In his commentary to Shade's poem 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 Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure who jumped or fell from the North Tower:
However, not all Russians are gloomy, and the two young experts from Moscow whom our new government engaged to locate the Zemblan crown jewels turned out to be positively rollicking. The Extremists were right in believing that Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, had succeeded in hiding those jewels before he jumped or fell from the North Tower; but they did not know he had had a helper and were wrong in thinking the jewels must be looked for in the palace which the gentle white-haired Bland had never left except to die. I may add, with pardonable satisfaction, that they were, and still are, cached in a totally different - and quite unexpected - corner of Zembla. (note to Line 681)
In Pushkin's Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremyon (Scenes from the Times of Chivalry, 1835) Clothilda tells her brother that she will expect him in the North Tower:
Клотильда. Граф, я рада, что имею честь принимать вас у себя... Братец, я буду вас ожидать в северной башне... (Уходит.)
Clothilda's maid Berta is a namesake of Berthe au Grand Pied (Bertrada of Laon, the wife of Pepin the Short and the mother of Charlemagne) mentioned by Humbert Humbert in VN's novel Lolita (1955):
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl” - that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair - of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary ”revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” - that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,” and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze! (1.15)
The characters in Pushkin's Scenes from the Times of Chivalry include Brother Berthold (apparently, Berthold Schwarz, a legendary German alchemist of the late 14th century who is credited with the invention of gunpowder) who hopes to discover perpetual motion:
Мартын. Постой! Ну, а если опыт твой тебе удастся, и у тебя будет и золота и славы вдоволь, будешь ли ты спокойно наслаждаться жизнию?
Бертольд. Займусь еще одним исследованием: мне кажется, есть средство открыть perpetuum mobile...
Мартын. Что такое perpetuum mobile?
Бертольд. Perpetuum mobile, то есть вечное движение. Если найду вечное движение, то я не вижу границ творчеству человеческому... видишь ли, добрый мой Мартын: делать золото задача заманчивая, открытие, может быть, любопытное — но найти perpetuum mobile... o!...
In Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor makes fun of Chernyshevski's attempts to discover perpetual motion:
У меня продолжают расти (сказал автор) без моего позволения и ведома, идеи, темы, -- иные довольно криво, -- и я знаю, что мешает: мешает "машина"; надо выудить эту неуклюжую бирюльку из одной уже сложенной фразы. Большое облегчение. Речь идет о перпетуум-мобиле.
Возня с перпетуум-мобиле продлилась в общем около пяти лет, до 1853 года, когда он, уже учитель гимназии и жених, наконец сжег письмо с чертежами, которые однажды заготовил, боясь, что помрет (от модного аневризма), не одарив мира благодатью вечного и весьма дешевого движения. В описаниях его нелепых опытов, в его комментариях к ним, в этой смеси невежественности и рассудительности, уже сказывается тот едва уловимый, но роковой изъян, который позже придавал его выступлениям как бы оттенок шарлатанства; оттенок мнимый, ибо не забудем: человек -- прямой и твердый, как дубовый ствол, "самый честнейший из честнейших" (выражение жены); но такова уж была судьба Чернышевского, что всё обращалось против него: к какому бы предмету он ни прикасался, и -- исподволь, с язвительнейшей неизбежностью, вскрывалось нечто совершенно противное его понятию о нем. Он, скажем, за синтез, за силу тяготения, за живую связь (читая роман, в слезах целует страницу, где к читателю воззвал автор), а вот готовится ему ответ: распад, одиночество, отчуждение. Он проповедует основательность, толковость во всем, -- а точно по чьему-то издевательскому зазыву, его судьбу облепляют оболтусы, сумасброды, безумцы. За всг ему воздается "отрицательной сторицей", по удачному слову Страннолюбского, за всг его лягает собственная диалектика, за всг мстят ему боги: за трезвый взгляд на отвлеченные розы, за добро в беллетристическом порядке, за веру в познание, -- и какие неожиданные, какие хитрые формы принимает это возмездие! Что если -- мечтается ему в 48 году -- приделать к ртутному градуснику карандаш, так чтобы он двигался согласно изменениям температуры? Исходя из положения, -- что температура есть нечто вечное -- Но позвольте, кто это, кто это тут кропотливо записывает шифром кропотливые соображения? Молодой изобретатель, неправда-ли, с безошибочным глазомером, с врожденной способностью к склеиванию, связыванию, спаиванию косных частей, из которых рождается чудо-движение, -- а там, глядь, и жужжит уже ткацкий станок, или паровоз с длинной трубой и машинистом в цилиндре обгоняет кровного рысака? Вот тут то и трещина с гнездом возмездия, -- ибо у этого рассудительного юноши, который, не забудем, печется лишь о благе всего человечества, глаза как у крота, а белые, слепые руки движутся в другой плоскости, нежели его плошавшая, но упрямая и мускулистая мысль. Все, к чему он ни прикоснется, разваливается. Невесело в его дневнике читать о снарядах, которыми он пытается пользоваться, -- коромыслах, чечевицах, пробках, тазах, -- и ничто не вертится, а если и вертится, то, в в силу непрошенных законов, в другую сторону, чем он того хочет: обратный ход вечного двигателя -- ведь это сущий кошемар, абстракция абстракции, бесконечность со знаком минуса, да разбитый кувшин в придачу.
