Describing Zembla’s geography, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla:
The Bera Range, a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula (cut off basally by an impassable canal from the mainland of madness), divides it into two parts, the flourishing eastern region of Onhava and other townships, such as Aros and Grindelwod, and the much narrower western strip with its quaint fishing hamlets and pleasant beach resorts. The two coasts are connected by two asphalted highways; the older one shirks difficulties by running first along the eastern slopes northward to Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla, and only then turning west at the northmost point of the peninsula; the newer one, an elaborate, twisting, marvelously graded road, traverses the range westward from just north of Onhava to Bregberg, and is termed in tourist booklets a "scenic drive." Several trails cross the mountains at various points and lead to passes none of which exceeds an altitude of five thousand feet; a few peaks rise some two thousand feet higher and retain their snow in midsummer; and from one of them, the highest and hardest, Mt. Glitterntin, one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east, beyond the Gulf of Surprise, a dim iridescence which some say is Russia. (note to Line 149)
In Norse mythology, Ask and Embla (from Old Norse: Askr ok Embla)—male and female respectively—were the first two humans, created by the gods (the pair appears in both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda). Odevalla and Yeslove seem to hint at Uddevalla and Eslöv, the towns in Sweden. Describing his collection of rhymes, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), says that Sweden was represented in it only with two cities:
Рифмы по мере моей охоты за ними сложились у меня в практическую систему несколько картотечного порядка. Они были распределены по семейкам, получались гнёзда рифм, пейзажи рифм. "Летучий" сразу собирал тучи над кручами жгучей пустыни и неминучей судьбы. "Небосклон" направлял музу к балкону и указывал ей на клён. "Цветы" подзывали мечты, на ты, среди темноты. Свечи, плечи, встречи и речи создавали общую атмосферу старосветского бала, Венского конгресса и губернаторских именин. "Глаза" синели в обществе бирюзы, грозы и стрекоз - и лучше было их не трогать. "Деревья" скучно стояли в паре с "кочевья", - как в наборной игре "городов", Швеция была представлена только двумя городами (а Франция, та, - двенадцатью!). "Ветер" был одинок - только вдали бегал непривлекательный сеттер, - да пользовалась его предложным падежом крымская гора, а родительный - приглашал геометра. Были и редкие экземпляры - с пустыми местами, оставляемыми для других представителей серии, вроде "аметистовый", к которому я не сразу подыскал "перелистывай" и совершенно неприменимого неистового пристава. Словом, это была прекрасно размеченная коллекция, всегда у меня бывшая под рукой.
As my hunt for them progressed, rhymes settled down into a practical system somewhat on the order of a card index. They were distributed in little families—rhyme-clusters, rhymescapes. Letuchiy (flying) immediately grouped tuchi (clouds) over the kruchi (steeps) of the zhguchey (burning) desert and of neminuchey (inevitable) fate. Nebosklon (sky) let the muse onto the balkon (balcony) and showed her a klyon (maple). Tsvety (flowers) and ty (thou) summoned mechty (fancies) in the midst of temnoty (darkness). Svechi, plechi, vstrechi, and rechi (tapers, shoulders, meetings, and speeches) created the old-world atmosphere of a ball at the Congress of Vienna or on the town governor’s birthday. Glaza (eyes) shone blue in the company of biryuza (turquoise), groza (thunderstorm), and strekoza (dragonfly), and it was better not to get involved in the series. Derevya (trees) found themselves dully paired with kochevya (nomad encampments) as happens in the game in which one has to collect cards with the names of cities, with only two representing Sweden (but a dozen in the case of France!). Veter (wind) had no mate, except for a not very attractive setter running about in the distance, but by shifting into the genitive, one could get words ending in “meter” to perform (vetra-geometra). There were also certain treasured freaks, rhymes to which, like rare stamps in an album, were represented by blanks. Thus it took me a long time to discover that ametistovyy (amethystine) could be rhymed with perelistyvay (turn the pages), with neistovyy (furioso), and with the genitive case of an utterly unsuitable pristav (police constable). In short, it was a beautifully labeled collection that I had always close to hand. (Chapter Three)
In Chapter Four (XLII: 1-4) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin rhymes rozy (roses) with morozy (frosts):
И вот уже трещат морозы
И серебрятся средь полей...
(Читатель ждет уж рифмы розы;
На, вот возьми её скорей!)
And there the frosts already crackle
and silver midst the fields
(the reader now expects the rhyme “froze-rose” –
here you are, take it quick!).
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, pp. 470-471) VN points out that morozy – rozy is a Russian example of what Pope calls (in his Essay on Criticism, ll. 349-351) “sure returns still-expected rhymes:”
Where-e’er you find the cooling western breeze,
In the next line, it whispers thro’ the trees…
John Shade is an authority on Pope. In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his daughter (who drowned in Lake Omega; Omega rhymes with Onega, a lake and a river from which the name Onegin derives) and mentions his book on Pope:
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
I'd finished recently my book on Pope. (ll. 383-384)
The title of Shade's book on Pope, Supremely Blest, was borrowed from Pope's Essay on Man (Epistle Two, VI):
See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king;
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his Muse.
In the same Epistle Two of his Essay on Man Pope mentions Zembla:
But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:
Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where:
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he! (V)
To paraphrase Pushkin, chitatel’ zhdyot uzh rifmy Zembla…
The reader now expects the rhyme “Embla–Zembla” –
here you are, take it quick!
In Kinbote’s Index there are the following entries:
Embla, a small old town with a wooden church surrounded by sphagnum bogs at the saddest, loneliest, northmost point of the misty peninsula, 149, 433.
Odevalla, a fine town north of Onhava in E. Zembla, once the mayorship of the worthy Zule ("chessrook") Bretwit, granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q. v., q. v., as the crows say), 149, 286.
