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) mentions the society sculptor and poet Arnor:
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)
Arnor = Raron (Fr., Rarogne, a municipality in the district of Raron in the canton of Valais in Switzerland). An Austrian poet who was born on December 4, 1875, in Prague, Rainer Maria Rilke died on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was buried in Raron on January 2, 1927:
Rilke's grave in Raron, Switzerland
Raron rhymes with Charon (the ferryman of the Greek underworld) and Acheron (a river that borders the underworld). Rilke's wife, Clara Henriette Sophie Westhoff (1878-1954), also known by her married name Clara Rilke or Clara Rilke-Westhoff, was a pioneer German sculptor and artist. Rilke is the author of Die Sonette an Orpheus ("The Sonnets to Orpheus," 1922), a cycle of 55 sonnets. Rilke wrote the cycle in a period of three weeks experiencing what he described a "savage creative storm." According to Kinbote, it took Shade twenty days (less than three weeks) to write Pale Fire:
Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto. (Foreword)
According to Greek mythology, the legendary poet and musician Orpheus played his lyre so sweetly that his music enchanted wild animals, birds, and reptiles, subduing their natural hostility. Le Bestiaire, ou Cortège d'Orphée ("The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus," 1911) is a collection of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire (a French poet, born Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky, 1880-1918). Tri stana verbalala (three hundred camels) in Arnor's poem about a miragarl bring to mind Le Dromadaire ("The Dromedary"), a poem in Le Bestiaire, ou Cortège d'Orphée:
Avec ses quatre dromadaires
Don Pedro d'Alfaroubeira
Courut le monde et l'admira.
Il fit ce que je voudrais faire
Si j'avais quatre dromadaires.
With his four dromedaries,
Don Pedro of Alfaroubeira
Roamed the world and admired it.
He did what I would like to do
If I had four dromedaries.
A miragarl ("mirage girl") makes one think of Guillaume Apollinaire's poem Le pont Mirabeau ("The Mirabeau Bridge," 1912) collected in Alcools ("Alcohols," 1913):
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again
Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay
Hands joined and face to face let's stay just so
While underneath
The bridge of our arms shall go
Weary of endless looks the river's flow
Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay
All love goes by as water to the sea
All love goes by
How slow life seems to me
How violent the hope of love can be
Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay
The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken
Neither time past
Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay
(tr. Richard Wilbur)
In his poem Apollinaire mentions l’Espérance (Hope). The Russian word for "hope" is nadezhda. The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. 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.