In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Von Tausend und einem Ziele ("On the Thousand Goals and One") is a chapter from the first part of Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None), a philosophical novel by Friedrich Nietzsche (a German philosopher, 1844-1900), published in four parts between 1883 and 1885. In his autobiographical work Ecce Homo: Wie man wird, was man ist (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is) written in 1888, first published in 1908, eight years after the author's death, Nietzsche explicitly describes himself as a Doppelgänger: "I am a Doppelgänger, I have a 'second' face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third." In a letter of April 6, 1873, to Malwida von Meysenbug (a German writer, born Malwida Rivalier, 1816-1903) Nietzsche mentions his dream about Gradus ad Parnassum (a Latin dictionary used for composition and poetry):
Basel, 6. April 1873
Verehrtestes Fräulein!
In Bayreuth hoffe ich wieder Muth und gute Laune zu finden und mich in allem Rechten zu bestärken. Gestern Nacht träumte mir, ich hätte meinen Gradus ad Parnassum ganz selten иnd schön einbinden lassen; die Symbolik, die an dem Einband eines Buches haftet, ist verständlich genug, wenn auch geschmacklos. Und daß unser Leben ein Gradus ad Parnassum sein soll, ist auch eine Wahrheit, die man sich öfter einmal sagen muß. Mein Parnassus der Zukunft ist, wenn ich Sie wiedersehe.
In Treue Ihr
F. Nietzsche
Shade's murderer (and Kinbote's double), Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). Der Wanderer und sein Schatten ("The Wanderer and his Shadow," 1880) is a collection of 350 aphorisms by Friedrich Nietzsche. Today, 15 October 2026, is Nietzsche's 182nd birthday. Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915).
The main character of Pyotr Boborykin's novel Pereval ("The Pass," 1894), Yuri Petrovich Lyzhin is a type of Russian Nietzschean. His name brings to mind Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin, the title character of VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930). In a letter to a friend, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (a Russian writer and satirist, 1826-89) says that Boborykin's new (monstrously long) novel Kitay-gorod (1882) is simply katalog veshchey (a catalogue of things), and not a novel at all:
Опять, черт возьми, он набоборыкал роман… Это просто-напросто каталог вещей, а вовсе не роман!
"Again, the hell, he naboborykal roman [has boboryked a novel]... This is simply a catalogue of things, and not a novel at all!"
Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions a catalogue raisonné of the desk's meager contents. According to Kinbote, he has no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel:
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)
Kinbote's catalogue raisonné brings to mind the Catalogue Aria sung by Leporello (Don Giovanni’s servant) to Elvira in Act One of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787):
Madamina, il catalogo è questo
Delle belle che amò il padron mio;
un catalogo egli è che ho fatt'io;
Osservate, leggete con me.
In Italia seicento e quaranta;
In Alemagna duecento e trentuna;
Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna;
Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre...
My dear lady, this is the list
Of the beauties my master has loved,
A list which I have compiled.
Observe, read along with me.
In Italy, six hundred and forty;
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;
A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;
But in Spain already one thousand and three...
Nietzsche is the author of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872). Madamina (my dear lady in Italian) makes one think of Minnamin (my darling in Zemblan):
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 the other two 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, health 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 principles: 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)
Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla) = Nodo (Odon's half-brother, a cardsharp and despicable traitor) = odno (neut. of odin, 'one' in Russian). Zorko odno lish' serdtse. Samogo glavnogo glazami ne uvidish' (It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye) is the central aphorism (the Fox's words) in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale Le Petit prince ("The Little Prince," 1943) in Nora Gal's Russian translation. It translates to German as "Man sieht nur mit dem Herzen gut. Das Wesentliche ist für die Augen unsichtbar." Gut means in Zemblan "God." The Zemblan name of the Devil, Pern seems to hint at Perun, the ancient Slavic God of thunder. In his memoirs Byloe i dumy ("Bygone and Meditations," 1870), Alexander Herzen (a Russian writer and thinker, 1812-1870, whose daughters Natalia and Olga were raised by Malwida von Meysenbug) mentions peruny (pagan idols):
Мы смелы в отрицании и всегда готовы толкнуть всякого перуна в воду, но перуны домашней и семейной жизни как-то water-proof, они все "выдыбаются". Может, в них и не осталось смысла -- но жизнь осталась; видно, орудия, употребляемые против них, только скользнули по их змеиной чешуе, уронили их, оглушили... по не убили. Ревность... Верность... Измена... Чистота... Темные силы, грозные слова, по милости которых текли реки слез, реки крови, -- слова, заставляющие содрогаться нас, как воспоминание об инквизиции, пытке, чуме... и притом слова, под которыми, как под Дамокловым мечом, жила и живет семья. (Part Five. Chapter XLI. Paris - Italy - Paris, 1847--1852, I)
According to Herzen, we are courageous in negation and are always ready to cast every Perun into water, but the Peruns of domestic and family life are somehow waterproof, they refuse to be drowned. The poet's daughter, Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part Three. LX. "The Seven Seals"), Nietzsche mentions his Alpha and Omega:
If my virtue be a dancer's virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald rapture:
If my wickedness be a laughing wickedness, at home among rose-banks and hedges of lilies:
--For in laughter is all evil present, but it is sanctified and absolved by its own bliss:--
And if it be my Alpha and Omega that everything heavy shall become light, every body a dancer, and every spirit a bird: and verily, that is my Alpha and Omega!--
Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings--the ring of the return?
Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!
FOR I LOVE THEE, O ETERNITY! (6)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and says that he will turn down eternity unless all the things he loves in life are found in Heaven by the newly dead stored in its strongholds through the years:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato. I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber). You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state.
I love great mountains. From the iron gate
Of the ramshackle house we rented there
One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair,
That one could only fetch a sigh, as if
It might assist assimilation. Iph
Was a larvorium and a violet:
A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. (ll. 501-536)
In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen (Snedronningen, 1844), the Snow Queen promises Kai the whole world and a pair of skates if he can spell the word "Eternity" with pieces of ice. Describing his rented house in New Wye (a small University town in New England), Kinbote mentions Professor C.’s ultramodern villa that eternity shall not dislodge:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)