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), after Line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man'
In Spanish... (note to Line 275)
Les Trois Ombres (The Three Shades) is a sculptural group produced in plaster by Auguste Rodin in 1886 for his The Gates of Hell (a monumental bronze sculptural group work that depicts a scene from the Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy). In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and quotes the words of his wife Sybil: “I really could not tell the differences between this place [IPH] and Hell:”
A wrench, a rift - that's all one can foresee.
Maybe one finds le grand néant; maybe
Again one spirals from the tuber's eye.
As you remarked the last time we went by
The Institute: "I really could not tell
The differences between this place and Hell." (ll. 617-622)
In a letter of Nov. 4, 1898, to W. E. Henley Auguste Rodin writes:
“How I wish I could have my child’s soul and fairy religion of yore to uphold me! My dear friend, I envy you if you have still your pen at the service of your thoughts. . . I congratulate you (on your book). We have the misfortunes that come with age; but you have compensations; and the respect shown to you by your younger contemporaries who accept your advice is no common thing. Good-bye, my dear great friend Affectionately yours, RODIN.
P.S. – And our friend Stevenson who was so dear, also lost on the way, leaving only his glorious name!”
According to Kinbote, Shade was a very dear friend indeed:
And he was a very dear friend indeed! The calendar says I had known him only for a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music. Never shall I forget how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find; that the suburban house (rented for my use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) into which I moved on February 5, 1959, stood next to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier! Apart from this glamorous neighborhood, the Goldsworthian château, as I was soon to discover, had little to recommend it. The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath. By occluding the apertures upstairs I attempted to give more energy to the register in the living room but its climate proved to be incurably vitiated by there being nothing between it and the arctic regions save a sleezy front door without a vestige of vestibule - either because the house had been built in midsummer by a naïve settler who could not imagine the kind of winter New Wye had in store for him, or because old-time gentility required that a chance caller at the open door could satisfy himself from the threshold that nothing unseemly was going on in the parlor. (Foreword)
The sculptor's surname brings to mind rodina, motherland in Russian, and rodinka (birthmark). Describing the night of his daughter's death in Canto Two of his poem, Shade mentions the face of a famous actress (presumably, Marilyn Monroe) with the grain of beauty (a gallicism) on the cheek:
"Was that the phone?" You listened at the door.
More headlights in the fog. There was no sense
In window-rubbing: only some white fence
And the reflector poles passed by unmasked.
"Are we quite sure she's acting right?" you asked.
"It's technically a blind date, of course.
Well, shall we try the preview of Remorse?"
And we allowed, in all tranquillity,
The famous film to spread its charmed marquee;
The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:
The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain
Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,
And the soft form dissolving in the prism
Of corporate desire. "I think," she said,
"I'll get off here." "It's only Lochanhead."
"Yes, that's okay." Gripping the stang, she peered
At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared. (ll. 443-460)
Rodina and rodinka both come from rodnoy (native). In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Rodnaya Zembla (rodnaya is feminine of rodnoy, zemlya means land and earth):
The sound of a rapid car or a groaning truck would come as a strange mixture of friendly life's relief and death's fearful shadow: would that shadow pull up at my door? Were those phantom thugs coming for me? Would they shoot me at once - or would they smuggle the chloroformed scholar back to Zembla, Rodnaya Zembla, to face there a dazzling decanter and a row of judges exulting in their inquisitorial chairs? (note to Line 62)
Those phantom thugs bring to mind "Spiteful thugs!" (Kinbote's exclamation when he describes the Shadows, a regicidal organization):
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'EN-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. Gradus had long been a member of all sorts of jejune leftist organizations. He had never killed, though coming rather close to it several times in his gray life. He insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards - but let us not forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out. Perhaps our man's foreign origin secretly prompted a nomination that would not cause any son of Zembla to incur the dishonor of actual regicide. We can well imagine the scene: the ghastly neon lights of the laboratory, in an annex of the Glass Works, where the Shadows happened to hold their meeting that night; the ace of spades lying on the tiled floor, the vodka gulped down out of test tubes; the many hands clapping Gradus on his round back, and the dark exultation of the man as he received those rather treacherous congratulations. We place this fatidic moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 - which happens to be also the date upon which an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem. (note to Line 171)
At the end of his Commentary Kinbote mentions his wretched countrymen and a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus who will presently ring at his door:
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"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)
In Dante's poem the inscription above the Gates of Hell reads: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate (“Abandon all hope, those who enter”). The Russian word for hope is nadezhda. The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus. 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.
The Russian title of Dante's Inferno is Ad. Hodasevich's sonnet Pokhorony ("The Funeral," 1928) ends in the words Ten' - v ad! (The shade [goes] to Hades):
Лоб -
Мел.
Бел
Гроб.
Спел
Поп.
Сноп
Стрел -
День
Свят!
Склеп
Слеп.
Тень -
В ад!
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”).
Hodasevich translated into Russian several poems by R. L. Stevenson (The Land of Story-books and The Moon). Stevenson's poem The Land of the Counterpane was translated into Russian (as Odeyal'naya strana) by Osip Mandelshtam. In his poem V tot vecher ne gudel strel’chatyi les organa… (“That Evening the forest of organ pipes did not play…” 1918), with the epigraph from Heinrich Heine’s poem about the doppelganger, Mandelshtam mentions dvoynik (the double):
Du, Doppelgänger, du, bleicher Geselle!..
В тот вечер не гудел стрельчатый лес органа.
Нам пели Шуберта — родная колыбель!
Шумела мельница, и в песнях урагана
Смеялся музыки голубоглазый хмель!
Старинной песни мир — коричневый, зеленый,
Но только вечно-молодой,
Где соловьиных лип рокочущие кроны
С безумной яростью качает царь лесной.
И сила страшная ночного возвращенья —
Та песня дикая, как чёрное вино:
Это двойник — пустое привиденье —
Бессмысленно глядит в холодное окно!
Du, Doppelgänger, du, bleicher Geselle!..
That evening the forest of organ pipes did not play.
A native cradle sang Schubert for us,
The mill was grinding, the music's blue-eyed drunkenness
Laughed in the songs of the hurricane.
The world of the old song – brown, green,
But only eternally young where the Erl-king
Shakes the rumbling crowns of nightingaled
Linden trees in savage rage.
The awesome force of night's return,
That wild song, like black wine:
It is a double, a hollow ghost
Peering senselessly through the cold window!