At the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes and wonders what is the man's age:
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 985-999)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet's wife, née Irondell) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. In 1919 Shade was twenty-one and Dr. Sutton was forty-two (twice the poet's age). This means that old Dr. Sutton was born in 1877 (in July 1959, when Shade writes his poem, he is eighty-two). In 1877, in Rome, Oscar Wilde composed his sonnet The Grave of Keats:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
In his sonnet Wilde calls Keats "poet-painter of our English Land." In Canto Two of his poem Shade says that he was raised by dear bizarre Aunt Maud, "a poet and a painter with a taste for realistic objects interlaced with grotesque growths and images of doom." A curio in Aunt Maud's collection, Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4, on Chapman's Homer (a newspaper clipping), hints at Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816). John Keats (1795-1821) died in Rome at the age of twenty-five. In his poem The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) Robert Browning mentions octogenarian Keats who gave up the ghost:
New long bright life! and happy chance befell—
That I know—when some prematurely lost
Child of disaster bore away the bell
From some too-pampered son of fortune, crossed
Never before my chimney broke the spell!
Octogenarian Keats gave up the ghost,
While—never mind Who was it cumbered earth—
Sank stifled, span-long brightness, in the birth. (IV)
Describing the last moments of Shade’s life, Kinbote pairs Browning with Keats:
Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (note to Line 991)
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). In 1959 both Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) are forty-four. The author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) and A. P. Chekhov (1860-1904) died at the age of forty-four. In a telegram to his publisher (Adolf Marx) Chekhov promised that he will live not longer than eighty years:
В дополнение к письму о переговорах с М<арксом> сообщаю, что я продолжал упорно торговаться до сегодня и только сегодня телеграфировал, что я согласен. За будущие произведения я буду получать (по предварительном напечатании в журналах обычным порядком) 250 р. за лист, потом через 5 лет 450 р., еще через 5 лет 650 р. за лист и т. д. с надбавками по 200 р. через каждые 5 лет. Обещал в телеграмме, что буду жить не долее 80 лет. (a letter of Jan. 20, 1899, to Ivan Chekhov)
According to Kinbote, Sutton is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Actually, Sutton seems to combine sutki (the Russian word for twenty-four hours) with Anton, Dr. Chekhov's first name. In Chekhov's story Ionych (1898), Dr. Startsev, as he speaks to Kitten, uses the proverbial phrase den' da noch' - sutki proch' (day in, day out):
Эх! — сказал он со вздохом. — Вы вот спрашиваете, как я поживаю. Как мы поживаем тут? Да никак. Старимся, полнеем, опускаемся. День да ночь — сутки прочь, жизнь проходит тускло, без впечатлений, без мыслей... Днем нажива, а вечером клуб, общество картежников, алкоголиков, хрипунов, которых я терпеть не могу. Что хорошего?
"Alas!" he sighed. "You ask what I have been doing! What do we all do here? Nothing! We grow older and fatter and more sluggish. Day in, day out our colourless life passes by without impressions, without thoughts. It is money by day and the club by night, in the company of gamblers, alcoholics, wheezers whom I cannot endure. What is there in that?" (IV)
Dr. Sutton's daughter, Mrs. Starr (a war widow and president of Sybil Shade's club) brings to mind Dr. Startsev (the surname comes from starets, "elder, ancient, elderly monk") and Dr. Starov, a character in VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Mrs. Starr must have lost her husband in World War II. Chekhov died (on July 15, 1904) in Badenweiler (a German spa). In Chekhov's story Ionych Ivan Petrovich Turkin (Kitten’s father) mentions rimskoe pravo (Roman Law) and his wife Vera Iosifovna tells Dr. Startsev that her husband is an Othello:
-- Здравствуйте пожалуйста, -- сказал Иван Петрович, встречая его на крыльце. -- Очень, очень рад видеть такого приятного гостя. Пойдёмте, я представлю вас своей благоверной. Я говорю ему, Верочка, -- продолжал он, представляя доктора жене, -- я ему говорю, что он не имеет никакого римского права сидеть у себя в больнице, он должен отдавать свой досуг обществу. Не правда ли, душенька?
