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), the Reformation in Zembla had been headed by a composer of genius:
I had mentioned - I do not recall in what connection - certain differences between my Church and his. It should be noted that our Zemblan brand of Protestantism is rather closely related to the "higher" churches of the Anglican Communion, but has some magnificent peculiarities of its own. The Reformation with us had been headed by a composer of genius; our liturgy is penetrated with rich music; our boy choirs are the sweetest in the world. Sybil Shade came from a Catholic family but since early girlhood developed, as she told me herself, "a religion of her own" - which is generally synonymous, at the best, with a half-hearted attachment to some half-heathen sect or, at the worst, with tepid atheism. She had weaned her husband not only from the Episcopal Church of his fathers, but from all forms of sacramental worship. (note to Line 549)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is the quintessential Protestant composer. He even attended the same school in Eisenach where Martin Luther (a leader of the Protestant Reformation, 1483-1546) had been a pupil two centuries before. Shade's murderer, Jakob Gradus is the son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga:
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night. (Kinbote's note to Line 17)
Vinograd ("The Grapes," 1824) is a poem by Pushkin. The surname Tselovalnikov comes from tseloval’nik (obs., inn-keeper, publican; hist., tax-collector). In Rodoslovnaya moego geroya (“The Pedigree of my Hero,” 1836) Pushkin mentions Mityushka tseloval’nik (Mityushka the tax-collector):
Кто б ни был ваш родоначальник,
Мстислав, князь Курбский, иль Ермак,
Или Митюшка целовальник,
Вам всё равно.
Whoever your ancestor were,
Mstislav, Prince Kurbski, or Yermak,
or Mityushka the tax-collector,
you do not care.
At the beginning of Slovo o polku Igoreve (“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”) khrabryi Mstislav (brave Mstislav) who slew Rededya before the Kasog troops and krasnyi Roman Svyatoslavovich (fair Roman son of Svyatoslav) are mentioned:
Не лѣполи ны бяшетъ, братiе, начяти старыми словесы трудныхъ повѣстiй о пълку Игоревѣ, Игоря Святъславлича! начати же ся тъй пѣсни по былинамь сего времени, а не по замышленiю Бояню. Боянъ бо вѣщiй, аще кому хотяше пѣснь творити, то растѣкашется мыслiю по древу, сѣрымъ вълкомъ по земли, шизымъ орломъ подъ облакы. Помняшеть бо речь първыхъ временъ усобiцѣ; тогда пущашеть ĩ соколовь на стадо лебедѣй, который дотечаше, та преди пѣсь пояше, старому Ярослову, храброму Мстиславу, иже зарѣза Редедю предъ пълкы Касожьскыми, красному Романови Святъславличю.
Might it not become us, brothers,
to begin in the diction of yore
the stern tale
of the campaign of Igor,
Igor son of Svyatoslav?
Let us, however,
begin this song
in keeping with the happenings
of these times
and not with the contriving of Boyan.
For he, vatic Boyan
if he wished to make a laud for one,
ranged in thought
[like the nightingale] over the tree;
like the gray wolf
across land;
like the smoky eagle
up to the clouds.
For as he recalled, said he,
the feuds of initial times,
"He set ten falcons
upon a flock of swans,
and the one first overtaken,
sang a song first"—
to Yaroslav of yore,
and to brave Mstislav
who slew Rededya
before the Kasog troops,
and to fair Roman
son of Svyatoslav.
