According to John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962), a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention is merely turning a new leaf with the left hand:
Above this the poet wrote and struck out:
The madman’s fate
The ultimate destiny of madmen's souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survived death and suddenly expands, bursts out as it were, in peals of healthy and triumphant laughter when the world of timorous fools and trim blockheads has fallen away far behind. Personally, I have not known any lunatics; but have heard of several amusing cases in New Wye ("Even in Arcady am I," says Dementia, chained to her gray column). There was for instance a student who went berserk. There was an old tremendously trustworthy college porter who one day, in the Projection Room, showed a squeamish coed something of which she had no doubt seen better samples; but my favorite case is that of an Exton railway employee whose delusion was described to me by Mrs. H., of all people. There was a big Summer School party at the Hurleys', to which one of my second ping-pong table partners, a pal of the Hurley boys had taken me because I knew my poet was to recite there something and I was beside myself with apprehension believing it might be my Zembla (it proved to be an obscure poem by one of his obscure friends - my Shade was very kind to the unsuccessful). The reader will understand if I say that, at my altitude, I can never feel "lost" in a crowd, but it is also true that I did not know many people at the H.'s. As I circulated, with a smile on my face and a cocktail in my hand, through the crush, I espied at last the top of my poet's head and the bright brown chignon of Mrs. H. above the back of two adjacent chairs: At the moment I advanced behind them I heard him object to some remark she had just made:
"That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand."
I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed eyes. She said: "You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what's his name, old - the old man, you know, at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet."
"We all are, in a sense, poets, Madam," I replied, and offered a lighted match to my friend who had his pipe in his teeth and was beating himself with both hands on various parts of his torso.
I am not sure this trivial variant has been worth commenting; indeed, the whole passage about the activities of the IPH would be quite Hudibrastic had its pedestrian verse been one foot shorter. (note to Line 629)
In her Pesnya posledney vstrechi ("Song of the Last Encounter") composed on September 29, 1911, in Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin) Anna Akhmatov (a Russian poet, born Gorenko, 1889-1966) famously says: "Ya na pravuyu ruku nadela / perchatku s levoy ruki (I put onto the right hand / the glove that belonged to the left)." One of Anna Akhmatov's poems written in evacuation in Tashkent (dated 25 November 1943) begins with the lines: "A v knigakh ya poslednyuyu stranitsu / vsegda lyubila bol'she vsekh drugikh (And in the books the last page / I always loved more than all others)." At the end of his commentary to Shade's poem, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus who will presently ring at his door:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, health heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
Kinbote's foreword to Shade's poem is dated October 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum). According to Kinbote, he writes his commentary, index and foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. But it seems that Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus's "real" name) 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" after Lolita's escape from (or, more likely, death in) the Elphinstone hospital. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. 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 the second poem of her cycle V Tsarskom Sele ("In Tsarskoe Selo," 1911), Anna Akhmatov mentions her mramornyi dvoynik (marble double):
II
…А там мой мраморный двойник,
Поверженный под старым клёном,
Озёрным водам отдал лик,
Внимает шорохам зелёным.
И моют светлые дожди
Его запекшуюся рану…
Холодный, белый, подожди,
Я тоже мраморною стану.
…And there my double made of marble
Lies by the ancient maple tree,
His face onto the lake imparted,
He hears the rustling greenery.
Bright showers wash in a cascade
The clotted wound upon his torso…
O, cold one, white one, only wait
And I will turn to marble also.
(tr. A. Kneller)
In the cycles' third poem Anna Akhmatov mentions nizkie pni (low tree stumps):
III
Смуглый отрок бродил по аллеям,
У озёрных грустил берегов,
И столетие мы лелеем
Еле слышный шелест шагов.
Иглы сосен густо и колко
Устилают низкие пни...
Здесь лежала его треуголка
И растрепанный том Парни.
A swarthy youth once wandered here,
By the shores of the lake he sighed,
And for a century now we revere
A barely audible rustling stride.
Pine needles’ dense and bristly mat
Covers the stumps of the trees…
Here lay his old three-cornered hat
And a worn, tattered book by Parny.
Pni (tree stumps) bring to mind Pnin, the title character of a novel (1957) by VN. Liza Bogolepov (Pnin's former wife) writes verse imitating Anna Akhmatov ("Ya nadela tyomnoe plat'ye"). At Wordsmith University (where Shade and Kinbote teach) Professor Pnin is the Head of the bloated Russian department:
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)