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 lazy Garh, the farmer's daughter who shows to the king the shortest way to the pass:
The gnarled farmer and his plump wife who, like personages in an old tedious tale offered the drenched fugitive a welcome shelter, mistook him for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group. He was allowed to dry himself in a warm kitchen where he was given a fairy-tale meal of bread and cheese, and a bowl of mountain mead. His feelings (gratitude, exhaustion, pleasant warmth, drowsiness and so on) were too obvious to need description. A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair as he dozed off between that blaze and the tremulous light of a little earthenware cresset, a beaked affair rather like a Roman lamp, hanging above a shelf where poor beady baubles and bits of nacre became microscopic soldiers swarming in desperate battle. He woke up with a crimp in the neck at the first full cowbell of dawn, found his host outside, in a damp corner consigned to the humble needs of nature, and bade the good grunter (mountain farmer) show him the shortest way to the pass. "I'll rouse lazy Garh," said the farmer.
A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: "Garh! Garh!" Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father's wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan.
Before leaving, the King asked his host, whose name was Griff, to accept an old gold piece he chanced to have in his pocket, the only money he possessed. Griff vigorously refused and, still remonstrating, started the laborious business of unlocking and unbolting two or three heavy doors. The King glanced at the old woman, received a wink of approval, and put the muted ducat on the mantelpiece, next to a violet seashell against which was propped a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife - Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes.
The stars had just faded. He followed the girl and a happy sheepdog up the overgrown trail that glistened with the ruby dew in the theatrical light of an alpine dawn. The very air seemed tinted and glazed. A sepulchral chill emanated from the sheer cliff along which the trail ascended; but on the opposite precipitous side, here and there between the tops of fir trees growing below, gossamer gleams of sunlight were beginning to weave patterns of warmth. At the next turning this warmth enveloped the fugitive, and a black butterfly came dancing down a pebbly rake. The path narrowed still more and gradually deteriorated amidst a jumble of boulders. The girl pointed to the slopes beyond it. He nodded. "Now go home," he said. "I shall rest here and then continue alone."
He sank down on the grass near a patch of matted elfinwood and inhaled the bright air. The panting dog lay down at his feet. Garh smiled for the first time. Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception. As soon as she had settled beside him, she bent over and pulled over and off her tousled head the thick gray sweater, revealing her naked back and blancmange breasts, and flooded her embarrassed companion with ail the acridity of ungroomed womanhood. She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a gesture and got up. He thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King started to walk up the turfy incline. (note to Line 149)
Griff and his wife mistake the king (who is clad, like an athlete, in red wool) for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group. Their daughter's name, Garh seems to hint at Manfred's garb in Byron's dramatic poem Manfred (1817):
A Cottage amongst the Bernese Alps.
Manfred and the Chamois Hunter.
C. Hun. No, no—yet pause—thou must not yet go forth:
Thy mind and body are alike unfit
To trust each other, for some hours, at least;
When thou art better, I will be thy guide—
But whither?
Man. It imports not; I do know
My route full well, and need no further guidance.
C. Hun. Thy garb and gait bespeak thee of high lineage—
One of the many chiefs, whose castled crags
Look o'er the lower valleys—which of these
May call thee Lord? I only know their portals;
My way of life leads me but rarely down
To bask by the huge hearths of those old halls,
Carousing with the vassals; but the paths,
Which step from out our mountains to their doors,
I know from childhood—which of these is thine?
Man. No matter.
C. Hun.Well, sir, pardon me the question,
And be of better cheer. Come, taste my wine;
'Tis of an ancient vintage; many a day
'T has thaw'd my veins among our glaciers, now
Let it do thus for thine—Come, pledge me fairly.
Man. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim!
Will it then never—never sink in the earth?