An anonymous epic poem of the 12th century, Slovo o polku Igoreve was translated into English by VN. Roman Tselovalnikov and Jakob Gradus bring to mind Roman Jakobson, a linguist with whom VN refused to collaborate on his translation (1960) of Slovo. In his Commentary and Index to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions the Russian adventurer Hodinski, Queen Yaruga’s goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius who is said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste:
When I was a child, Russia enjoyed quite a vogue at the court of Zembla but that was a different Russia - a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and gentlemen and liberal aspirations. We may add that Charles the Beloved could boast of some Russian blood. In medieval times two of his ancestors had married Novgorod princesses. Queen Yaruga (reigned 1799-1800) his great-great-granddam, was half Russian; and most historians believe that Yaruga's only child Igor was not the son of Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) but the fruit of her amours with the Russian adventurer Hodinski, her goliart (court jester) and a poet of genius, said to have forged in his spare time a famous old Russian chanson de geste generally attributed to an anonymous bard of the twelfth century. (note to Line 697)
Hodinski, Russian adventurer, d. 1800, also known as Hodyna, 681; resided in Zembla 1778-1800; author of a celebrated pastiche and lover of Princess (later Queen) Yaruga (q.v.), mother of Igor II, grandmother of Thurgus (q.v.). (Index)
Igor II, reigned 1800-1845, a wise and benevolent king, son of Queen Yaruga (q. v.) and father of Thurgus III (q. v.); a very private section of the picture gallery in the Palace, accessible, only to the reigning monarch, but easily broken into through Bower P by an inquisitive pubescent, contained the statues of Igor's four hundred favorite catamites, in pink marble, with inset glass eyes and various touched up details, an outstanding exhibition of verisimilitude and bad art, later presented by K. to an Asiatic potentate. (Index)
Yaruga, Queen, reigned 1799-1800, sister of Uran (q. v.); drowned in an ice-hole with her Russian lover during traditional New Year's festivities, 681. (Index)
In Vospominaniya o Rossii (“Reminiscences of Russia,” 1959) Leonid Sabaneyev (a music critic, 1881-1968) mentions Igor Markevich, a young talented composer whom the critics called “Igor II” (Igor I was Stravinsky):
Самый, быть может, одаренный и самый молодой из зарубежья — Игорь Маркевич оказывается более втянувшимся в европейский, даже более точно — парижский стиль музыки. Он — не «дикий», напротив, он является уже всецело детищем «европейского мира» и парижской культуры и одно время подавал такие надежды, что его уже звали «Игорем II» (Игорь I — это Стравинский). Ему, как и всем, попавшим в этот плен, угрожает опасность быть навсегда плененным той манерой, которая сама накануне крушения. Если его музыкальность сможет преодолеть эти влияния, то он сможет выдвинуться, ибо у него есть качество, редкое в наше время, — настоящая звуковая фантазия.
Igor Markevich (1912-83) was an intimate friend of Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), a ballet impresario who was the model of Prince Fig in VN’s story Solus Rex (1940). According to Kinbote, he suggested to Shade Solus Rex as a title of his poem:
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title - the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?
Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. (note to Line 1000)
In his commentary Kinbote mentions a chess problem of the solus rex type:
Line 130 is followed in the draft by four verses which Shade discarded in favor of the Fair Copy continuation (line 131 etc.). This false start goes:
As children playing in a castle find
In some old closet full of toys, behind
The animals and masks, a sliding door
[four words heavily crossed out] a secret corridor -
The comparison has remained suspended. Presumably our poet intended to attach it to the account of his stumbling upon some mysterious truth in the fainting fits of his boyhood. I cannot say how sorry I am that he rejected these lines. I regret it not only because of their intrinsic beauty, which is great, but also because the image they contain was suggested by something Shade had from me. I have already alluded in the course of these notes to the adventures of Charles Xavier, last King of Zembla, and to the keen interest my friend took in the many stories I told him about that king. The index card on which the variant has been preserved is dated July 4 and is a direct echo of our sunset rambles in the fragrant lanes of New Wye and Dulwich. "Tell me more," he would say as he knocked his pipe empty against a beech trunk, and while the colored cloud lingered, and while far away in the lighted house on the hill Mrs. Shade sat quietly enjoying a video drama, I gladly acceded to my friend's request.
