Describing the King’s escape from Zembla, 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) mentions the King’s repeater that he pressed to find out what is the time:
A handshake, a flash of lightning. As the King waded into the damp, dark bracken, its odor, its lacy resilience, and the mixture of soft growth and steep ground reminded him of the times he had picnicked hereabouts - in another part of the forest but on the same mountainside, and higher up, as a boy, on the boulderfield where Mr. Campbell had once twisted an ankle and had to be carried down, smoking his pipe, by two husky attendants. Rather dull memories, on the whole. Wasn't there a hunting box nearby - just beyond Silfhar Falls? Good capercaillie and woodcock shooting - a sport much enjoyed by his late mother, Queen Blenda, a tweedy and horsy queen. Now as then, the rain seethed in the black trees, and if you paused you heard your heart thumping, and the distant roar of the torrent. What is the time, kot or? He pressed his repeater and, undismayed, it hissed and tinkled out ten twenty-one. (note to Line 149)
"What is the time" in Zemblan, kot or clearly hints at kotoryi chas, "what is the time" in Russian. "Kotoryi chas?" is the last, eighth, question posed by a mad mathematician in Chekhov's humorous short story Zadachi sumasshedshego matematika ("Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician," 1882):
1) За мной гнались 30 собак, из которых 7 были белые, 8 серые, а остальные черные. Спрашивается, за какую ногу укусили меня собаки, за правую или левую?
2) Автолимед родился в 223 году, а умер после того, как прожил 84 года. Половину жизни провел он в путешествиях, треть жизни потратил на удовольствия. Сколько стоит фунт гвоздей, и был ли женат Автолимед?
3) Под Новый год из маскарада Большого театра было выведено 200 человек за драку. Если дравшихся было двести, то сколько было бранившихся, пьяных, слегка пьяных и желавших, но не находивших случая подраться?
4) Что получается по сложении сих чисел?
5) Куплено было 20 цибиков чая. В каждом цибике было по 5 пудов, каждый пуд имел 40 фунтов. Из лошадей, везших чай, две пали в дороге, один из возчиков заболел, и 18 фунтов рассыпалось. Фунт имеет 96 золотников чая. Спрашивается, какая разница между огуречным рассолом и недоумением?
6) Английский язык имеет 137 856 738 слов, французский в 0,7 раз больше. Англичане сошлись с французами и соединили оба языка воедино. Спрашивается, что стоит третий попугай и сколько понадобилось времени, чтобы покорить сии народы?
7) В среду 17-го июня 1881 года в 3 часа ночи должен был выйти со станции A поезд железной дороги, с тем, чтобы в 11 час. вечера прибыть на станцию B; но при самом отправлении поезда получено было приказание, чтобы поезд прибыл на станцию B в 7 часов вечера. Кто продолжительнее любит, мужчина или женщина?
8) Моей теще 75 лет, а жене 42. Который час?
"My mother-in-law is seventy-five years old, my wife is fouty-two. What is the time?" (all eight riddles in Chekhov's story are rather Lutwidgean in their funny absurdity).
The problem statement of the seventh riddle is about a train traveling from Point A to Point B (the question posed is "Who loves longer, a man or a woman?"). According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him and Shade Mrs. Hurley (the wife of the head of the English Department at Wordsmith University) mentioned the old man at the Exton railway station who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains:
Above this the poet wrote and struck out:
The madman’s fate
The ultimate destiny of madmen's souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survived death and suddenly expands, bursts out as it were, in peals of healthy and triumphant laughter when the world of timorous fools and trim blockheads has fallen away far behind. Personally, I have not known any lunatics; but have heard of several amusing cases in New Wye ("Even in Arcady am I," says Dementia, chained to her gray column). There was for instance a student who went berserk. There was an old tremendously trustworthy college porter who one day, in the Projection Room, showed a squeamish coed something of which she had no doubt seen better samples; but my favorite case is that of an Exton railway employee whose delusion was described to me by Mrs. H., of all people. There was a big Summer School party at the Hurleys', to which one of my second ping-pong table partners, a pal of the Hurley boys had taken me because I knew my poet was to recite there something and I was beside myself with apprehension believing it might be my Zembla (it proved to be an obscure poem by one of his obscure friends - my Shade was very kind to the unsuccessful). The reader will understand if I say that, at my altitude, I can never feel "lost" in a crowd, but it is also true that I did not know many people at the H.'s. As I circulated, with a smile on my face and a cocktail in my hand, through the crush, I espied at last the top of my poet's head and the bright brown chignon of Mrs. H. above the back of two adjacent chairs: At the moment I advanced behind them I heard him object to some remark she had just made:
"That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand."