C. Hun. What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee. (Act Two, scene 1)
The Chamois Hunter asks Manfred to taste his wine. A few minutes before Shade's death, Kinbote invites the poet to a glass of Tokay at his place and Shade replies that he will sample Kinbote's wine with pleasure:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-caped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and-"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)
On the other hand, lazy Garh makes one think of lenivyi popyonok (the priest's lazy boy) in Pushkin’s poem Rumyanyi kritik moy, nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (“My ruddy-cheeked critic, pot-bellied scoffer,” 1830):
Румяный критик мой, насмешник толстопузый,
Готовый век трунить над нашей томной музой,
Поди-ка ты сюда, присядь-ка ты со мной,
Попробуй, сладим ли с проклятою хандрой.
Смотри, какой здесь вид: избушек ряд убогий,
За ними чернозём, равнины скат отлогий,
Над ними серых туч густая полоса.
Где нивы светлые? где тёмные леса?
Где речка? На дворе у низкого забора
Два бедных деревца стоят в отраду взора,
Два только деревца. И то из них одно
Дождливой осенью совсем обнажено,
И листья на другом, размокнув и желтея,
Чтоб лужу засорить, лишь только ждут Борея.
И только. На дворе живой собаки нет.
Вот, правда, мужичок, за ним две бабы вслед.
Без шапки он; несет подмышкой гроб ребёнка
И кличет издали ленивого попёнка,
Чтоб тот отца позвал да церковь отворил.
Скорей! ждать некогда! давно бы схоронил.
Что ж ты нахмурился? — Нельзя ли блажь оставить!
И песенкою нас весёлой позабавить? —
Куда же ты? — В Москву, чтоб графских именин
Мне здесь не прогулять.
— Постой, а карантин!
Ведь в нашей стороне индейская зараза.
Сиди, как у ворот угрюмого Кавказа,
Бывало, сиживал покорный твой слуга;
Что, брат? уж не трунишь, тоска берёт — ага!
«My critic, rosy-gilled, as quick as thought to offer
Our gloomy Muse affront, you plump, pot-bellied scoffer,
Come here, I beg, sit down, and have a little nip;
Together we may get the better of the hyp.
Behold those wretched huts: a view to feast your eyes on,
Black earth beyond, the plain that slopes toward the horizon;
Above the hovels hang low clouds, thick-massed and gray.
But the bright meadows, friend, the dark woods — where are they?
Where the blithe brook? Beside the low fence in the court
Two trees rejoice the eye; they're of a meager sort,
Such pitiable things, the two of them together,
And one is stripped quite bare by autumn's rainy weather,
The other's yellow leaves wait, sopping, to be strewn
On puddles by the wind that will be raging soon.
There's not a living cur. True, here a peasant trudges
Across the empty court, tagged by two kerchiefed drudges.
The coffin of a child beneath his arm, no hat
Upon his head — he calls to the priest's lazy brat
To bid his dad unlock the church — “You've legs to run with!
Be quick!We're late — high time the funeral were done with!”
Why do you frown, my friend?» «You've kept this up too long;
Can't you amuse us with a merry sort of song?»
«Where are you off to now?» «To Moscow, I am setting
Out for the birthday ball.» «But are you quite forgetting
That we are quarantined? There's cholera about.
Come, cool your heels, as in the mountainous redoubt
Your humble servant did there's nothing else to do now.
Well, brother, you don't scoff: so you've got the hyp too now!»
(tr. Babette Deutsch)
In his poem Pushkin mentions proklyataya khandra (the accursed hyp). Like the English hyp, the Russian khandra comes from the Greek hypochondria. In his diary (the entry of Feb. 2, 1821, Ravenna) Byron mentions his hypochondria:
I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits—I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects—even of that which pleased me over night. In about an hour or two, this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty—calculating, however, some lost from the bursting out and effervescence and overflowing of the soda-water, in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience. At present, I have not the thirst; but the depression of spirits is no less violent.
What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more powerful than indifference. If I rouse, it is into fury. I presume that I shall end (if not earlier by accident, or some such termination) like Swift—“dying at top.” I confess I do not contemplate this with so much horror as he apparently did for some years before it happened. But Swift had hardly begun life at the very period (thirty-three) when I feel quite an old sort of feel.
