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), in his poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl") the society sculptor and poet Arnor mentioned a dream king in the sandy wastes of time:
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)
Sagaren seems to hint at the Sahara, a desert spanning across North Africa. At the end of his poem Sakhara ("The Sahara," 1918) Gumilyov mentions korabli marsian (the ships of the Martians):
И, быть может, немного осталось веков,
Как на мир наш, зеленый и старый,
Дико ринутся хищные стаи песков
Из пылающей юной Сахары.
Средиземное море засыпят они,
И Париж, и Москву, и Афины,
И мы будем в небесные верить огни,
На верблюдах своих бедуины.
И когда, наконец, корабли марсиан
У земного окажутся шара,
То увидят сплошной золотой океан
И дадут ему имя: Сахара.
And perhaps, in a hundred, two hundred
years, wild packs of sand-wolves
from the burning young Sahara
will rush at our old, green world,
Fill the Mediterranean,
fill Paris, and Moscow, fill Athens —
and we, bedouins on camels,
will believe in heavenly fires.
And then, in the end, when ships
from Mars dock on earth
all they'll see is an ocean of gold,
all, and they'll call it: Sahara.
(tr. B. Raffel & A. Burago)
In H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898) England is invaded by the Martians. H. G. Wells is the author of The Time Machine (1895). Its Russian title, Mashina vremeni, brings to mind werem (of time in Zemblan). H. G. Wells' book Russia in the Shadows (1921), in which the author describes his trip to the Soviet Russia in the fall of 1920 and meeting with Lenin (whom Wells calls "the Kremlin dreamer"), brings to mind the Shadows, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (Shade's murderer) to assassinate the self-banished king of Zembla. The main character in H. G. Wells' novel The Invisible Man (1897), Dr. Griffin reminds one of Griff, the good old grunter (mountain farmer) who offers the King a welcome shelter:
The gnarled farmer and his plump wife who, like personages in an old tedious tale offered the drenched fugitive a welcome shelter, mistook him for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group. He was allowed to dry himself in a warm kitchen where he was given a fairy-tale meal of bread and cheese, and a bowl of mountain mead. His feelings (gratitude, exhaustion, pleasant warmth, drowsiness and so on) were too obvious to need description. A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair as he dozed off between that blaze and the tremulous light of a little earthenware cresset, a beaked affair rather like a Roman lamp, hanging above a shelf where poor beady baubles and bits of nacre became microscopic soldiers swarming in desperate battle. He woke up with a crimp in the neck at the first full cowbell of dawn, found his host outside, in a damp corner consigned to the humble needs of nature, and bade the good grunter (mountain farmer) show him the shortest way to the pass. "I'll rouse lazy Garh," said the farmer.
A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: "Garh! Garh!" Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father's wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan.
Before leaving, the King asked his host, whose name was Griff, to accept an old gold piece he chanced to have in his pocket, the only money he possessed. Griff vigorously refused and, still remonstrating, started the laborious business of unlocking and unbolting two or three heavy doors. The King glanced at the old woman, received a wink of approval, and put the muted ducat on the mantelpiece, next to a violet seashell against which was propped a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife - Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes. (note to Line 149)
Charles the Beloved (who was born in 1915) married Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone (who was born in 1928) in 1949, nine years before the Zemblan Revolution (May 1, 1958). Twenty odd years before, in the mid-1930s, Queen Disa was a little girl younger than ten. Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter whose "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin) was born in 1934. After her tragic death in March 1957 her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent), went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. Nadezhda means “hope.” 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, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Tri stána verbálala (three hundred camels) in Arnor's poem about a miragarl brings to mind Tristan und Isolde (1865), Richard Wagner's music drama loosely based on the medieval 12th-century romance Tristan and Iseult by Gottfried von Strassburg. Its Russian title is Tristan i Izolda. The name Izolda neatly rhymes with izo l'da (Russ., out of ice). The bare-shouldered wife of Karl the Beloved, Queen Disa is an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes. One is also reminded of Ivan Lazhechnikov's historical novel Ledyanoy dom ("The House of Ice," 1835) about the intrigues and horrors of the court of Empress Anna Ioannovna (a niece of Peter I who reigned in 1730-40). As to the name Garh, in Hindi garh means 'fort.'