In simple words I described the curious situation in which the King found himself during the first months of the rebellion. He had the amusing feeling of his being the only black piece in what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type. The Royalists, or at least the Modems (Moderate Democrats), might have still prevented the state from turning into a commonplace modern tyranny, had they been able to cope with the tainted gold and the robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, the King refused to abdicate. A haughty and morose captive, he was caged in his rose-stone palace from a corner turret of which one could make out with the help of field glasses lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club, and the English ambassador in old-fashioned flannels playing tennis with the Basque coach on a clay court as remote as paradise. How serene were the mountains, how tenderly painted on the western vault of the sky! (note to Line 130)
A person who creates endgame studies or chess problems is called a chess composer. The author of Poems and Problems (1973), VN was a chess composer. In a theological dispute with Kinbote Shade mentions chess problems:
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance. (note to Line 549)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack during which he saw a tall white fountain. Pushkin's poem Bakhchisarayskiy fontan ("The Fountain of Bakhchisaray," 1821-23) makes one think of J. S. Bach (in Бахчисарай there is Бах, Bach in Russian spelling). In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart says that genius and villainy are two things incompatible and uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Моцарт.
Да! Бомарше ведь был тебе приятель;
Ты для него Тарара сочинил,
Вещь славную. Там есть один мотив....
Я все твержу его, когда я счастлив....
Ла ла ла ла.... Ах, правда ли, Сальери,
Что Бомарше кого-то отравил?
Сальери.
Не думаю: он слишком был смешон
Для ремесла такого.
Моцарт.
Он же гений,
Как ты, да я. А гений и злодейство,
Две вещи несовместные. Не правда ль?
Mozart
Yes, you and Beaumarchais were pals, weren’t you?
It was for him you wrote Tarare, a lovely
Work. There is one tune in it, I always
Hum it to myself when I feel happy . . .
La la la la . . . Salieri, is it true
That Beaumarchais once poisoned somebody?
Salieri
I don’t think so. He was too droll a fellow
For such a trade.
Mozart
Besides, he was a genius,
Like you and me. And genius and villainy
Are two things incompatible, aren’t they?
Моцарт
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! но нет; тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power of harmony!
But no: the world could not go on then. None
Would bother with the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art.
(Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). In his epigram on Count Vorontsov (the governor general of New Russia, the poet's boss in Odessa) Pushkin mentions nadezhda (hope):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is a hope
That he will be a full one at last.
There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin will be full again.
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 music, a coda is a passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end. In Der Untergang des Abendlandes (“The Decline of the West,” 1918) Oswald Spengler speaks of Napoleon, Bismarck and Goethe and mentions a coda (using the word in a musical sense):
Napoleon hat in bedeutenden Augenblicken ein starkes Gefühl für die tiefe Logik des Weltwerdens. Er ahnte dann, inwiefern er ein Schicksal war und inwiefern er eines hatte. »Ich fühle mich gegen ein Ziel getrieben, das ich nicht kenne. Sobald ich es erreicht haben werde, sobald ich nicht mehr notwendig sein werde, wird ein Atom genügen, mich zu zerschmettern. Bis dahin aber werden alle menschlichen Kräfte nichts gegen mich vermögen«, sagte er zu Beginn des russischen Feldzugs… Bismarck selbst deutet in seinen Erinnerungen an, daß im Frühling 1848 eine Einigung in weiterem Umfang als 1870 hätte erreicht werden können, was nur an der Politik des preußischen Königs, richtiger an seinem privaten Geschmack scheiterte. Das wäre, auch nach Bismarcks Gefühl, eine matte Durchführung des »Satzes« gewesen, die irgendwie eine Coda (»da capo e poi la coda«) notwendig gemacht hätte. Der Sinn der Epoche – das Thema – wäre aber durch keine Gestaltung des Tatsächlichen verändert worden. Goethe konnte – vielleicht – in frühen Jahren sterben, nicht seine »Idee«. Faust und Tasso wären nicht geschrieben worden, aber sie wären, ohne ihre poetische Greifbarkeit, in einem sehr geheimnisvollen Sinne trotzdem »gewesen«. (Chapter Two, II, 16)
In VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) Yasha Chernyshevski (whose father, a Protestant, went mad after his son's suicide) was in a daze for a whole week after reading Spengler:
Его пасмурность, прерываемая резким крикливым весельем, свойственным безъюморным людям; его сентиментально-умственные увлечения; его чистота, которая сильно отдавала бы трусостью чувств, кабы не болезненная изысканность их толкования; его ощущение Германии; его безвкусные тревоги («неделю был как в чаду», потому что прочитал Шпенглера); наконец, его стихи… словом всё то, что для его матери было преисполнено очарования, мне лишь претило.
