In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions a story in a magazine about a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand:
It was a story in a magazine
About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been
Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.
She told her interviewer of "The Land
Beyond the Veil" and the account contained
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained
Windows, and some soft music, and a choice
Of hymnal items, and her mother's voice;
But at the end she mentioned a remote
Landscape, a hazy orchard - and I quote:
"Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke
I glimpsed a tall white fountain - and awoke." (ll. 747-758)
The author of a remarkable book on surnames, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) would know that the surname Herzen (its Russian spelling is Gertsen) comes from the German word for heart, Herz. It was famously bestowed as an invented surname by Ivan Yakovlev (a rich Russian landowner, 1767-1846) for his illegitimate child. A grandson of Alexander Herzen (a Russian writer and thinker, 1812-1870), Pyotr Aleksandrovich Herzen (1871-1947) was a celebrated surgeon and one of the pioneers of oncology in the USSR. In Canto One of his poem Shade (whose father, Samuel Shade, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton) describes his childhood and says that the cause of his father's death was bad heart and that his mother died of cancer of the pancreas:
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. (ll. 71-79)
Describing his conversations with Shade, Kinbote mentions Professor Pnin, the Head of the bloated Russian department at Wordsmith University:
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." (note to Line 172)
Phin (1957) is a humorous novel by VN. During his heart attack Pnin (whose father was an eye specialist) remembers the date of the Great Moscow Fire--1812:
A sense of being late for some appointment as odiously exact as school, dinner, or bedtime added the discomfort of awkward haste to the difficulties of a quest that was grading into delirium. The foliage and the flowers, with none of the intricacies of their warp disturbed, appeared to detach themselves in one undulating body from their pale-blue background which, in its turn, lost its papery flatness and dilated in depth till the spectator's heart almost burst in response to the expansion. He could still make out through the autonomous garlands certain parts of the nursery more tenacious of life than the rest, such as the lacquered screen, the gleam of a tumbler, the brass knobs of his bedstead, but these interfered even less with the oak leaves and rich blossoms than would the reflection of an inside object in a window-pane with the outside scenery perceived through the same glass. And although the witness and victim of these phantasms was tucked up in bed, he was, in accordance with the twofold nature of his surroundings, simultaneously seated on a bench in a green and purple park. During one melting moment, he had the sensation of holding at last the key he had sought; but, coming from very far, a rustling wind, its soft volume increasing as it ruffled the rhododendrons--now blossomless, blind--confused whatever rational pattern Timofey Pnin's surroundings had once had. He was alive and that was sufficient. The back of the bench against which he still sprawled felt as real as his clothes, or his wallet, or the date of the Great Moscow Fire--1812. (Chapter One, 2)
A son of Ivan Yakovlev and Louise Haag, Alexander Herzen was born on April 6, 1812, in Moscow, shortly before Napoleon's invasion of Russia and brief occupation of the city. In his main work, Byloe i dumy ("Bygone and Meditations," 1870), Herzen tells an episode from his father's life. On September 20, 1812, Napoleon asked Herzen's father (a retired guard captain) to deliver a peace-offer letter to Emperor Alexander I from occupied and destroyed by fire Moscow. The letter was delivered, Napoleon never got a reply from Alexander I. The cause of Napoleon's death on St. Helena (May 6, 1821) was the advanced stomach cancer. Herzen was the first cousin of Count Sergei Levitski (1819-1898), the patriarch of Russian photography and one of Europe's most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators. The 1845 daguerreotype by Sergei Levitski is the only known lifetime photograph of Gogol (a writer, 1809-1852, whom Shade lists among Russian humorists). Describing his heart attack in Canto Three of his poem, Shade mentions his wife's portrait by Lang:
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)
In his commentary Kinbote wonders if Shade has in mind a photographic portrait:
Line 682: Lang
A modern Fra Pandolf no doubt. I do not remember seeing any such painting around the house. Or did Shade have in mind a photographic portrait? There was one such portrait on the piano, and another in Shade's study. How much fairer it would have been to Shade's and his friend's reader if the lady had deigned answer some of my urgent queries.
In Pnin, Lang is the author of the celebrated mural at Waindell College:
President Poore, a tall, slow, elderly man wearing dark glasses, had started to lose his sight a couple of years before and was now almost totally blind. With solar regularity, however, he would be led every day by his niece and secretary to Frieze Hall; he came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon, and although everybody had long grown accustomed to his tragic entrance, there was invariably the shadow of a hush while he was being steered to his carved chair and while he groped for the edge of the table; and it was strange to see, directly behind him on the wall, his stylized likeness in a mauve double-breasted suit and mahogany shoes, gazing with radiant magenta eyes at the scrolls handed him by Richard Wagner, Dostoyevsky, and Confucius, a group that Oleg Komarov, of the Fine Arts Department, had painted a decade ago into Lang's celebrated mural of 1938, which carried all around the dining-room a pageant of historical figures and Waindell faculty members. (Chapter Three, 5)
Leonardo's Last Supper (mentioned by Kinbote when he describes a conversation at the Faculty Club) is a mural painting on the dining hall wall of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. In his poem about painters Victor Wind (in Pnin, the son of Eric Wind and Liza Bogolepov, Pnin's former wife) mentions Mona Lisa and her nun-pale lips:
To the latest issue of the school magazine Victor had contributed a poem about painters, over the nom de guerre Moinet, and under the motto 'Bad reds should all be avoided; even if carefully manufactured, they are still bad' (quoted from an old book on the technique of painting but smacking of a political aphorism). The poem began:
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa's
lips that you had made so red. (Chapter Four, 5)