In his commentary and index 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 King Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid (the grandfather of Charles the Beloved), and his mistress Iris Acht (a celebrated actress):
One August day, at the beginning of his third month of luxurious captivity in the South West Tower, he was accused of using a fop's hand mirror and the sun's cooperative rays to flash signals from his lofty casement. The vastness of the view it commanded was denounced not only as conducive to treachery but as producing in the surveyor an airy sense of superiority over his low-lodged jailers. Accordingly, one evening the King's cot-and-pot were transferred to a dismal lumber room on the same side of the palace but on its first floor. Many years before, it had been the dressing room of his grandfather, Thurgus the Third. After Thurgus died (in 1900) his ornate bedroom was transformed into a kind of chapel and the adjacent chamber, shorn of its full-length multiple mirror and green silk sofa, soon degenerated into what it had now remained for half a century, an old hole of a room with a locked trunk in one corner and an obsolete sewing machine in another. It was reached from a marble-flagged gallery, running along its north side and sharply turning immediately west of it to form a vestibule in the southwest corner of the Palace. The only window gave on an inner court on the south side. This window had once been a glorious dreamway of stained glass, with a fire-bird and a dazzled huntsman, but a football had recently shattered the fabulous forest scene and now its new ordinary pane was barred from the outside. On the west-side wall, above a whitewashed closet door, hung a large photograph in a frame of black velvet. The fleeting and faint but thousands of times repeated action of the same sun that was accused of sending messages from the tower, had gradually patinated this picture which showed the romantic profile and broad bare shoulders of the forgotten actress Iris Acht, said to have been for several years, ending with her sudden death in 1888, the mistress of Thurgus. In the opposite, east-side wall a frivolous-looking door, similar in turquoise coloration to the room's only other one (opening into the gallery) but securely hasped, had once led to the old rake's bedchamber; it had now lost its crystal knob, and was flanked on the east-side wall by two banished engravings belonging to the room's period of decay. They were of the sort that is not really supposed to be looked at, pictures that exist merely as general notions of pictures to meet the humble ornamental needs of some corridor or waiting room: one was a shabby and lugubrious Fête Flammande after Teniers; the other had once hung in the nursery whose sleepy denizens had always taken it to depict foamy waves in the foreground instead of the blurry shapes of melancholy sheep that it now revealed. (note to Line 130)
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid. K's grandfather, d. 1900 at seventy-five, after a long dull reign; sponge-bag-capped, and with only one medal on his Jaegar jacket, he liked to bicycle in the park; stout and bald, his nose like a congested plum, his martial mustache bristing with obsolete passion, garbed in a dressing gown of green silk, and carrying a flambeau in his raised hand, he used to meet, every night, during a short period in the middle-Eighties, his hooded mistress, Iris Acht (q. v.) midway between palace and theater in the secret passage later to be rediscovered by his grandson, 130. (Index)
Acht, Iris, celebrated actress, d. 1888, a passionate and powerful woman, favorite of Thurgus the Third (q. v.), 130. She died officially by her own hand; unofficially, strangled in her dressing room by a fellow actor, a jealous young Gothlander, now, at ninety, the oldest, and least important, member of the Shadows (q. v.) group. (Index)
King Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid, brings to mind the three Turgenev brothers: Andrey (a poet and translator, Zhukovski's best friend, 1871-1803), Alexander (director of the Department of Foreign Creeds who helped to enroll young Pushkin in the Lyceum and who accompanied Pushkin’s coffin to the Svyatye Gory monastery where the poet was buried, 1784-1845), and Nikolay (the Decembrist, 1789-1871). Their distant relative, Ivan Turgenev (the writer, 1818-1883) is the author of Dym (The Smoke," 1867), a novel directly alluded to in Pale Fire:
I am happy to report that soon after Easter my fears disappeared never to return. Into Alphina's or Betty's room another lodger moved, Balthasar, Prince of Loam, as I dubbed him, who with elemental regularity fell asleep at nine and by six in the morning was planting heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi). This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land. (note to Line 62)
Tyazholyi dym ("Torpid Smoke," 1935) a story by VN. On the other hand, in his poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) Byron mentions gentle Coleridge, to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear:
Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
To turgid odes and tumid stanza dear?
Though themes of innocence may amuse him best,
Yet still obscurity's a welcome guest.
If Inspiration should her aid refuse
To him who takes a Pixy for a Muse,
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegise an ass:
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind.
