marble bust of Alexander I (made in Warsaw in 1820):
Напрасно видишь тут ошибку:
Рука искусства навела
На мрамор этих уст улыбку,
А гнев на хладный лоск чела.
Недаром лик сей двуязычен.
Таков и был сей властелин:
К противочувствиям привычен,
В лице и в жизни арлекин.
You are wrong to see a mistake here:
The hand of art has camouflaged
The marble of these lips with a smile,
Ice of a brow - with a rage…
Not in vain is this face double-tongued.
That potentate was exactly as he is portrayed:
Used to his soul’s controversies,
In face and in life an Harlequin.
In his poem K moryu ("To the Sea," 1824) that he began in Odessa and finished in Mikhaylovskoe (the poet's family estate in the Province of Pskov) Pushkin mentions the sea's pustynya (desert) and pairs Napoleon (who died in May 1821 on St. Helena) with Byron (who died in April 1824 in Missolonghi, Greece):
О чём жалеть? Куда бы ныне
Я путь беспечный устремил?
Один предмет в твоей пустыне
Мою бы душу поразил.
Одна скала, гробница славы…
Там погружались в хладный сон
Воспоминанья величавы:
Там угасал Наполеон.
Там он почил среди мучений.
И вслед за ним, как бури шум,
Другой от нас умчался гений,
Другой властитель наших дум.
What's to regret? Toward what far shoal
Could I my madcap voyage chart?
In all your open wilds, one goal
Could still have power to strike my heart,
One cliff...that sepulcher of glory
There a chill slumber in the west
Whelmed memories of a mighty story...
There was Napoleon felled to rest.
There rested he in tribulations.
And, after him as thunder, rolls
Yet one more genius of the nations,
One more commander of our souls.
(transl. A. Z. Foreman)
In Russian, verblyud (a camel) is often called korabl' pustyni (a ship of the desert). Tri stána verbálala (three hundred camels) in Arnor's poem about a miragarl brings to mind I staya tonet korabley (And a herd of ships drowns), a line in Pushkin's poem To the Sea:
Смиренный парус рыбарей,
Твоею прихотью хранимый,
Скользит отважно средь зыбей:
Но ты взыграл, неодолимый,
И стая тонет кораблей.
The humble sail of fishers' slips,
With the protection of your mood,
Bravely amid your watertips,
But you grew rough, unsubdued,
and a herd of ships drowns.
On the other hand, tri stana (Zemblan for 'three hundred') seems to hint at Tristan (a Cornish knight, the lover of an Irish princess Iseult) and at Tristan da Cunha, colloquially Tristan, a remote group of volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The most remote inhabited archipelago in the world, it is mentioned in Amfiteatrov's story Morskaya skazka ("The Sea Fairy Tale," 1899):
Экипаж «Измаила», толпясь вокруг капитана, спорил и держал пари, где мы. Большинство склонялось к мнению, что буря загнала нас обратно — к Азорским островам и Зелёному Мысу. Другие клялись, что мы — если не у св. Елены, то у о. Вознесения, либо Тристан-да-Кунья. Третьи стояли на том, что буря, хоть и жестоко закрутила нас, но — в конце концов — ветер взял попутное направление, и теперь «Измаил» приближается к какому-либо крохотному, безымянному островку-вулкану Индийского океана. Капитан, на все предположения, только пожимал плечами и повторял:
— Всё может быть. Я знаю лишь одно: это — не Тенерифе. А затем — все вулканические острова похожи друг на друга, как две капли воды… и, если не уверен в широте и долготе, так разве чёрт их различить с моря.
According to Fritz (the German narrator in Amfiteatrov's fairy tale), he knew personally Adam and Eve (cf. Arnor's sculpture Lilith Calling Back Adam; Lilith and the Pig is an essay by Amfiteatrov included in his book Protiv techeniya, "Against the Current," 1908):
Смуглый генуэзец Альфио, при этих словах, бросил подозрительный взгляд на стоявшую пред Фрицем кружку и, оттянув указательным пальцем левой руки веко на левом глазу, остальными пальцами весьма скептически заиграл пред лицом своим: дескать — вот началось — не любо не слушай, врать не мешай!.. Но немец настаивал уверенно и спокойно:
— Да, я был знаком с Адамом и с Евою. Ева-то, положим, когда я имел честь быть ей представленным, уже никого не узнавала от старости и, как недвижимое имущество какое-нибудь, лежала денно и нощно под шалашом на циновке. Но Адам, хоть и седой, как лунь, держался ещё молодцом, и мы с ним славно выпили перед отходом нашего брига с острова…
— Ага! — проворчал Альфио, опуская руку, — история какого-нибудь Робинзона!
— Вот видишь: догадался! — хладнокровно возразил Фриц, — стало быть, нечего было и рожи строить!..
