In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving and mentions slaves who make hay between his mouth and nose:
And while the safety blade with scrap and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-938)
In his note to Line 937 ("Old Zembla") Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
I am a weary and sad commentator today.
Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope's Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote:
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where
So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla - my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange...
Still later in his commentary Kinbote quotes the beginning of a sonnet in which his uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) says that he is not a slave and calls Shakespeare "Master:"
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)
Khozyain i rabotnik ("Master and Man," 1895) is a story by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), a Russian writer who famously loathed Shakespeare. In his Krug chteniya ("A Calendar of Wisdom," 1906), a collection of insights and wisdom, Tolstoy quotes the words of Henry George (an American political economist, social philosopher and journalist, 1839-1897) who mentioned somewhere a thousand people working together, of whom 999 men are [not necessarily] enslaved to a single person:
Устройство нашего мира таково, что тысяча людей, работая вместе, могут произвести во много раз больше, чем сколько могла бы произвести та же тысяча человек, работая порознь. Однако это не доказывает еще необходимости того, чтобы девятьсот девяносто девять человек делались рабами одного. Генри Джордж. (January 4)
In his novel Voyna i mir ("War and Peace," 1869) Tolstoy mentions the sounds of music which leave you cold a thousand times and the thousand and first time thrill you and make you weep:
«И чему она радуется! — подумал Николай, глядя на сестру. И как ей не скучно и не совестно!» Наташа взяла первую ноту, горло ее расширилось, грудь выпрямилась, глаза приняли серьезное выражение. Она не думала ни о ком, ни о чем в эту минуту, и из в улыбку сложенного рта полились звуки, те звуки, которые может производить в те же промежутки времени и в те же интервалы всякий, но которые тысячу раз оставляют вас холодным, в тысячу первый раз заставляют вас содрогаться и плакать.
And what is she so pleased about?” thought Nicholas, looking at his sister. “Why isn't she dull and ashamed?”
Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose, her eyes became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her surroundings, and from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may produce at the same intervals and hold for the same time, but which leave you cold a thousand times and the thousand and first time thrill you and make you weep. (Book Four, Chapter 15; translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude)
Shade's poem consists of 999 lines and is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). 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 his fragment Rim ("Rome," 1842) Nikolay Gogol (a Russian writer, 1809-1852, whom Shade lists among Russian humorists) describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плща ечах чучело великана, придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: <Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!>
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as a sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведёт за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire foreword, commentary and index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.
In 1848, during his trip to the Holy Land, Gogol visited Beirut (cf. "Sunglassers tour Beirut") where he stayed at the house of his schoolmate Konstantin Bazili (the diplomat and Russian consul in Beirut, 1809-1884). In Gogol's story Nos ("The Nose," 1836) Ivan Yakovlevich (the barber with smelly hands) finds Major Kovalyov's nose baked inside his breakfast loaf. Describing shaving, Shade mentions his mouth and nose ("And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose"). Shade's "sunglassers" make one think of Belikov, in Chekhov's story Chelovek v futlyare ("The Man in a Case," 1898) the teacher of Greek who wears dark glasses, upturned collar, galoshes, and whose ears are cotton-stuffed. According to Kinbote, Shade listed Gogol, Dostoevski (the author of The Double, 1846) and Chekhov among Russian humorists:
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)
In his autobiography Zhili-byli (“There Once Were,” 1961) Viktor Shklovsky (a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer, 1893-1984) says that Gogol's images are precious because they are zemlya (the earth):
Великий узбекский поэт Навои говорил ученикам, чтобы они не писали про драгоценные камни. Если хотите создать розы, будьте землею, писал он.
Образы Гоголя оттого драгоценны, что они земля. (4)
Kinbote's words "Strange, strange" (in his note to Line 937) bring to mind ostranenie (defamiliarization), a literary device used by Tolstoy (according to Shklovsky, the author of the term) in War and Peace.