In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes the night of his daughter's tragic death. On that fatal night, Hazel Shade's parents watched TV and Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) played “network roulette:”
Eleven struck. You sighed. "Well, I'm afraid
There's nothing else of interest." You played
Network roulette: the dial turned and trk'ed.
Commercials were beheaded. Faces flicked.
An open mouth in midsong was struck out.
An imbecile with sideburns was about
To use his gun, but you were much too quick.
A jovial Negro raised his trumpet. Trk.
Your ruby ring made life and laid the law.
Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw
A pinhead light dwindle and die in black
Infinity. (ll. 463-474)
Dostoevski's novel Igrok ("The Gambler," 1866) is set in Roulettenburg (a fictional town modeled on Baden-Baden, a German spa). The novel's characters include the Frenchman de Grieux (Aleksey Ivanovich's main rival). The surname Grieux is derived from the Old French word grieu, meaning "grey." Describing Gradus' day in New York, Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) calls Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer who is also known as Jack de Grey) "Degré:"
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkum ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder. (note to Line 949)
Gradus would be sixty-four on July 5, 1979. Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birtday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). Shade is seventeen years Kinbote's and Gradus' senior. In a letter of October 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday) to his brother Dostoevski twice repeats the word gradus (degree):
Философию не надо полагать простой математической задачей, где неизвестное - природа... Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Philosophy should not be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity… Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!..
Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает Бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God and consequently does the philosopher's work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than poetical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
In the same letter to his brother Dostoevski says that it is sad to live without nadezhda (hope):
"Брат, грустно жить без надежды... Смотрю вперёд, и будущее меня ужасает...
"I look ahead and the future terrifies me.”
Hazel Shade's "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent), went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 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, Shade listed Dostoevski among Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
Gogol is the author of Igroki ("The Gamblers," 1842), a comedy about cardsharps. The favorite roulette number of la baboulinka (Russo-French, 'grandma'), a character in Dostoevski's novel The Gambler, is zero. Describing his rented house in New Wye (a small University town), Kinbote mentions the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero:
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)
Ozero is the Russian word for "lake." Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega (the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes). The Russian name of waxwing (the bird Bombycilla garrulus; in Canto One of his poem Shade twice calls himself "the shadow of the waxwing"), sviristel', brings to mind the Svir' River in Northwest Russia that flows from Lake Onega into Lake Ladoga. The surname Onegin (of Pushkin's hero) comes from the Onega River (that flows into Lake Onega).