In his Commentary to Shade's poem 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) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the king’s uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
In his poem V yantarnom zabyt’ye poludennykh minut (“In the amber slumber of noon’s minutes,” 1913) Maximilian Voloshin mentions the laurels and the acanthus, Velázquez’s clowns and Shakespeare’s fools:
В янтарном забытье полуденных минут
С тобою схожие проходят мимо жены,
В душе взволнованной торжественно поют
Фанфары Тьеполо и флейты Джорджионе.
И пышный снится сон: и лавры, и акант
По мраморам террас, и водные аркады,
И парков замкнутых душистые ограды
Из горьких буксусов и плющевых гирлянд.
Сменяя тишину веселым звоном пира,
Проходишь ты, смеясь, меж перьев и мечей,
Меж скорбно-умных лиц и блещущих речей
Шутов Веласкеса и дураков Шекспира…
Но я не вижу их… Твой утомленный лик
Сияет мне один на фоне Ренессанса,
На дымном золоте испанских майолик,
На синей зелени персидского фаянса…
In his poem in blank verse Michelangelo, a translation from Verhaeren, Voloshin mentions the architrave:
Уже
Двенадцать вспарушенных сводов замыкали
Семь пророков и пять сивилл,
Упорно проникавших в текст вещих книг,
Незыблемо сковавший
Живую зыбь грядущего.
Вдоль по карнизу пронизанные светом тела
Лепились дерзко, торсы их и спины населяли архитрав
Цветущей зрелостью и осмугленной плотью.
“Seven prophets and five sibyls” bring to mind Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife). In his poem Voloshin calls Michelangelo master:
И стала хвала расти, подобная приливу,
Волнами страстными и рокотом широким.
Но папа Юлий Второй молчал.
Его молчанье было как ожог.
И мастер снова ушел в свое уединенье.
Он с радостью вернулся к старым своим мученьям,
И гнев, и гордость, и непонятная тоска,
Обиды, подозренья
Устремили снова
Свой ураган трагический сквозь душу
Микельанджело.
At the end of Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” (1830) Salieri wonders if the Vatican’s creator (Michelangelo) was no murderer after all:
Ты заснёшь
Надолго, Моцарт! но ужель он прав,
И я не гений? Гений и злодейство
Две вещи несовместные. Неправда:
А Бонаротти? или это сказка
Тупой, бессмысленной толпы — и не был
Убийцею создатель Ватикана?
Your sleep
Will be a long one, Mozart. But is he right,
And I’m no genius? Genius and villainy
Are two things incompatible. Not true:
What about Buonarotti? Or is that just
A fable of stupid, senseless crowd,
And the Vatican’s creator was no murderer?
(Scene II)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart says that genius and villainy are two things incompatible:
Моцарт.
Да! Бомарше ведь был тебе приятель;
Ты для него Тарара сочинил,
Вещь славную. Там есть один мотив....
Я всё 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?
and uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
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’s “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). 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.
In his “Inscriptions on the Book Quiet Songs” (1904), to K. D. Balmont, I. Annenski mentions arkhitrav (the architrave) and his penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”):
Тому, кто зиждет архитрав
Над гулкой залой новой речи,
Поэту «Придорожных Трав»
Никто — взамен банальной встречи.
To the one who builds the architrave
Above the sonorous hall of new speech,
To the poet of “Roadside Weeds”
Nobody – instead of a banal meeting.
In his essay Problema Gamleta (“The Problem of Hamlet”) included in Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy ("The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909) Annenski mentions Pushkin's Mozart and says that Hamlet is not Salieri:
Видите ли: зависть художника не совсем то, что наша...
Для художника это - болезненное сознание своей ограниченности и желание делать творческую жизнь свою как можно полнее. Истинный художник и завистлив и жаден... я слышу возражение - пушкинский Моцарт. - Да! Но ведь Гамлет не Сальери. Моцарта же Пушкин, как известно, изменил: его короткая жизнь была отнюдь не жизнью праздного гуляки, а сплошным творческим горением. Труд его был громаден, не результат труда, а именно труд.
The king’s uncle, Conmal is the Duke of Aros. In his Eugene Onegin Commentary VN several times mentions Jean-François Ducis (1733-1816), a fervent admirer of "Sakespir." In Ducis’s French version (1772) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.1) Hamlet tells Ophelia:
Que tu me connois mal , ô ma chere Ophélie!
In Canto Two of his poem Shade mentions a hive in which he is locked up:
What moment in the gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?
Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
A syllogism: other men die; but I
Am not another; therefore I'll not die.
Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears. In this hive I'm
Locked up. Yet, if prior to life we had
Been able to imagine life, what mad,
Impossible, unutterably weird,
Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared! (ll. 209-220)
In VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) Shakespeare's head is compared to a hive of words:
But enough of this, let us hear Ember's rendering of some famous lines:
Ubit' il' ne ubit'? Vot est' oprosen.
Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren
Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka –
(or as a Frenchman might have it:)
L’éorgerai-je ou non? Voici le vrai problème.
Est-il plus noble en soi de supporter quand même
Et les dards et le feu d'un accablant destin –
Yes, I am still jesting. We now come to the real thing.
Tam nad ruch'om rostiot naklonno iva,
V vode iavliaia list'ev sedinu;
Guirliandy fantasticheskie sviv
Iz etikh list'ev – s primes'u romashek,
Krapivy, lutikov –
(over yon brook there grows aslant a willow
Showing in the water the hoariness of its leaves;
Having tressed fantastic garlands
of these leaves, with a sprinkling of daisies,
Nettles, crowflowers – )
You see, I have to choose my commentators.
Or this difficult passage:
Ne dumaete-li Vy, sudar', shto vot eto (the song about the wounded deer), da les per'ev na shliape, da dve kamchatye rozy na proreznykh bashmakakh, mogli by, kol' fortuna zadala by mne turku, zasluzhit' mne uchast'e v teatralnoy arteli; a, sudar'?
Or the beginning of my favourite scene:
As he sits listening to Ember's translation, Krug cannot help marvelling at the strangeness of the day. He imagines himself at some point in the future recalling this particular moment. He, Krug, was sitting beside Ember's bed. Ember, with knees raised under the counterpane, was reading bits of blank verse from scraps of paper. Krug had recently lost his wife. A new political order had stunned the city. Two people he was fond of had been spirited away and perhaps executed. But the room was warm and quiet and Ember was deep in Hamlet. And Krug marvelled at the strangeness of the day. He listened to the rich-toned voice (Ember's father had been a Persian merchant) and tried to simplify the terms of his reaction. Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combination of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T - the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of sun rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every new wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, but an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk's writing machine? (chapter 7)
In his poem Drevniy plasticheskiy grek ("The Ancient Plastic Greek," 1854) Kozma Prutkov (a poet invented by A. K. Tolstoy and brothers Zhemchuzhnikov) mentions list'ya akanfa (the leaves of the acanthus) and uley shumyashchiy (a noisy hive):
Люблю тебя, дева, когда золотистый
И солнцем облитый ты держишь лимон,
И юноши зрю подбородок пушистый
Меж листьев аканфа и белых колонн.
Красивой хламиды тяжелые складки
Упали одна за другой…
Так в улье шумящем вкруг раненой матки
Снует озабоченный рой.
In A. K. Tolstoy’s poem “The Uproar in Vatican” the eunuch singers attempt to castrate the Pope Pius IX. According to Kinbote, Gradus (Shade’s murderer) tried several times to castrate himself:
At his hotel [in Nice] the beaming proprietress handed him a telegram. It chided him in Danish for leaving Geneva and told him to undertake nothing until further notice. It also advised him to forget his work and amuse himself. But what (save dreams of blood) could be his amusements? He was not interested in sightseeing or seasiding. He had long stopped drinking. He did not go to concerts. He did not gamble. Sexual impulses had greatly bothered him at one time but that was over. After his wife, a beader in Radugovitra, had left him (with a gypsy lover), he had lived in sin with his mother-in-law until she was removed, blind and dropsical, to an asylum for decayed widows. Since then he had tried several times to castrate himself, had been laid up at the Glassman Hospital with a severe infection, and now, at forty-four, was quite cured of the lust that Nature, the grand cheat, puts into us to inveigle us into propagation. No wonder the advice to amuse himself infuriated him. I think I shall break this note here. (note to Line 697)
In A. K. Tolstoy’s poem Istoriya Gosudarstva Rossiyskogo ot Gostomysla do Timasheva (“A History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev,” 1868) Vladimir I (the grand prince of Kiev who converted to Christianity in 988) says:
«Перун уж очень гадок!
Когда его спихнём,
Увидите, порядок
Какой мы заведём!»
“Perun is too loathsome!
You just see what an order
we'll have
once we dethrone him!”
At the end of his Commentary Kinbote quotes a saying that he heard from his Zemblan nurse:
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here. (note to Line 1000)
Zemblan for “devil,” Pern seems to hint at Perun (the Slavic Jupiter).