I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed eyes. She said: "You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what's his name, old - the old man, you know, at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet."
"We all are, in a sense, poets, Madam," I replied, and offered a lighted match to my friend who had his pipe in his teeth and was beating himself with both hands on various parts of his torso.
I am not sure this trivial variant has been worth commenting; indeed, the whole passage about the activities of the IPH would be quite Hudibrastic had its pedestrian verse been one foot shorter. (note to Line 629)
The main character in Chekhov's story Kotoryi iz tryokh? Staraya, no vechno novaya istoriya ("Which of the Three? An old but eternally new story," 1882), Nadya Langer brings to mind Nadezhda Botkin (Hazel Shade's "real" name) and Lang, the artist who made the portrait of Sybil Shade (the poet's wife):
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)
In his note to Line 682 (Lang) Kinbote writes:
A modern Fra Pandolf no doubt. I do not remember seeing any such painting around the house. Or did Shade have in mind a photographic portrait? There was one such portrait on the piano, and another in Shade's study. How much fairer it would have been to Shade's and his friend's reader if the lady had deigned answer some of my urgent queries.
Fra Pandolf is a painter mentioned in Robert Browning's poem (dramatic monologue) My Last Duchess. At the end of Robert Browning’s poem Madhouse Cell (1836) the lyrical hero mentions God’s right hand:
There's Heaven above, and night by night,
I look right through its gorgeous roof
No sun and moons though e’er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof:
For I intend to get to God,
For ’tis to God I speed so fast,
For in God’s breast, my own abode,
Those shoals of dazzling glory past,
I lay my spirit down at last.
I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as he has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled
The Heavens, God thought on me his child;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances, every one
To the minutest; ay, God said
This head this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so:
But sure that thought and word and deed
All go to swell his love for me,
Me, made because that love had need
Of something irrevocably
Pledged solely its content to be.
Yes, yes, a tree which must ascend,—
No poison-gourd foredoomed to stoop!
I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup,
To drink the mingled venoms up,
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast,
While sweet dews turn to the gourd’s hurt,
And bloat, and while they bloat it, blast,
As from the first its lot was cast.
For as I lie, smiled on, full fed
By unexhausted power to bless,
I gaze below on Hell’s fierce bed,
And those its waves of flame oppress,
Swarming in ghastly wretchedness;
Whose life on earth aspired to be
One altar-smoke, so pure!—to win
If not love like God’s love to me,
At least to keep his anger in,
And all their striving turned to sin!
Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white
With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte,
The incense-swinging child,—undone
Before God fashioned star or sun!
God, whom I praise; how could I praise,
If such as I might understand,
Make out, and reckon on, his ways,
And bargain for his love, and, stand,
Paying a price, at his right hand?
According to Kinbote, he writes his commentary, index and forword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. But it seems that Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus's "real" name) writes them in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatoriun where Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) writes his poem "Wanted" after Lolita was abducted from him by Quilty (or, rather, by death). An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda. 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, of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method. The hero of VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930), Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin (a chess maestro) goes mad and commits suicide by falling from the bathroom window of a Berlin flat rented by his father-in-law. In his book Orthodoxy (1908) G. K. Chesterton (an English writer, 1874-1936) says: “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom." The author of detective stories about Father Brown, Chesterton also wrote a book on Robert Browning that consists of eight chapters (cf. eight questions posed by Chekhov's mad mathematician) and, like Pale Fire, has an Index.
A Russian poet who went mad was Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855). In Mandelshtam’s poem Net, ne luna, a svetlyi tsiferblat… (“No, not the moon, but a clock’s dial lit brightly…” 1912) mad Batyushkov to the question kotoryi chas replies vechnost’ (Eternity):
Нет, не луна, а светлый циферблат
Сияет мне, — и чем я виноват,
Что слабых звёзд я осязаю млечность?
И Батюшкова мне противна спесь:
Который час, его спросили здесь,
А он ответил любопытным: вечность!
No, not the moon, but a clock's dial lit brightly
Shines upon me; must the blame be mine to bear
If I detect the weakest stars' lacticity?
Thus, Batyushkov's airs cannot fail to rile me:
"What is the time, please, Sir?" they asked him here,
And he replied to the curious: Eternity!
(transl. Ph. Nikolayev)
Batyushkov is the author of Besedka muz ("The Bower of Muses," 1817). Shade "embowers" his muse between the two masters of the heroic couplet:
Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith
The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade's. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows.
Goldsmith, Oliver and Wordsworth, William are inluded in the Index of G. K. Chesterton's book Robert Browning (1903).