In my work (said the author), ideas and themes continue to grow without my knowledge or consent—some of them fairly crookedly—and I know what is wrong: “the machine” is getting in the way; I must fish this awkward spillikin out of an already composed sentence. A great relief. The subject is perpetual motion.
The pottering with perpetual motion lasted about five years, until 1853, when—already a schoolteacher and a betrothed man—he burned the letter with diagrams that he had once prepared when he feared he would die (from that fashionable disease, aneurysm) before endowing the world with the blessing of eternal and extremely cheap motion. In the descriptions of his absurd experiments and in his commentaries on them, in this mixture of ignorance and ratiocination, one can already detect that barely perceptible but fatal flaw which gave his later utterances something like a hint of quackery; an imaginary hint, for we must keep in mind that the man was as straight and firm as the trunk of an oak, “the most honest of the honest” (his wife’s expression); but such was the fate of Chernyshevski that everything turned against him: no matter what subject he touched there would come to light—insidiously, and with the most taunting inevitability—something that was completely opposed to his conception of it. He, for instance, was for synthesis, for the force of attraction, for the living link (reading a novel he would kiss the page where the author appealed to the reader) and what was the answer he got? Disintegration, solitude, estrangement. He preached soundness and common sense in everything—and as if in response to someone’s mocking summons, his destiny was cluttered with blockheads, crackbrains and madmen. For everything he was returned “a negative hundredfold,” in Strannolyubski’s happy phrase, for everything he was backkicked by his own dialectic, for everything the gods had their revenge on him; for his sober views on the unreal roses of poets, for doing good by means of novel writing, for his belief in knowledge—and what unexpected, what cunning forms this revenge assumed! What if, he muses in 1848, one attached a pencil to a mercury thermometer, so that it moved according to the changes in temperature? Starting with the premise that temperature is something eternal—But excuse me, who is this, who is this making laborious notes in cipher of his laborious speculations? A young inventor, no doubt, with an infallible eye, with an innate ability to fasten, to attach, to solder inert parts together, having them give birth in result to the miracle of movement—and lo! a loom is already humming, or an engine with a tall smokestack and a top-hatted driver is overtaking a thoroughbred trotter. Right here is the chink with the nidus of revenge, since this sensible young man, who—let us not forget—is only concerned with the good of all mankind, has eyes like a mole, while his blind, white hands move on a different plane from his faulty but obstinate and muscular mind. Everything that he touches falls to pieces. It is sad to read in his diary about the appliances of which he tries to make use—scale-arms, bobs, corks, basins—and nothing revolves, or if it does, then according to unwelcome laws, in the reverse direction to what he wants: an eternal motor going in reverse—why, this is an absolute nightmare, the abstraction to end all abstractions, infinity with a minus sign, plus a broken jug into the bargain.
In his commentary and index to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter:
For almost a whole year after the King's escape the Extremists remained convinced that he and Odon had not left Zembla. The mistake can be only ascribed to the streak of stupidity that fatally runs through the most competent tyranny. Airborne machines and everything connected with them cast a veritable spell over the minds of our new rulers whom kind history had suddenly given a boxful of these zipping and zooming gadgets to play with. That an important fugitive would not perform by air the act of fleeing seemed to them inconceivable. Within minutes after the King and the actor had clattered down the backstairs of the Royal Theater, every wing in the sky and on the ground had been accounted for - such was the efficiency of the government. During the next weeks not one private or commercial plane was allowed to take off, and the inspection of transients became so rigorous and lengthy that international lines decided to cancel stopovers at Onhava. There were some casualties. A crimson balloon was enthusiastically shot down and the aeronaut (a well-known meteorologist) drowned in the Gulf of Surprise. A pilot from a Lapland base flying on a mission of mercy got lost in the fog and was so badly harassed by Zemblan fighters that he settled atop a mountain peak. Some excuse for all this could be found. The illusion of the King's presence in the wilds of Zembla was kept up by royalist plotters who decoyed entire regiments into searching the mountains and woods of our rugged peninsula. The government spent a ludicrous amount of energy on solemnly screening the hundreds of impostors packed in the country's jails. Most of them clowned their way back to freedom; a few, alas, fell. Then, in the spring of the following year, a stunning piece of news came from abroad. The Zemblan actor Odon was directing the making of a cinema picture in Paris!
