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), the king saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
A masked ball in Conmal's palace at Aros (a fine town in E. Zembla, capital of Conmal's dukedom) brings to mind Lermontov's verse play Maskarad (Masquerade, 1835). The characters in Lermontov's play include Prince Zvezdich and Baroness Shtral (who is in love with Zvezdich and spreads rumors about the infidelity of Arbenin's wife Nina). Their names were borrowed from Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinski's novella Ispytanie ("The Ordeal," 1830), with their sexes reversed: grafinya (Countess) Zvezdich and rotmistr (Captain) Shtral in Bestuzhev's tale. Zvezda being Russian for "star," and Strahl being German for "ray" or "beam," one is reminded of Afanasiy Fet's poem Sredi zvyozd ("Among the Stars," 1876):
Пусть мчитесь вы, как я, покорны мигу,
Рабы, как я, мне прирожденных числ,
Но лишь взгляну на огненную книгу,
Не численный я в ней читаю смысл.
В венцах, лучах, алмазах, как калифы,
Излишние средь жалких нужд земных,
Незыблемой мечты иероглифы,
Вы говорите: "Вечность — мы, ты — миг.
Нам нет числа. Напрасно мыслью жадной
Ты думы вечной догоняешь тень;
Мы здесь горим, чтоб в сумрак непроглядный
К тебе просился беззакатный день.
Вот почему, когда дышать так трудно,
Тебе отрадно так поднять чело
С лица земли, где все темно и скудно,
К нам, в нашу глубь, где пышно и светло".
Though you rush on, like me submissive to the moment,
Slaves, like me, to numbers innate to my being,
Yet as soon as I gaze upon the fiery book,
It is not a numerical meaning I read in it.
In crowns, rays, and diamonds, like caliphs,
Superfluous amidst the wretched needs of earth,
Hieroglyphs of an immovable dream,
You say: "We are eternity, you are the moment.
We are without number. In vain with a greedy thought
Do you chase the shadow of eternal contemplation;
We burn here so that into the impenetrable gloom
An unsetting day might ask for you.
This is why, when it is so hard to breathe,
It is so joyous for you to raise your brow
From the face of the earth, where all is dark and meager,
To us, into our depths, where it is lavish and bright."
A fine town in East Zembla, Aros seems to hint at Aarhus (Aros is the original Viking-Age name for Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city). On the other hand, Aros brings to mind the Pharos of Alexandria and Fet's palindrome A roza upala na lapu Azora (And the rose fell on the paw of Azor). On August 16, 1857, Afanasiy Fet (a Russian poet and memoirist, 1820-1892) married Maria Botkin (the younger sister of the writer and critic Vasiliy Botkin, 1812-1869). The day on which the King saw Disa for the first time, July 5 is Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls Shade's wife, born Sybil Irondell) makes one think of Fet's poem Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884):
Природы праздный соглядатай,
Люблю, забывши всё кругом,
Следить за ласточкой стрельчатой
Над вечереющим прудом.
Вот понеслась и зачертила —
И страшно, чтобы гладь стекла
Стихией чуждой не схватила
Молниевидного крыла.
И снова то же дерзновенье
И та же тёмная струя, —
Не таково ли вдохновенье
И человеческого я?
Не так ли я, сосуд скудельный,
Дерзаю на запретный путь,
Стихии чуждой, запредельной,
Стремясь хоть каплю зачерпнуть?
I love to play the idle spy,
And watch, oblivious to all,
A swoop-flit swallow on the fly,
O’er pond as evening nears nightfall.
Look there, see how she darts and skims
Along the lip of glazed-smooth mere;
I’m worried lest a ripple’s whims
Snatch up her blitzwing on the veer.
But she dares more exuberation,
Pursues her games of dark spurt-swoop;
Is this not much like lucubration,
Inspired poets’ loop-de-loop?
Is this not how I soar where banned,
O’er God’s wild seas with my tin cup,
Illicit veers through barred dreamland,
In hopes one drop I can scoop up?
(tr. U. R. Bowie)
Sybil Shade and Queen Disa (Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, who is thirty years younger than Sybil Shade and who wed Charles the Beloved exactly thirty years after John Shade married Sybil Swallow) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Her husband, 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 (Hazel Shade’s “real name”). 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.