At the end of his Commentary to Shade's poem 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) quotes a Zemblan saying Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan (God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty):
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 two other 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, healthy, 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 principals: 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)
The Zemblan words for "devil" and "god," Pern and Gut make one think of Peer Gynt, the title character of a five-act play in verse (1867) by Henrik Ibsen (a Norwegian playwright, 1828-1906). The Norwegian word for God is Gud (the Devil is djevel). In Ibsen's play the hero says that he is "no more than God’s the Devil:"
VON EBERKOPF. But what then is the Gyntish Self?
PEER. The world behind my forehead’s arch, in force of which I’m no one else than I, no more than God’s the Devil.
TRUMPETERSTRALE. I understand now where you’re aiming!
MONSIEUR BALLON. Thinker sublime!
VON EBERKOPF. Exalted poet!
PEER (more and more elevated). The Gyntish Self—it is the host of wishes, appetites, desires,—the Gyntish Self, it is the sea of fancies, exigencies, claims, all that, in short, makes my breast heave, and whereby I, as I, exist. But as our Lord requires the clay to constitute him God o’ the world, so I, too, stand in need of gold, if I as Emperor would figure. (Act IV, scene 1)
The Gyntish Self brings to mind Kinbote's words "my notes and self are petering out." According to Kinbote, he will continue to exist (cf. Peer Gynt's words "the sea of fancies, exigencies, claims, all that, in short, makes breast heave, and whereby I, as I, exist"). Kinbote's Zemblan nurse reminds one of nursemaid Anne Marie (a kind woman who was forced to give up her own child, who it is suggested was born out of wedlock), a character in Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879), nurse to both Nora and Nora's children. Peer Gynt's goal is to be Emperor:
PEER. Well, first of all, I want to travel. You see, that’s why I shipped you four, to keep me company, at Gibraltar. I needed such a dancing-choir of friends around my gold-calf-altar—
VON EBERKOPF. Most witty!
MR. COTTON. Well, but no one hoists his sails for nothing but the sailing. Beyond all doubt, you have a goal; and that is—?
PEER. To be Emperor.
ALL FOUR. What?
PEER (nodding). Emperor!
THE FOUR. Where?
PEER. O’er all the world.
MONSIEUR BALLON. But how, friend—?
PEER. By the might of gold! That plan is not at all a new one; it’s been the soul of my career. Even as a boy, I swept in dreams far o’er the ocean on a cloud. I soared with train and golden scabbard,—and flopped down on all-fours again. But still my goal, my friends, stood fast.—There is a text, or else a saying, somewhere, I don’t remember where, that if you gained the whole wide world, but lost yourself, your gain were but a garland on a cloven skull. That is the text—or something like it; and that remark is sober truth. (Act IV, scene 1)
Ibsen is the author of Emperor and Galilean (1873), a play about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363 AD), the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire. According to Kinbote, King Alfin's question "What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot:
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). King Alfin's absent-mindedness knew no bounds. He was a wretched linguist, having at his disposal only a few phrases of French and Danish, but every time he had to make a speech to his subjects - to a group of gaping Zemblan yokels in some remote valley where he had crash-landed - some uncontrollable switch went into action in his mind, and he reverted to those phrases, flavoring them for topical sense with a little Latin. Most of the anecdotes relating to his naïve fits of abstraction are too silly and indecent to sully these pages; but one of them that I do not think especially funny induced such guffaws from Shade (and returned to me, via the Common Room, with such obscene accretions) that I feel inclined to give it here as a sample (and as a corrective). One summer before the first world war, when the emperor of a great foreign realm (I realize how few there are to choose from) was paying an extremely unusual and flattering visit to our little hard country, my father took him and a young Zemblan interpreter (whose sex I leave open) in a newly purchased custom-built car on a jaunt in the countryside. As usual, King Alfin traveled without a vestige of escort, and this, and his brisk driving, seemed to trouble his guest. On their way back, some twenty miles from Onhava, King Alfin decided to stop for repairs. While he tinkered with the motor, the emperor and the interpreter sought the shade of some pines by the highway, and only when King Alfin was back in Onhava, did he gradually realize from a reiteration of rather frantic questions that he had left somebody behind ("What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot). Generally speaking, in respect of any of my contributions (or what I thought to be contributions) I repeatedly enjoined my poet to record them in writing, by all means, but not to spread them in idle speech; even poets, however, are human. (note to Line 71)
Kinbote's Zembla (in Zemblan: Semblerland) is a land of reflections, of 'resemblers.' In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his years at Cambridge and mentions his friend 'Nesbit' who resembled early portraits of Maxim Gorki (1868-1936):