Oh! there is an organ playing in the street—a waltz, too! I must leave off to listen. They are playing a waltz which I have heard ten thousand times at the balls in London, between 1812 and 1815. Music is a strange thing.
According to Kinbote, it is Pern (the Devil) who makes one thirsty:
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
The Devil in Zemblan, Pern seems to hint at Perun (the ancient Slavic god of thunder). On the other hand, Pernod Fils was the most popular brand of absinthe throughout the 19th century until it was banned in 1915. Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915. Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (seventeen years Kinbote's and Gradus' senior, Shade was born in 1898).
In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 479) VN points out that in his Don Juan Byron had difficulties with Russian names and rhymed "Souvaroff - lover of" and "Suvarrow - sorrow" (instead of the correct "Suvorov - more of"). Suvorov Crossing the Alps in 1799 is a painting (1899) by Vasiliy Surikov (1848-1916). As a young man, Surikov once drank sixteen glasses of vodka as if it were plain water:
Мальчиком постарше я покучивал со своими товарищами. И водку тогда пил. Раз 16 стаканов выпил. И ничего. Весело только стало. Помню, как домой вернулся, мать меня со свечами встретила. (from Maximilian Voloshin's essay Surikov included in volume III of Voloshin's Liki tvorchestva, "Faces of Creativity," 1917)
In his essay on Surikov Voloshin mentions Anatole France's novel Les dieux ont soif ("The Gods Are Athirst," 1912):
Шедевры нового исторического романа, построенного вне традиционной романтической формулы, как «Le bon plaisir» и «Double maitresse» Анри де Ренье, как «La rotisserie de la reine Pédauque» и «Les dieux ont soif» Анатоля Франса, использовали именно эти возможности художественного воссоздания прошлого. (I)
The main character in Les dieux ont soif, Évariste Gamelin is a young Parisian painter who becomes a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Byron was afraid that he would end like Swift. In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his commentary) Shade mentions poor old man Swift:
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):
Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire
What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cp. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)
Kinbote is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name). An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) 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 and of Jonathan Swift's death), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
At the end of the same diary entry Byron (the author of The Waltz, 1813) mentions an organ playing a waltz in the street. In Chapter Five (XLI: 1-4) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Tatiana's nameday party and mentions val'sa vikhor' shumnyi (the waltz's noisy whirl):
Однообразный и безумный,
Как вихорь жизни молодой,
Кружится вальса вихорь шумный;
Чета мелькает за четой.
Monotonous and mad
like young life's whirl,
the waltz's noisy whirl revolves,
pair after pair flicks by.
In his essay Sud’ba Pushkina (“The Fate of Pushkin,” 1897) Vladimir Solovyov quotes Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1828) and the lines from Byron’s Manfred, in which Mont Blanc is mentioned:
Уже в сонете "Поэту" высота самосознания смешивается с высокомерием и требование бесстрастия - с обиженным и обидным выражением отчуждения.
Ты - царь, живи один!
Это взято, кажется, из Байрона: the solitude of kings. Но ведь одиночество царей состоит не в том, что они живут одни,- чего, собственно, и не бывает,- а в том, что они среди других имеют единственное положение. Это есть одиночество горных вершин.
Монблан - монарх соседних гор:
Они его венчали.
("Манфред" Байрона). (chapter VII)
Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crown'd him long ago (Manfred, Act One, scene 1).
The solitude of kings (mentioned by Byron in his tale in verse The Prophecy of Dante, 1821) brings to mind Solus Rex, a title that Kinbote proposed to Shade for his poem. In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his visit to Mrs. Z. who mentioned Shade’s poem about Mon Blon that appeared in the Blue Review:
"I can't believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound--But I'm so dense!" (ll. 781-786)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
An image of Mont Blanc's "blue-shaded buttresses and sun-creamed domes" is fleetingly glimpsed through the cloud of that particular poem which I wish I could quote but do not have at hand. The "white mountain" of the lady's dream, caused by a misprint to tally with Shade's "white fountain," makes a thematic appearance here, blurred as it were by the lady's grotesque pronunciation. (note to Line 782)