In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood and says that, as a boy, he felt nature glued to him and how his childish palate loved the taste half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste:
My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged. (ll. 99-114)
The Russian word for palate, nyobo, differs only in the first vowel from nebo, the Russian word for "sky, heaven." At the beginning of his poem Shade calls himself "the shadow of the waxwing" and mentions the reflected sky:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)
Shade’s mad commentator, Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla. The capital of Kinbote's Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. Onhava-onhava means in Zemblan "far, far away." The Zemblan word vebodar (upland pastures) seems to combine nebo (the sky) with dar (the gift) and deodar (the Himalayan cedar):
Line 137: lemniscate
"A unicursal bicircular quartic" says my weary old dictionary. I cannot understand what this has to do with bicycling and suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning. As other poets before him, he seems to have fallen here under the spell of misleading euphony.
To take a striking example: what can be more resounding, more resplendent, more suggestive of choral and sculptured beauty, than the word coramen? In reality, however, it merely denotes the rude strap with which a Zemblan herdsman attaches his humble provisions and ragged blanket to the meekest of his cows when driving them up to the vebodar (upland pastures).
Dar ("The Gift," 1937) is a novel by VN. A word that sounds so pleasingly to Kinbote's ear, coramen seems to hint at korameenu, one of India's most popular and tastiest fish, also known as snakehead or Murrel. Shade calls the taste of that golden paste his childish palate loved so much "half-fish, half-honey."
"That rare phenomenon the iridule" mentioned by Shade in Canto One of his poem brings to mind the phenomena in the Haunted Barn investigated by Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) not long before her death and "la femme aux phénomènes," as in his book Sovremennaya zhritsa Izidy ("A Modern Priestess of Isis," 1892) Vsevolod Solovyov (1849-1903) calls Helena Blavatsky (a Russian and American mystic, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, born Helena von Hahn, 1831-1891), the author of Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877):
Несчастная Елена Петровна! вот она передо мною, как живая, но образ её не только двоится, а троится. В ней было три совершенно различных существа. Было в ней ещё и четвертое существо, но я его не знал лично, и только последняя крайность может заставить меня в будущем его коснуться. До сих пор живо много лиц, знавших её в молодости и в зрелых годах её, — эти лица сообщают удивительные вещи о приключениях её бурной и скитальческой жизни.
...Я знаю её состарившейея, больной, но полной огня и энергии — и не могу её иначе себе представить. Как я сказал — в ней было три существа. Первое из них — Елена Петровна в её спокойные дни и вдали от дел «теософического» общества, весёлая, остроумная собеседница, с неистощимым запасом хотя грубоватого, но настоящего юмора, интересных, увы, далеко не всегда основанных на строгой правде рассказов, анекдотов, смешная и симпатичная, как-то магнетически к себе привлекавшая и даже способная на добрые порывы.
Второе существо её — «Радда-Бай», H. P. Blavatsky или H. P. B. — автор «Пещер и дебрей Индостана», «Загадочных племён», «Разоблачённой Изиды», «Тайного учения», «Ключа к теософии», редактор «Теософиста», «Люцифера» и так далее — писательница, поражающая своим литературным талантом, огромной памятью и способностями быстро схватывать самые разнородные предметы и писать о чём угодно, писать интересно и увлекательно, хотя нередко бессвязно и разбрасываясь во все стороны.
...Третье существо Е. П. Блаватской, за которым, к несчастью, слишком часто скрывались и совсем исчезали два её первых существа, это «madame», как называли её все теософы, без различия национальностей, это создательница «Теософического общества», и его «хозяйка», «la femme aux phénomènes».
Unhappy Helena Petrovna! I see her before meas though she were alive; but her picture is not only a double one, it is treble. There were in her - three perfectly different persons. There was indeed a fourth person in her, but that is one which I never knew personally, and only the last extremity will force me to touch on it in what follows. There are still alive many who knew her in her youth and her mature years; and wonderful tales they tell about the adventures of her stormy and wandering life. I made her acquaintance at a time when, for her, the woman's life was over, and she had started on a period of very different activity. The end of this stormy "woman's life" proved for her to be no end such as it generally is with ordinary women, but only the beginning of her real existence, and of the manifestation of all the gifts which nature had bestowed upon her.
As I know her, she is elderly and ill, but full of fire and energy; I cannot imagine her otherwise. As I have said, there were in her three persons. The first of these was ''Helena Petrovna" on her quiet days, far away from the business of the Theosophical Society, a cheerful, witty companion, with an inexhaustible store of rough but real humour, of narratives, interesting, though, alas! by no means always founded on strict truth, and of anecdotes droll and sympathetic, with a sort of magnetic attraction, and even capable of good impulses. Her second character was that of " Radda Bay," H. P. Blavatsky, or H. P. B.; the author of the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, The Enigmatical Tribes, Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy; the editor of the Theosophist, Lucifer, etc.; a writer wonderful for her literary talent, her immense memory, and her power of rapidly grasping the most heterogeneous subjects and writing on them at will writing interestingly and attractively, though often disconnectedly and with digressions in every direction.
...The third character of H. P. Blavatsky, behind which, unfortunately, the two others have but too often been hidden and vanished from sight, is that of "Madame," as all the theosophists, without distinction of nationality, used to call her, the foundress of the Theosophical Society and its mistress, la femme aux phénomènes. (Chapter I)
According to Vsevolod Solovyov, there were in Helena Blavatsky three perfectly different persons. The three main characters in Pale Fire, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus, seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. 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). Nadezhda means “hope.” 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.
In his book on Helena Blavatsky Vsevolod Solovyov mentions Dr Botkin (Sergey Botkin, a celebrated physician, 1832-1889), the first Russian who proclaimed hypnotism "a really existing phenomenon," and not a fairy tale:
Наконец, было и ещё одно интересное дело: доктор Комбрэ помог мне ознакомиться как теоретически, так и практически с гипнотизмом, о котором в то время в России не имели ещё почти никакого понятия — доктор Боткин ещё не объявлял его тогда «действительно существующим явлением», а не сказкой. (Chapter XVI)