To some of the several fellow émigrés I met in Cambridge the general trend of my feelings was so obvious and familiar a thing that it would have fallen flat and seemed almost improper if put into words. With the whiter of those White Russians I soon found out that patriotism and politics boiled down to a snarling resentment which was directed more against Kerenski than against Lenin and which proceeded solely from material discomforts and losses. Then, too, I ran into some quite unexpected difficulties with such of my English acquaintances as were considered to be cultured and subtle, and humane, but who, for all their decency and refinement, would lapse into the most astonishing drivel when Russia was being discussed. I want to single out here a young Socialist I knew, a lanky giant whose slow and multiple manipulations of a pipe were horribly aggravating when you did not agree with him and delightfully soothing when you did. With him, I had many political wrangles, the bitterness of which invariably dissolved when we turned to the poets we both cherished. Today he is not unknown among his peers, which is, I admit readily, a pretty meaningless phrase, but then, I am doing my best to obscure his identity; let me refer to him by the name of ‘Nesbit’ as I dubbed him (or affirm now having dubbed him), not only because of his alleged resemblance to early portraits of Maxim Gorki, a regional mediocrity of that era, one of whose stories (“My Fellow Traveler” – another apt note) had been translated by a certain R. Nesbit Bain, but also because ‘Nesbit’ has the advantage of entering into a voluptuous palindromic association with ‘Ibsen,’ a name I shall have to evoke presently. (Chapter Thirteen, 3)
In Gorki's play Na dne ("The Lower Depths," 1902) Satin famously says that pravda (truth) is the God of the free man (lies are the religions of slaves and masters). Gorki's essay on New York is entitled Gorod zhyoltogo d'yavola (The City of the Yellow Devil," 1906). By the Yellow Devil Gorki means gold. Judge Goldsworth is Kinbote's landlord. Shade (whose God died young) lives in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith. The father of Charles the Beloved, King Alfin (Alfin the Vague) brings to mind Alphina, the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters.
When VN revisited Cambridge in the 1930s and met Nesbit again, Nesbit looked a little like Ibsen, minus the simian vegetation:
When, after an absence of almost seventeen years I revisited England, I made the dreadful mistake of going to see Cambridge again not at the glorious end of the Easter term but on a raw February day that reminded me only of my own confused old nostalgia. I was hopelessly trying to find an academic job in England (the ease with which I obtained that type of employment in the U.S.A. is to me, in backthought, a constant source of grateful wonder). In every way the visit was not a success. I had lunch with Nesbit at a little place, which ought to have been full of memories but which, owing to various changes, was not. He had given up smoking. Time had softened his features and he no longer resembled Gorki or Gorki’s translator, but looked a little like Ibsen, minus the simian vegetation. An accidental worry (the cousin or maiden sister who kept house for him had just been removed to Binet’s clinic or something) seemed to prevent him from concentrating on the very personal and urgent matter I wanted to speak to him about. Bound volumes of Punch were heaped on a table in a kind of small vestibule where a bowl of goldfish had formerly stood—and it all looked so different. Different too were the garish uniforms worn by the waitresses, of whom none was as pretty as the particular one I remembered so clearly. Rather desperately, as if struggling against boredom, Ibsen launched into politics. I knew well what to expect—denunciation of Stalinism. In the early twenties Nesbit had mistaken his own ebullient idealism for a romantic and humane something in Lenin’s ghastly rule. Ibsen, in the days of the no less ghastly Stalin, was mistaking a quantitative increase in his own knowledge for a qualitative change in the Soviet regime. The thunderclap of purges that had affected “old Bolsheviks,” the heroes of his youth, had given him a salutary shock, something that in Lenin’s day all the groans coming from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon had not been able to do. With horror he pronounced the names of Ezhov and Yagoda—but quite forgot their predecessors, Uritski and Dzerzhinski. While time had improved his judgment regarding contemporaneous Soviet affairs, he did not bother to reconsider the preconceived notions of his youth, and still saw in Lenin’s short reign a kind of glamorous quinquennium Neronis. (Chapter Thirteen, 5)
Ibsen's last play is When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vågner, 1899). At the end of his poem Shade says that he is reasonably sure that he will wake at six tomorrow, on July the twenty-second:
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I'm reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine;
So this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade's "Poems" on their shelf.
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. 963-999)
But on the same evening of July 21, 1959, the poet is killed by Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a Zemblan regicidal organization).
brain + Ibsen + ament = R. Nesbit Bain + amen/name/mane
Btw., Pern (the Devil in Zemblan) hints at Perun, the ancient Slavic god of thunder who corresponds to Germanic (and Scandinavian) Thor. Thor brings to mind Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), a Danish-Icelandic sculptor and medalist. The main character in Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken, the sculptor Arnold Rubek, brings to mind Arnor, the society sculptor and poet mentioned by Kinbote:
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin. (note to Line 80)
On the other hand, Pern and Gut (Devil and God) make one think of Gernguter (Russian for Herrnhuter, a Brüdergemeine), a member of the Moravian Church.
2 July 2024, the forty-seventh anniversary of VN's death.