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), on the day following Gradus' visit to him Oswin Bretwit (the former Zemblan consul in Paris) was hospitalized, operated upon and died under the knife:
But to return to the roofs of Paris. Courage was allied in Oswin Bretwit with integrity, kindness, dignity, and what can be euphemistically called endearing naïveté. When Gradus telephoned from the airport, and to whet his appetite read to him Baron B.'s message (minus the Latin tag), Bretwit's only thought was for the treat in store for him. Gradus had declined to say over the telephone what exactly the "precious papers" were, but it so happened that the ex-consul had been hoping lately to retrieve a valuable stamp collection that his father had bequeathed years ago to a now defunct cousin. The cousin had dwelt in the same house as Baron B., and with all these complicated and entrancing matters uppermost in his mind, the ex-consul, while awaiting his visitor, kept wondering not if the person from Zembla was a dangerous fraud, but whether he would bring all the albums at once or would do it gradually so as to see what he might get for his pains. Bretwit hoped the business would be completed that very night since on the following morning he was to be hospitalized and possibly operated upon (he was, and died under the knife). (note to Line 286)
The surname Bretwit means Chess Intelligence and brings to mind Pavel Milyukov (a Russian politician, 1859-1943; according to Pyotr Struve, "if politics were a game of chess and people were little wooden chessmen, P. N. Milyukov would have been a politician of genius") and Count Sergey Yulievich Witte (a Russian statesman who served as the first prime minister of the Russian Empire, replacing the emperor as head of government, 1849-1915). When Witte died (on February 28, 1915), the emperor Nicholas II (who called Witte's death "God's sign") felt relief and Maurice Paléologue (the French ambassador to the Russian Empire in 1914-1917) could not conceal his joy (Witte consistently advocated against war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, preferring peaceful economic expansion to maintain the Russian Empire's stability). The son of Alexandru Gulianu-Paleologu (1824–1886), a Wallachian Romanian revolutionary who had fled to France after attempting to assassinate Prince Gheorghe Bibescu during the 1848 Wallachian revolution, and his wife, Frederique de Ridder (member of the Dutch nobility, 1829–1901), Maurice Paléologue (1859-1944) brings to mind Sophia Paleologue (c. 1449-1503), a Byzantine princess from the Palaiologos imperial dynasty and the Grand Princess of Moscow as the second wife of Ivan III of Russia. The grandmother of Ivan the Terrible, Sophia Paleologue has the same first name as Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin, the "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved). After the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name), 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. Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." 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 (General Governor of New Russia, Pushkin's boss in Odessa and a target of the poet's epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
The author of Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824), a play in verse, Alexander Griboedov (1795-1829) was a diplomat and Russian envoy in Tehran (the capital of Iran where Griboedov and other members of the Russian mission were assassinated by religious fanatics on February 11, 1829). In a letter of February 14, 1825, to Pavel Katenin Griboedov calls Famusov’s daughter Sofia (a character in Woe from Wit) ferz’ (chessqueen):
Кто-то со злости выдумал об нём, что он сумасшедший, никто не поверил и все повторяют, голос общего недоброхотства и до него доходит, притом и нелюбовь к нему той девушки, для которой единственно он явился в Москву, ему совершенно объясняется, он ей и всем наплевал в глаза и был таков. Ферзь тоже разочарована насчёт своего сахара медовича.
Describing Gradus’ visit to Oswin Bretwit, Kinbote mentions Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros:
The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows' neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs; Oswin Bretwit's father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to "young" Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:
Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent.
The scripta in question were two hundred and thirteen long letters which had passed some seventy years ago between Zule Bretwit, Oswin's grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his, Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros. This correspondence, a dismal exchange of bureaucratic platitudes and fustian jokes, was devoid of even such parochial interest as letters of this sort may possess in the eyes of a local historian – but of course there is no way of telling what will repel or attract a sentimental ancestralist – and this was what Oswin Bretwit had always been known to be by his former staff. I would like to take time out here to interrupt this dry commentary and pay a brief tribute to Oswin Bretwit.
Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland. His face was singularly featureless. He had café-au-lait eyes. One remembers him always as wearing a mourning band. But this insipid exterior belied the quality of the man. From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit! Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water over the golden wake of an emblematic sun. Let no insurance firm or airline use this insigne on the glossy page of a magazine as an ad badge under the picture of a retired businessman stupefied and honored by the sight of the technicolored snack that the air hostess offers him with everything else she can give; rather, let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation. How fervently one had dreamed that a similar symbol but in verbal form might have imbued the poem of another dead friend; but this was not to be... Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, indeed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade! (note to Line 286)
The country where Griboedov was envoy, Iran was ruled by Shahs. In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack and mentions Shahs:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)