In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter and mentions those almost unruffled evenings when he played mah-jongg with his wife and daughter:
She was my darling - difficult, morose -
But still my darling. You remember those
Almost unruffled evenings when we played
Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made
Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,
The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,
Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
"Mother, what's grimpen?" "What is what?" "Grim Pen."
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
"Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain,
Appending, "Would you like a tangerine?"
"No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?"
You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door. (ll. 357-376)
In his 1926 travelogue Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America”), Mayakovski describes his eighteen-day Atlantic crossing in June 1925 and mentions the first class passengers who played poker and mahjong:
Первый класс играет в покер и маджонг, второй в шашки и на гитаре, третий — заворачивает руку за спину, закрывает глаза, сзади хлопают изо всех сил по ладони, — надо угадать, кто хлопнул из всей гурьбы, и узнанный заменяет избиваемого. Советую вузовцам пробовать эту испанскую игру.
Mahjong is a traditional tile-based game originating in China, typically played by four players using a set of 144 tiles. The word mahjong comes from the Chinese term for "sparrow" (maque / ma-jong), inspired by the clattering sound of the tiles resembling feeding sparrows. In his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers," 1944) VN mentions chinovnyi Kitay (bureaucratic Cathay):
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем все тот же Мамай.
В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя
поступить, как чиновный Китай,
кучу лишних веков присчитавший
к истории скромной своей,
от этого, впрочем, не ставшей
ни лучше, ни веселей.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
on the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Does our plight really force us to do
what did bureaucratic Cathay
that with heaps of superfluous centuries
augmented her limited history
which, however, hardly became
either better or merrier.
and, at the end of the poem, his late namesake:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake,
who used to write verse, in rank
and in file, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as “praline”
or “air chill,”
and others of the same kind.
VN’s footnotes: Line 35: one recalls rather amusing words of Stalin: "Life has become better, life has become merrier!"
Line 52: my late namesake. An allusion to the Christian name and patronymic of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893-1930), minor Soviet poet, endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served.
Lines 58–59/“praline” … “air chill.” In the original, monumentalen, meaning “[he is] monumental” rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning “[he] put in too much pepper,” offers an ingenuous correspondence with the name of the British politician in a slovenly Russian pronunciation (“chair-chill”).
The terrible name of the leader of the Shadows (a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus to assassinate the self-banished king) that cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar, seems to be Stalin. Pereperchil ("[he] put in too much pepper") brings to mind Chekhov's humorous story Peresolil ("Overdoing it," 1885). Literally, peresolil means “[he] put in too much salt.” According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), in a conversation with him Shade listed Chekhov among Russian humorists:
In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation which I had collected in order to refer to them in the presence of people whom my friendship with the poet might interest or annoy. His and my reader will, I trust, excuse me for breaking the orderly course of these comments and letting my illustrious friend speak for himself.
Book reviewers being mentioned, he said: "I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate. I regard both the demolishment and the rave with like detachment."
Kinbote: "I suppose you dismiss the first as the blabber of a blockhead and the second as a kind soul's friendly act?"
Shade: "Exactly."
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron."
Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull."
Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"
Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane."
The respective impacts and penetrations of Marxism and Freudism being talked of, I said: "The worst of two false doctrines is always that which is harder to eradicate."
Shade: "No, Charlie, there are simpler criteria: Marxism needs a dictator, and a dictator needs a secret police, and that is the end of the world; but the Freudian, no matter how stupid, can still cast his vote at the poll, even if he is pleased to call it [smiling] political pollination."
Of students' papers: "I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive."
Kinbote: "For instance?"
"Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: 'The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration.' I am also in the habit of lowering a student's mark catastrophically if he uses 'simple' and 'sincere' in a commendatory sense; examples: 'Shelley's style is always very simple and good'; or 'Yeats is always sincere.' This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool."
Kinbote: "But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school?"
"That's where the broom should begin to sweep. A child should have thirty specialists to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude."
Kinbote: "Yes. I agree." (note to Line 172)
In his Open Letter to Stalin (dated August 17, 1939) Fyodor Raskolnikov (born Ilyin, 1892-1939) famously calls Stalin "a chef preparing spicy dishes:"
Вы - повар, готовящий острые блюда, для нормального человеческого желудка они не съедобны.
You are a chef preparing spicy dishes, for a normal human stomach they are not edible.
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is the main character in Fyodor Dostoevski's novel Prestuplenie i nakazanie ("Crime and Punishment," 1866). According to Kinbote, Shade listed Dostoevski (1821-1881), the author of The Double (1846) etc., among Russian humorists. 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 his fragment Rim ("Rome," 1842), Gogol (a writer whom Shade listed among Russian humorists) describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана, придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: "Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!"
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
In Canto One of his poem, Shade speaks of his dead parents and mentions a preterist (one who collects cold nests):
I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests. (ll. 71-80)
A Futurist poet, Mayakovski crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the French steamship SS España (the journey took him from La Coruña, Spain, to Havana, Cuba, and ultimately to Mexico and the United States). Pis'ma ob Ispanii ("Letters about Spain," 1851) is a book by Vasiliy Botkin (a Russian writer, 1812-1869). The three main characters in Pale Fire, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of mad Botkin's personality. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Graduster after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). 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 (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
Shade’s mother assisted her husband (an ornithologist) in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico:
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
In My Discovery of America Mayakovski describes his brief stay in Vera Cruz and mentions “zopilotes” (black vultures, Coragyps atratus), "the peaceful crows of Mexico" (as Mayakovski calls them):
По дороге к вокзалу автомобиль спугнул стаю птиц. Есть чего испугаться.
Гусиных размеров, вороньей черноты, с голыми шеями и большими клювами, они подымались над нами.
Это «зопилоты», мирные вороны Мексики; ихнее дело — всякий отброс.
In the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), Burlyuk, Kruchyonykh, Mayakovski and Khlebnikov proposed to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity. Describing his rented house in New Wye (a small University town in New England), Kinbote mentions Professor C.’s ultramodern villa that eternity shall not dislodge:
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)