It was now correctly conjectured that if Odon had fled, the King had fled too: At an extraordinary session of the Extremist government there was passed from hand to hand, in grim silence, a copy of a French newspaper with the headline: L'EX-ROI DE ZEMBLA EST-IL À PARIS? Vindictive exasperation rather than state strategy moved the secret organization of which Gradus was an obscure member to plot the destruction of the royal fugitive. Spiteful thugs! They may be compared to hoodlums who itch to torture the invulnerable gentleman whose testimony clapped them in prison for life. Such convicts have been known to go berserk at the thought that their elusive victim whose very testicles they crave to twist and tear with their talons, is sitting at a pergola feast on a sunny island or fondling some pretty young creature between his knees in serene security - and laughing at them! One supposes that no hell can be worse than the helpless rage they experience as the awareness of that implacable sweet mirth reaches them and suffuses them, slowly destroying their brutish brains. A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty. The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
Mandevil, Baron Mirador, cousin of Radomir Mandevil (q. v.), experimentalist, madman and traitor, 171.
Mandevil, Baron Radomir, b. 1925, man of fashion and Zemblan patriot; in 1936, K's throne page, 130; in 1958, disguised, 149. (Index)
In a letter of Feb. 10, 1831, to Krivtsov (a hero of the anti-Napoleon wars who had lost a leg in the battle of Kulm) Pushkin says ty bez nogi (you are one-legged), a ya zhenat (and I am married):
Посылаю тебе, милый друг, любимое моё сочинение. Ты некогда баловал первые мои опыты — будь благосклонен и к произведениям более зрелым. Что ты делаешь в своём уединении? Нынешней осенью был я недалеко от тебя. Мне брюхом хотелось с тобой увидаться и поболтать о старине — карантины мне помешали. Таким образом, бог ведает, когда и где судьба сведёт нас опять. Мы не так-то легки на подъём. Ты без ноги, а я женат.
Женат — или почти. Всё, что бы ты мог сказать мне в пользу холостой жизни и противу женитьбы, всё уже много передумано. Я хладнокровно взвесил выгоды и невыгоды состояния, мною избираемого. Молодость моя прошла шумно и бесплодно. До сих пор я жил иначе, как обыкновенно живут. Счастья мне не было. Il n’est de bonheur que dans les voies communes. Мне за 30 лет. В тридцать лет люди обыкновенно женятся — я поступаю как люди и, вероятно, не буду в том раскаиваться. К тому же я женюсь без упоения, без ребяческого очарования. Будущность является мне не в розах, но в строгой наготе своей. Горести не удивят меня: они входят в мои домашние расчёты. Всякая радость будет мне неожиданностию.
A week later, on Feb. 18, 1831, Pushkin finally married Natalia Goncharov. In a letter (quoted by Veresaev in “Pushkin in Life” and by Shchyogolev in “The Duel and Death of Pushkin”) of Feb. 19, 1831, to his brother A. Bulgakov predicts that Pushkin’s wife will be Milady Byron:
Итак, совершилась эта свадьба, которая так долго тянулась. Ну, да как будет хороший муж? То-то всех удивит, — никто не ожидает, а все сожалеют о ней. Я сказал Грише Корсакову: быть ей миледи Байрон. Он пересказал Пушкину, который смеялся только.
The name Mandevil brings to mind a line in Byron’s Don Juan, “Man — and, as we would hope — perhaps the devil:”
But Time, which brings all beings to their level,
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last
Man — and, as we would hope — perhaps the devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:
While youth’s hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this — the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion. (Canto the Fourth, II)
In Chapter Four of The Gift Fyodor says that both Chernyshevski and Count Vorontsov called Pushkin "a poor imitator of Byron:"
Говоря, что Пушкин был «только слабым подражателем Байрона», Чернышевский чудовищно точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронцова: «Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона». Излюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что «у Пушкина недостаток прочного, глубокого образования» – дружеское аукание с замечанием того же Воронцова: «Нельзя быть истинным поэтом, не работая постоянно для расширения своих познаний, а их у него недостаточно». «Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евгения Онегина», – писал Надеждин, сравнивая Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетных узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Уваровым, министром народного просвещения, сказавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: «Писать стишки не значит ещё проходить великое поприще».
When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”