Yeslove, a fine town, district and bishopric, north of Onhava, 149, 275.
Zembla, a distant northern land.
In Odevalla there are "ode" and Alla. The author of Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1914), in The Giaour (1813) Byron says:
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)
The name of Zemblan capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven.
In the first stanza of his last poem, On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year (1824), Byron says that he cannot be beloved anymore:
Tis time the heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
Shade’s mad commentator, Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla. The characters of Pushkin's poem Poltava (1828) include the Swedish king Charles XII.
In his poem K moryu (“To the Sea,” 1824) Pushkin pairs Byron with Napoleon. In Eugene Onegin (Two: XIV: 5-7) Pushkin says that we all expect to be Napoleons and that the millions of two-legged creatures for us are orudie odno (only tools):
Но дружбы нет и той меж нами.
Все предрассудки истребя,
Мы почитаем всех нулями,
А единицами - себя.
Мы все глядим в Наполеоны;
Двуногих тварей миллионы
Для нас орудие одно;
Нам чувство дико и смешно.
Сноснее многих был Евгений;
Хоть он людей, конечно, знал
И вообще их презирал, -
Но (правил нет без исключений)
Иных он очень отличал
И вчуже чувство уважал.
But in our midst there’s even no such friendship:
Having destroyed all the prejudices,
We deem all people naughts
And ourselves units.
We all expect to be Napoleons;
the millions of two-legged creatures
for us are only tools;
feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
At the end of his Commentary Kinbote mentions Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the King to escape from Zembla) and a million of photographers:
"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 = Nodo (Odon's half-brother, a card-sharp and despicable traitor) = odno (neut. of odin, “one;” in the above stanza Pushkin uses the word odno in the sense “only”). Odno rhymes with okno (window). Near the end of his poem (in Line 986) Shade mentions old Dr Sutton's last two windowpanes. 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”). In "coda" there is oda (Russian for "ode"). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. According to G. Ivanov, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda" Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his poem Golubizna chuzhogo morya… (“The blueness of an alien sea…” 1955) G. Ivanov says that for the exiles the beauty of foreign lands is emblema gorya (an emblem of grief) rather than a symbol of mundane charm:
Голубизна чужого моря,
Блаженный вздох весны чужой
Для нас скорей эмблема горя,
Чем символ прелести земной.
…Фитиль, любитель керосина,
Затрепетал, вздохнул, потух —
И внемлет арфе Серафима
В священном ужасе петух.
In Kinbote's Index the entry on Embla is followed by that on Emblem:
Emblem, meaning "blooming" in Zemblan; a beautiful bay with bluish and black, curiously striped rocks and a luxurious growth of heather on its gentle slopes, in the southmost part of W. Zembla, 433.
In his essay Balmont-lirik (“Balmont the Lyric Poet”) included in Kniga otrazheniy (“Book of Reflections,” 1906) Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," I. Annenski’s penname) complains that we do not want to look at poetry seriously and mentions emblema (the emblem):
Да и не хотим мы глядеть на поэзию серьёзно, т. е. как на искусство. На словах поэзия будет для нас, пожалуй, и служение, и подвиг, и огонь, и алтарь, и какая там ещё не потревожена эмблема, а на деле мы всё ещё ценим в ней сладкий лимонад, не лишённый, впрочем, и полезности, которая даже строгим и огорчённым русским читателем очень ценится. Разве можно думать над стихами? Что же тогда останется для алгебры? (II)
"How can one brood over verses? What will then remain for algebra?" Among the “emblems” mentioned by Annenski are podvig (feat, exploit), ogon’ (fire) and altar’ (altar). All of them occur in Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1830) in which the author tells to a poet: “you are a king, live alone:”
Поэт! не дорожи любовию народной.
Восторженных похвал пройдёт минутный шум;
Услышишь суд глупца и смех толпы холодной,
Но ты останься твёрд, спокоен и угрюм.
Ты царь: живи один. Дорогою свободной
Иди, куда влечёт тебя свободный ум,
Усовершенствуя плоды любимых дум,
Не требуя наград за подвиг благородный.
Они в самом тебе. Ты сам свой высший суд;
Всех строже оценить умеешь ты свой труд.
Ты им доволен ли, взыскательный художник?
Доволен? Так пускай толпа его бранит
И плюет на алтарь, где твой огонь горит,
И в детской резвости колеблет твой треножник.
Poet! do not cling to popular affection.
The temporary noise of ecstatic praises will pass;
You will hear the fool’s judgment, the laugh of the cold crowd,
But you must remain firm, calm, and morose.
You are a king; live alone. By way of the free road
Go wherever your free mind draws you,
Perfecting the fruits of your beloved thoughts,
Not asking any rewards for your noble feat.
They are inside you. You are your highest judge;
More strictly than anyone can you appraise your work.
Are you satisfied with it, exacting artist?
Satisfied? Then let the crowd treat it harshly
And spit on the altar, where your fire burns
And shake your tripod in childish playfulness.
(transl. Diana Senechal)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri says that he cut up music like a corpse and measured harmony by algebra:
Звуки умертвив,
Музыку я разъял, как труп. Поверил
Я алгеброй гармонию.
Having stifled sounds,
I cut up music like a corpse. I measured
Harmony by algebra. (scene I)
and Mozart mentions harmony and uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If only all so quickly felt the power
of harmony! But no, in that event
the world could not exist; none would care
about the basic needs of ordinary life,
all would give themselves to free art. (scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse. 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 of Kinbote’s commentary). 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, will be full again. In his famous epigram on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda (hope):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is a hope
That he will be full at last.
In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of “The Gift,” Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski (a radical critic) repeated Vorontsov’s words about Pushkin:
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 еще 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.”