His somberness, interrupted by the sudden shrill gaiety characteristic of humorless people; the sentimentality of his intellectual enthusiasms; his purity, which would have strongly suggested timidity of the senses were it not for the morbid over-refinement of their interpretation; his feeling for Germany; his tasteless spiritual throes (“For a whole week,” he said, “I was in a daze”—after reading Spengler!); and finally his poetry… in short, everything that to his mother was filled with enchantment only repelled me. (Chapter One)
According to Spengler, Die Nacht entkörpert; der Tag entseelt (night eliminates body, day soul). In his Foreword and Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote mentions Dr. Oscar Nattochdag (a distinguished Zemblan scholar whose surname means in Swedish “night and day”). Dr. Nattochdag’s nickname, Netochka, hints at Dostoevski’s unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). In Chapter Five of The Gift Fyodor compares Dostoevski to a room in which a lamp burns during the day:
Фёдор Константинович собрался было восвояси, когда его сзади окликнул шепелявый голос: он принадлежал Ширину, автору романа "Седина" (с эпиграфом из книги Иова), очень сочувственно встреченного эмигрантской критикой. ("Господи, отче -- --? По Бродвею, в лихорадочном шорохе долларов, гетеры и дельцы в гетрах, дерясь, падая, задыхаясь, бежали за золотым тельцом, который, шуршащими боками протискиваясь между небоскребами, обращал к электрическому небу изможденный лик свой и выл. В Париже, в низкопробном притоне, старик Лашез, бывший пионер авиации, а ныне дряхлый бродяга, топтал сапогами старуху-проститутку Буль-де-Сюиф. Господи отчего -- --? Из московского подвала вышел палач и, присев у конуры, стал тюлюкать мохнатого щенка: Махонький, приговаривал он, махонький... В Лондоне лорды и лэди танцевали джими и распивали коктейль, изредка посматривая на эстраду, где на исходе восемнадцатого ринга огромный негр кнок-оутом уложил на ковер своего белокурого противника. В арктических снегах, на пустом ящике из-под мыла, сидел путешественник Эриксен и мрачно думал: Полюс или не полюс?.. Иван Червяков бережно обстригал бахрому единственных брюк. Господи, отчего Вы дозволяете все это?"). Сам Ширин был плотный, коренастый человек, с рыжеватым бобриком, всегда плохо выбритый, в больших очках, за которыми, как в двух аквариумах, плавали два маленьких, прозрачных глаза, совершенно равнодушных к зрительным впечатлениям. Он был слеп как Мильтон, глух как Бетховен, и глуп как бетон. Святая ненаблюдательность (а отсюда – полная неосведомленность об окружающем мире -- и полная неспособность что-либо именовать) -- свойство, почему-то довольно часто встречающееся у русского литератора-середняка, словно тут действует некий благотворный рок, отказывающий безталанному в благодати чувственного познания, дабы он зря не изгадил материала. Бывает, конечно, что в таком темном человеке играет какой-то собственный фонарик, -- не говоря о том, что известны случаи, когда по прихоти находчивой природы, любящей неожиданные приспособления и подмены, такой внутренний свет поразительно ярок -- на зависть любому краснощекому таланту. Но даже Достоевский всегда как-то напоминает комнату, в которой днём горит лампа.
Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete uninformedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day.
“An Epigraph from the Book of Job” brings to mind Shestov’s book Na vesakh Iova (“In Job’s Balances,” 1929). Lev Shestov is the author of Potestas clavium. Vlast’ klyuchey (“Power of the Keys,” 1923). In Tysyacha i odna noch’ (“A Thousand and One Nights”), a Preface to Potestas clavium, Shestov says that mankind is plunged into a perpetual night – even in a thousand and one nights:
Человечество живёт не в свете, а во тьме, окутанное одною непрерывною ночью. Нет, не одной, и не двумя, и не десятью - а тысячью и одной ночью!
Mankind does not live in the light but in the bosom of darkness; it is plunged into a perpetual night. No! Not in one or two or ten but in a thousand and one nights! (4)