-- Садитесь здесь, -- говорила Вера Иосифовна, сажая гостя возле себя. -- Вы можете ухаживать за мной. Мой муж ревнив, это Отелло, но ведь мы постараемся вести себя так, что он ничего не заметит.
"How do you do, if you please?" said Ivan Petrovich, meeting him on the steps. "Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verochka," he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife --"I tell him that he has no human right* to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society. Oughtn't he, darling?"
"Sit here," said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her. "You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous -- he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing." (chapter I)
*“he has no Roman law/right” in the original (in Russian pravo means “law” and “right”)
Kinbote’s landlord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman Law. Duchess of Payn, of great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. In a letter of Oct. 9, 1888, to Mme Lintvaryov (the owner of a farm in Ukraine where Chekhov and his family spent the previous summer) Chekhov (who just received the Pushkin Prize, 500 rubles) says that the prize award will be officially announced at the Academy on October 19 and quotes Othello’s speech in Shakespeare’s play in Veynberg’s translation:
Получил я известие, что Академия наук присудила мне Пушкинскую премию в 500 р. Это, должно быть, известно уже Вам из газетных телеграмм. Официально объявят об этом 19-го октября в публичном заседании Академии с подобающей случаю классической торжественностью. Это, должно быть, за то, что я раков ловил.
Премия, телеграммы, поздравления, приятели, актёры, актрисы, пьесы — всё это выбило меня из колеи. Прошлое туманится в голове, я ошалел; тина и чертовщина городской, литераторской суеты охватывают меня, как спрут-осьминог. Всё пропало! Прощай лето, прощайте раки, рыба, остроносые челноки, прощай моя лень, прощай голубенький костюмчик.
Прощай, покой, прости, мое довольство!
Всё, всё прости! Прости, мой ржущий конь,
И звук трубы, и грохот барабана,
И флейты свист, и царственное знамя,
Все почести, вся слава, всё величье
И бурные тревоги славных войн!
Простите вы, смертельные орудья,
Которых гул несется по земле,
Как грозный гром бессмертного Зевеса!
Если когда-нибудь страстная любовь выбивала Вас из прошлого и настоящего, то то же самое почти я чувствую теперь. Ах, нехорошо всё это, доктор, нехорошо! Уж коли стал стихи цитировать, то, стало быть, нехорошо!
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove's dead clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! (3.3)
In the next scene (3.4) of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello mentions a two-hundred-year-old Egyptian sibyl who gave his mother a magic handkerchief:
'Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sewed the work.
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.
Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on Oct. 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum). There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name), like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means in Russian “hope.”
Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. 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”). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski. The title of R. L. Stevenson's collection of stories, New Arabian Nights (1882), is a reference to A Thousand and One Nights, a collection of fairy tales. Chekhov is the author of Tysyacha odna strast’, ili Strashnaya noch’ (“A Thousand and One Passions, or The Terrible Night,” 1880), a parody of Gothic story dedicated to Victor Hugo (1802-85). Strashnaya mest' ("The Terrible Vengeance," 1832) is a story by Gogol. In a conversation with Kinbote Shade listed Gogol, Dostoevski and Chekhov among Russian humorists. Gogol's Myortvye dushi ("Dead Souls," 1842) bring to mind Pisemski's novel Tysyacha dush ("A Thousand Souls," 1858). As she speaks to Dr Startsev (“Ionych”), Kitten mentions Pisemski and his funny patronymic:
— Что вы читали на этой неделе, пока мы не виделись? — спросил он теперь. — Говорите, прошу вас.
— Я читала Писемского.
— Что именно?— «Тысяча душ», — ответила Котик. — А как смешно звали Писемского: Алексей Феофилактыч!
"What have you been reading this week since I saw you last?" he asked now. "Do please tell me."
"I have been reading Pisemski."
"What exactly?"
"'A Thousand Souls,' "answered Kitten. "And what a funny name Pisemski had -- Alexey Feofilaktych!” (chapter II)