— Ну, таких-то Адамов не в диво видеть всякому моряку, которому океан не впервинку, — заметил третий матрос — по бледно-жёлтым волосам, датчанин, швед или чухонец. — Без них не стоит ни один остров в южных морях. История обычная: облюбует себе какой-нибудь тюленебой островок в океане, как постоянную станцию, и начинает сперва ходить туда из года в год на промысел, потом станет на островке заживаться, потом зазимовать попробует, потом — глядь, и уезжать уж никуда не хочет. Посёлок строит, семью с материка везёт, коли женатый, либо с туземкой свяжется… Ведь это — вроде болезни, как прилипают люди к таким островкам. Кто в Робинзоны попал один раз, того потом всю жизнь тянет назад, в пустыню.
— Мой Адам, — перебил Фриц, — не из тюленебоев. Он был француз, человек образованный, хорошей фамилии, — хотя настоящего имени своего он нам не пожелал сказать: очень стыдился, что одичал… На острове звали его «муссю Фернанд».
A character in Amfiteatrov's fairy tale, Alfio (a swarthy Genoese sailor) brings to mind King Alfin (nicknamed by Amphitheatricus Alfin the Vague, the father of Charles the Beloved) and Alphina, the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters. Tyuleneboy (a sealer) mentioned in Amfiteatrov's story by the third sailor (a Dane, or a Swede, or a Finn, judging by his pale yellow hair) makes one think of Kipling's The Rhyme of the Three Sealers that Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) had translated into Zemblan not long before his death:
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)
The king's Uncle Conmal is Queen Blenda's eldest half-brother:
Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K. 's uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q. v.); noble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962. (Index)
Fleur de Fyler's elder sister Fifalda (whose name means in Old English 'butterfly' and whom Otar eventually marries) makes one think of those beautiful red, white, and yellow butterflies mentioned by the student in Andersen's fairy tale Little Ida’s Flowers (Den lille Idas Blomster, 1835):
Can the flowers from the Botanical Gardens go to these balls?” asked Ida. “It is such a distance!”
“Oh yes,” said the student “whenever they like, for they can fly. Have you not seen those beautiful red, white, and yellow butterflies, that look like flowers? They were flowers once. They have flown off their stalks into the air, and flap their leaves as if they were little wings to make them fly. Then, if they behave well, they obtain permission to fly about during the day, instead of being obliged to sit still on their stems at home, and so in time their leaves become real wings. It may be, however, that the flowers in the Botanical Gardens have never been to the king’s palace, and, therefore, they know nothing of the merry doings at night, which take place there. I will tell you what to do, and the botanical professor, who lives close by here, will be so surprised. You know him very well, do you not? Well, next time you go into his garden, you must tell one of the flowers that there is going to be a grand ball at the castle, then that flower will tell all the others, and they will fly away to the castle as soon as possible. And when the professor walks into his garden, there will not be a single flower left. How he will wonder what has become of them!”
Amfiteatrov's Morskaya skazka is a fantasy on the theme of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Robinson Cruzoe dans son île (1787) is an one-act comedy by Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1766-1834), the author of La feuille ("The Leaf," 1815), a popular poem about the destiny of an émigré. The first line of Pushkin's Epistle to Denis Davydov (a hero of the anti-Napoleon wars), Tebe, pevtsu, tebe, geroyu! ("To you, the poet, to you, the hero!" 1836), is a literal translation of the first line of Arnault's poem inscribed on a book that Arnault sent to Davydov: À vous, poète, à vous, guerrier.
The society sculptor and poet Arnor who had found in Fleur de Fyler what he sought and who had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam also brings to mind Arnor Tordsson jarlaskald, an Icelandic skald of the eleventh century. In his poem Vstrechnoy ("To a Woman Occasionally Met," 1908) Alexander Blok calls himself potomok severnogo skal'da (a descendant of the northern skald) and mentions tomik Uayl'da (a volume of Wilde) that the lady's husband carries with him:
Я только рыцарь и поэт,
Потомок северного скальда.
А муж твой носит томик Уайльда,
Шотландский плэд, цветной жилет…
Твой муж — презрительный эстет.
In January 1895, not long before his trial, Oscar Wilde met Andre Gide ("Gide the Lucid") in Biskra, Algeria:
Wilde spoke of returning to London; the Marquis of Q was abusing him, and accusing him of flight.
"But," I asked, "if you go to London, do you know what you are risking?"
"That is something one should never know. My friends are funny; they advise caution. Caution! How can I have that? That would mean my immediate return. I must go as far away as possible. And now I can go no farther. Something must happen —something different."
The next morning Wilde was on his way to London. The rest is well known. That 'something different' was hard labor in prison. (In Memoriam Oscar Wilde, 1905)