Describing Shade's last birthday (July 5, 1959), 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) calls old Dr. Sutton (one of the guests at Shade's birthday party) "a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman:"
From behind a drapery, from behind a box tree, through the golden veil of evening and through the black lacery of night, I kept watching that lawn, that drive, that fanlight, those jewel-bright windows. The sun had not yet set when, at a quarter past seven, I heard the first guest's car. Oh, I saw them all. I saw ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman arrive in a tottering Ford with his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow. I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr. Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation. I saw a world-famous old writer, bent under the incubus of literary honors and his own prolific mediocrity, arrive in a taxi out of the dim times of yore when Shade and he had been joint editors of a little review. I saw Frank, the Shades' handyman, depart in the station wagon. I saw a retired professor of ornithology walk up from the highway where he had illegally parked his car. I saw, ensconced in their tiny Pulex, manned by her boy-handsome tousle-haired girl friend, the patroness of the arts who had sponsored Aunt Maud's last exhibition, I saw Frank return with the New Wye antiquarian, purblind Mr. Kaplun, and his wife, a dilapidated eagle. I saw a Korean graduate student in dinner jacket come on a bicycle, and the college president in baggy suit come on foot. I saw, in the performance of their ceremonial duties, in light and shadow, and from window to window, where like Martians the martinis and highballs cruised, the two white-coated youths from the hotel school, and realized that I knew well, quite well, the slighter of the two. And finally, at half past eight (when, I imagine, the lady of the house had begun to crack her finger joints as was her impatient wont) a long black limousine, officially glossy and rather funereal, glided into the aura of the drive, and while the fat Negro chauffeur hastened to open the car door, I saw, with pity, my poet emerge from his house, a white flower in his buttonhole and a grin of welcome on his liquor-flushed face. (note to Line 181)
"Perfectly oval little gentleman" brings to mind E. A. Poe's story The Oval Portrait (1842). It is one of Poe's stories praised by R. L. Stevenson in his review of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Academy (London), vol. VII, no. 1, January 2, 1875:
Nor should the reader be surprised if a criticism upon Poe is mostly negative, and rather suggests new doubts than resolves those already existing; for it is Poe’s merit to carry people away, and it is his besetting sin that he wants altogether such scrupulous honesty as guides and restrains the finished artist. He was, let us say it with all sorrow, not conscientious. Hunger was ever at his door, and he had too imperious a desire for what we call nowadays the sensational in literature. And thus the critic (if he be more conscientious than the man he is criticising) dare not greatly praise lest he should be thought to condone all that is unscrupulous and tinsel in these wonderful stories. They are to be praised by him in one way only — by recommending those that are least objectionable. If anyone wishes to be excited, let him read, under favourable circumstances, “The Gold Bug,” “The Descent into the Maelström,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Oval Portrait,” and the three stories about C. Auguste Dupin, the philosophical detective. If he should then desire to read more, he may go on, but warily; there are trap-doors and spring-guns in these two volumes, there are gins and pitfalls; and the precipitate reader may stumble unawares upon some nightmare not easily to be forgotten.
In 1891 R. L. Stevenson heard that Annie Ide (daughter of the US Commissioner to Samoa, Henry Clay Ide) was unhappy that her birthday fell on Christmas Day and that she received no special birthday celebrations, so he “deeded” her his special day, the 13th November. A penalty clause should Annie cease celebrating her new birthday was also included: “I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my rights of the said birthday to the President of the United States.” The working place of the President of the United States is the Oval Office.
The author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) died at the age of forty-four, on Samoa. Charles Kinbote and Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) both die at forty-four. (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). A. P. Chekhov (1860-1904) was also forty-four, when in July of 1904 he died in Badenweiler (a German spa). In a letter of January 1, 1902, to Balmont Chekhov says that in his library there are two books by E. A. Poe in Balmont’s translation, Tainstvennye rasskazy (Tales of Mystery and Imagination) and Poe, Edgar, vol. 1 (Poems, Fairy Tales):
Из Ваших книг у меня имеются: 1) «Под северным небом»; 2) Шелли, вып<уск> 2-й и 7-й (Ченчи); 3) «В безбрежности»; 4) «Тишина»; 5) Кальдерон, т. 1; 6) «Таинственные рассказы»; 7) По Эдгар, т. 1.
За книгу всей душой благодарю. Я теперь не работаю, а только читаю, и завтра-послезавтра примусь за Эдг. По.
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) January 1 is Lolita’s birthday. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) dies on Christmas Day, 1952, in Gray Star (a settlement in the remotest Northwest). Dr. Sutton's daughter, Mrs. Starr (a war widow and president of Sybil Shade's club) brings to mind Dr. Startsev, the main character of Chekhov's story Ionych (1898). As he speaks to Kitten, Dr. Startsev 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)
According to Kinbote, Sutton is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Actually, it seems to combine sutki (the Russian word meaning twenty-four hours) with Anton, Dr. Chekhov's first name.
The adjective 'oval' comes from ovum, an egg in Latin. The Latin proverb ab ovo usque ad mala (literally, from egg to apples) brings to mind the saying ab alpha ad omega (from beginning to end). Charles the Beloved is the son of King Alfin and Queen Blenda. Alphina is the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters. Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters (1822) is a frivolous poem by Pushkin. In his poem Ezerski (1832-36) written after the meter and rhyme scheme of the Eugene Onegin stanza Pushkin mentions Dorofey, the hero's ancestor who engendered twelve sons:
Начнем ab ovo: мой Езерский
Происходил от тех вождей,
Чей дух воинственный и зверский
Был древле ужасом морей.
Одульф, его начальник рода,
Вельми бе грозен воевода,
Гласит Софийский хронограф.
При Ольге сын его Варлаф
Приял крещенье в Цареграде
С рукою греческой княжны;
От них два сына рождены:
Якуб и Дорофей. В засаде
Убит Якуб; а Дорофей
Родил двенадцать сыновей. (II)
The stanza begins: Nachnyom ab ovo ("Let's start ab ovo"). The surname Ezerski comes from ezero (an obsolete form of ozero, lake). Oblako, ozero, bashnya ("Cloud, Castle, Lake," 1937) is a story by VN. Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)
Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) drowned in Lake Omega.