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), New Wye (a small University town) is situated at the latitude of Palermo:
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)
The latitude of Palermo brings to mind a better Latitude accepted by the Bird in Emily Dickinson's poem "'Tis not that Dying hurts us so:"
'Tis not that Dying hurts us so —
'Tis Living — hurts us more —
But Dying — is a different way —
A Kind behind the Door —
The Southern Custom — of the Bird —
That ere the Frosts are due —
Accepts a better Latitude —
We — are the Birds — that stay.
The shiverers round Farmers' doors —
For whose reluctant Crumb —
We stipulate — till pitying Snows
Persuade our Feathers Home.
The Frosts in Emily Dickinson's poem make one think of diamonds of frost mentioned by Shade at the beginning of his poem:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
Describing his daughter's death in Canto Two of his poem, Shade mentions Robert Frost (an American poet, 1874-1963):
I went upstairs and read a galley proof,
And heard the wind roll marbles on the roof.
"See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing"
Has unmistakably the vulgar ring
Of its preposterous age. Then came your call,
My tender mockingbird, up from the hall.
I was in time to overhear brief fame
And have a cup of tea with you: my name
Was mentioned twice, as usual just behind
(one oozy footstep) Frost. "Sure you don't mind?
I'll catch the Exton plane, because you know
If I don't come by midnight with the dough - " (ll. 417-428)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
The reference is, of course, to Robert Frost (b 1874). The line displays one of those combinations of pun and metaphor at which our poet excels. In the temperature charts of poetry high is low, and low high, so that the degree at which perfect crystallization occurs is above that of tepid facility. This is what our modest poet says, in effect, respecting the atmosphere of his own fame.
Frost is the author of one of the greatest short poems in the English language, a poem that every American boy knows by heart, about the wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and the little horsebells of gentle remonstration in the dull darkening air, and that prodigious and poignant end - two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal. I dare not quote from memory lest I displace one small precious word.
With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way. (note to Line 426)
In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his commentary) Shade says that he likes his name:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor quotes from Discours sur les ombres, a book by the invented French thinker Delalande:
Но был один человек, мнение которого Фёдор Константинович уже узнать не мог. Александр Яковлевич Чернышевский умер незадолго до выхода книги.
Когда однажды французского мыслителя Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почему он не обнажает головы (ne se découvre pas), он отвечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая (qu'elle se découvre la première). В этом есть метафизическая негалантность, но смерть большего не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, благоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым восходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и склоненная боязнь к нему обращает молитву. Религия имеет такое же отношение к загробному состоянию человека, какое имеет математика к его состоянию земному: то и другое только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я знаю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связана с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестности, какой является дерево или холм. Выйти как-нибудь нужно, "но я отказываюсь видеть в двери больше, чем дыру да то, что сделали столяр и плотник" (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная мысль, с которой давно свыкся человеческий разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть глупая иллюзия: мы никуда не идем, мы сидим дома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовсе не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия. В земном доме, вместо окна -- зеркало; дверь до поры до времени затворена; но воздух входит сквозь щели. "Наиболее доступный для наших домоседных чувств образ будущего постижения окрестности долженствующей раскрыться нам по распаде тела, это -- освобождение духа из глазниц плоти и превращение наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зараз видящее все стороны света, или, иначе говоря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира при нашем внутреннем участии" (там же, стр. 64). Но все это только символы, символы, которые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгновение, как она приглядится к ним...
But there was one man whose opinion Fyodor was no longer able to ascertain. Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski had died not long before the book appeared.
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)
"We are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home" brings to mind "We - are the Birds - that stay" in Emily Dickinson's poem "'Tis not that Dying hurts us so." A character in The Gift, Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha. The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus, seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). Nadezhda means "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.