In his poem Kubla Khan (1816) Coleridge mentions Alph, the sacred river:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
The sacred river, Alph brings to mind Alphina (the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters) and King Alfin (Alfin the Vague, son of Thurgus the Turgid and father of Charles the Beloved). Alfin = final = la fin. Kinbote mentions King Thurgus in his note to Line 130 of Shade's poem. In Canto One of his poem Shade describes his childhood and says that, as a boy, he was asthmatic, lame and fat:
The regular vulgarian, I daresay,
Is happier: he sees the Milky Way
Only when making water. Then as now
I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,
Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,
I never bounced a ball or swung a bat. (ll. 125-130)
Like Byron, Nikolay Turgenev (the Decembrist who on April 9, 1824, left for Western Europe and remained there till 1856 when the Decembrists were granted amnesty) was lame. In Chapter Ten (XVI: 11) of Eugene Onegin, in which he planned to describe the disastrous uprising of December 14, 1825, Pushkin mentions khromoy Turgenev (lame Turgenev):
Друг Марса, Вакха и Венеры,
Тут Лунин дерзко предлагал
Свои решительные меры
И вдохновенно бормотал.
Читал свои Ноэли Пушкин,
Меланхолический Якушкин,
Казалось, молча обнажал
Цареубийственный кинжал.
Одну Россию в мире видя,
Преследуя свой идеал,
Хромой Тургенев им внимал
И, слово рабство ненавидя,
Предвидел в сей толпе дворян
Освободителей крестьян.
A friend of Mars, Bacchus and Venus,
here Lunin daringly suggested
his decisive measures
and muttered in a trance of inspiration;
Pushkin read his noels;
melancholy Yakushkin,
it seemed silently bared
a regicidal dagger;
seeing but Russia in the world,
in her caressing his ideal,
to them did lame Turgenev hearken
and the word slavery hating,
in this crowd of nobles foresaw
the liberators of the peasants.
Pushkin destroyed Chapter Ten of EO on Oct. 19, 1830 (the Lyceum anniversary). Kinbote's Foreword to Shade's poem is dated "Oct. 19, 1959." According to Kinbote, he writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade’s poem in “Cedarn, Utana” (actually, Botkin writes them in a madhouse near Quebec, in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, writes his poem "Wanted"). "Cedarn, Utana" brings to mind a cedarn cover mentioned by Coleridge in Kubla Khan (ll. 12-16):
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
According to Kinbote, King Thurgus liked to bicycle in the park. In Canto One Shade mentions the miracle of a lemniscate left upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft bicycle tires:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
I had a brain, five senses (one unique);
But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.
In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps
But really envied nothing - save perhaps
The miracle of a lemniscate left
Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft
Bicycle tires. (ll. 131-139)
A lemniscate is a curve shaped like a sideways figure eight (∞), also known as the infinity symbol. In hispoem ထ included in Tikhie pesni (“Quiet Songs,” 1904) I. Annenski compares the infinit}
symbol to the numeral 8 toppled over:
Девиз Таинственной похож
На опрокинутое 8:
Она - отраднейшая ложь
Из всех, что мы в сознаньи носим.
В кругу эмалевых минут
Её свершаются обеты,
А в сумрак звёздами блеснут
Иль ветром полночи пропеты.
Но где светил погасших лик
Остановил для нас теченье,
Там Бесконечность - только миг,
Дробимый молнией мученья.
Acht (cf. Iris Acht, the mistress of Thurgus the Third) is German for "eight." In his poem Buddiyskaya messa v Parizhe ("A Buddhist Mass in Paris"), the third poem in Trilistink tolpy ("The Trefoil of the Crowd"), I. Annenski (whose posthumous 1910 collection Kiparisovyi larets, "The Cypress Box," consists of trilistniki, the trefoils) mentions the fresh iris flowers of the English girls who attend the mass:
Священнодействовал базальтовый монгол,
И таял медленно таинственный глагол
В капризно созданном среди музея храме,
Чтоб дамы черными играли веерами
И, тайне чуждые, как свежий их ирис,
Лишь переводчикам внимали строго мисс.
A basalt Mongol celebrated the divine service and
The mysterious word slowly melted away in the
Temple capriciously created within a museum so that
Ladies might play with black fans and, alien to the
Mystery, like their fresh iris flowers, the Misses
Should pay strict attention only to the interpreters. (2)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions Buddhism:
Among our auditors were a young priest
And an old Communist. Iph could at least
Compete with churches and the party line.
In later years it started to decline:
Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in
Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept;
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,
A school of Freudians headed for the tomb. (ll. 635-644)
A poet, essayist and translator of Euripides, Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909) wrote under the penname Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody"). Lermontov’s poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) ends in the line Ya – ili Bog - ili nikto (Myself – or God – or none at all):
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я — или Бог — или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Who can, gloomy ocean,
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
Nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) brings to mind Nadezhda Botkin (Hazel Shade's "real" name). After her tragic death, her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent), went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.