In his poem about Théophile Gautier (whose collection Émaux et Camées Gumilyov translated into Russian) Gumilyov mentions pustyni vremyon (the wastes of times):
Вперёд, всегда вперёд, и вдруг заметит глаз
Немного зелени, обрадовавшей нас:
Лес кипарисовый и плиты снега чище.
Чтоб отдохнули мы среди пустынь времён,
Господь оазисом нам указал кладбище:
Больные путники, вкусить спешите сон.
…To make us take a rest among the wastes of times,
The Lord as an oasis pointed to us at cemetery:
Sick travelers, hurry up to taste of sleep.
Vperyod, vsegda vperyod (Forward, always forward) in Gumilyov's poem brings to mind Vperyod, vperyod, moya istor'ya! (Forward, forward, my story!) in Chapter Six (IV: 1) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Вперёд, вперёд, моя исторья!
Лицо нас новое зовёт.
В пяти верстах от Красногорья,
Деревни Ленского, живёт
И здравствует ещё доныне
В философической пустыне
Зарецкий, некогда буян,
Картёжной шайки атаман,
Глава повес, трибун трактирный,
Теперь же добрый и простой
Отец семейства холостой,
Надёжный друг, помещик мирный
И даже честный человек:
Так исправляется наш век!
Forward, forward, my story!
A new persona claims us.
Five versts from Krasnogórie,
Lenski's estate, there lives
and thrives up to the present time
in philosophical reclusion
Zarétski, formerly a brawler,
the hetman of a gaming gang,
chieftain of rakehells, pothouse tribune,
but now a kind and simple
bachelor paterfamilias,
a steadfast friend, a peaceable landowner,
and even an honorable man:
thus does our age correct itself!
Zaretski breeds utok i gusey (ducks and geese). Utka is Russian for duck, gus' means goose. Gusev (1890) is a story (set on a ship in the Indian Ocean) by Chekhov. A pioneer parachutist, Colonel Peter Gusev is King Alfin's 'aerial adjutant.' His son, Oleg Gusev (Prince Charles Xavier's beloved playmate, 1916-31), was killed in a toboggan accident. Pushkin's Zaretski and Nina Voronskoy (Cleopatra of the Neva in Chapter Eight of EO) bring to mind Nina Zarechny, a character in Chekhov's play Chayka ("The Seagull," 1896). In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his daughter and mentions the poor sea gulls:
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
Espied on a pine's bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls!
Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song.
And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear
Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear. (ll. 236-246)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
The sea gulls of 1933 are all dead, of course. But by inserting a notice in The London Times one might procure the name of their benefactor - unless Shade invented him. When I visited Nice a quarter of a century later, there was, in lieu of that Englishman, a local character, an old bearded bum, tolerated or abetted as a tourist attraction, who stood like a statue of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his matted hair, or took naps in the public sun, comfortably curled up with his back to the lulling roll of the sea, on a promenade bench, under which he had neatly arranged to dry, or ferment, multicolored gobbets of undeterminable victuals on a newspaper. Not many Englishmen walked there, anyway, though I noticed quite a few just east of Mentone; on the quay where in honor of Queen Victoria a bulky monument, with difficulty embraced by the breeze, had been erected, but not yet unshrouded, to replace the one the Germans had taken away. Rather pathetically, the eager horn of her pet monoceros protruded through the shroud. (note to Line 240)
Monoceros ("unicorn") is a faint constellation on the celestial equator. In several poems Gumilyov mentions edinorogi (unicorns). At the end of Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions ivory unicorns and ebony fauns:
It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebony fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king;
Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high-
Flying airplane to plummet from the sky
And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys,
Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is
My firm conviction – " Darling, shut the door.
Had a nice trip?" Splendid – but what is more
I have returned convinced that I can grope
My way to some – to some – "Yes, dear?" Faint hope. (ll. 816-835)
Btw., Camelopardalis is a large but faint constellation of the northern sky representing a giraffe.