At the end of his short poem “The Nature of Electricity” cited by Kinbote in his commentary to Shade's poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions "the torments of a Tamerlane, the roar of tyrants torn in hell:"
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? -
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. The name Tamerlane comes from the Persian nickname Timur-i Lang, which translates directly to "Timur the Lame." A Turco-Mongol conqueror, Timur (1336-1405) made Samarkand the capital of his emerging empire around 1369–1370, transforming the city—which had been devastated by Genghis Khan over a century prior—into the glorious core of the Timurid Empire and the seat of a profound cultural renaissance. At the beginning of his novel Our Man in Havana (1958) Graham Greene (an English writer, 1904-1991) mentions a lame black man who counted every step as he went and who had reached '1,369', as he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virtudes (a street in Havana):
‘That nigger going down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr – friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s deathbed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.
‘Joe?’ Wormold asked. ‘I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks. ‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’
‘No.’
‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’
‘I still don’t see…’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.
‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’
‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.
‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’
‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’
‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’
‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’ ‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’
‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional or would you say that wasn’t quite well, suitable?’
‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’ (Part One, chapter 1)
In his commentary to Shade's poem, Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (Shade's murderer, "our man" in Onhava, the beautiful capital of Kinbote's Zembla) Vinogradus and Leningradus. In his poem Nashemu yunoshestvu ("To Our Youth," 1927) V. V. Mayakovski (VN's "late namesake," 1893-1930) famously says:
Да будь я и негром преклонных годов,
и то, без унынья и лени,
я русский бы выучил только за то,
что им разговаривал Ленин.
Even if I were an elderly Negro,
and then, without being despondent or lazy,
I would learn Russian, only because
it was spoken by Lenin.
In his travelogue Moyo otkrytie Ameriki ("My Discrovery of America," 1926) Mayakovski describes his 18-day-long Transatlantic sea voyage and his visit to Havana (the capital of Cuba where Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana is set) on his way to Mexico. Samuel Shade (the poet's father, amateur ornithologist) is the author of The Birds of Mexico (illustrated by the poet's mother, born Caroline Lukin). Elektrichestvo - vid energii ("Electricity is a Variety of Energy," 1928) is a poem by Mayakovski:
Культура велит, — бери на учёт
частных чувств базар!
Пускай Курой на турбины течёт
и жадность, и страсть, и азарт!
The parenthetical "So brightly beaming through a tree So green" in Shade's poem "The Nature of Electricity" brings to mind Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock (1938). VN inscribed a rare 1955 Paris first edition of Lolita to Graham Greene in November 1959, featuring a hand-drawn green swallowtail butterfly and the phrase "green swallowtail dancing waisthigh". Greene famously helped launch the novel's success by naming it one of the best books of 1955. The Wonder Bar in Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana reminds one of the absolutely wunderbar pictures that Dietrich (a young German mentioned by VN in his autobiography Speak, Memory, 1951) took during Hitler's reign:
Somehow, during my secluded years in Germany, I never came across those gentle musicians of yore who, in Turgenev’s novels, played their rhapsodies far into the summer night; or those happy old hunters with their captures pinned to the crown of their hats, of whom the Age of Reason made such fun: La Bruyère’s gentleman who sheds tears over a parasitized caterpillar, Gay’s “philosophers more grave than wise” who, if you please, “hunt science down in butterflies,” and, less insultingly, Pope’s “curious Germans,” who “hold so rare” those “insects fair”; or simply the so-called wholesome and kindly folks that during the last war homesick soldiers from the Middle West seem to have preferred so much to the cagey French farmer and to brisk Madelon II. On the contrary, the most vivid figure I find when sorting out in memory the meager stack of my non-Russian and non-Jewish acquaintances in the years between the two wars is the image of a young German university student, well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment. At our second meeting he showed me a collection of photographs among which was a purchased series (“Ein bischen retouchiert,” he said wrinkling his freckled nose) that depicted the successive stages of a routine execution in China; he commented, very expertly, on the splendor of the lethal sword and on the spirit of perfect cooperation between headsman and victim, which culminated in a veritable geyser of mist-gray blood spouting from the very clearly photographed neck of the decapitated party. Being pretty well off, this young collector could afford to travel, and travel he did, in between the humanities he studied for his Ph.D. He complained, however, of continuous ill luck and added that if he did not see something really good soon, he might not stand the strain. He had attended a few passable hangings in the Balkans and a well-advertised, although rather bleak and mechanical guillotinade (he liked to use what he thought was colloquial French) on the Boulevard Arago in Paris; but somehow he never was sufficiently close to observe everything in detail, and the highly expensive teeny-weeny camera in the sleeve of his raincoat did not work as well as he had hoped. Despite a bad cold, he had journeyed to Regensburg where beheading was violently performed with an axe; he had expected great things from that spectacle but, to his intense disappointment, the subject had apparently been drugged and had hardly reacted at all, beyond feebly flopping about on the ground while the masked executioner and his clumsy mate fell all over him. Dietrich (my acquaintance’s first name) hoped some day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions; from this word, in his innocence, he derived the adjective “cute,” which he had learned from a cousin of his who had been to America, and with a little frown of wistful worry Dietrich wondered if it were really true that, during the performance, sensational puffs of smoke issued from the natural orifices of the body. At our third and last encounter (there still remained bits of him I wanted to file for possible use) he related to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that he had once spent a whole night patiently watching a good friend of his who had decided to shoot himself and had agreed to do so, in the roof of the mouth, facing the hobbyist in a good light, but having no ambition or sense of honor, had got hopelessly tight instead. Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows, nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this), a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans—the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler’s reign. (Chapter Fourteen, 1)