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) tells about his uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) and mentions the verbal inferno that Conmal preferred to a quiet military career:
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way.
We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.
A large, sluggish man with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.
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)
Inferno is the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy. Pushkin's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830), with the epigraph from Wordsworth ("Scorn not the sonnet, critic"), begins with the line Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta ("Stern Dante did not scorn the sonnet"). In Line 3 of his Sonnet Pushkin mentions tvorets Makbeta (the author of Macbeth) who loved a sonnet's play. In his poem Zoryu b'yut... iz ruk moikh ("The drums beat dawn... out of my hands," 1829) written in the Caucasus Pushkin (who wanted to join the army and was on his way to Erzurum in East Turkey) mentions a battered copy of Dante that falls out of his hands:
Зорю бьют… из рук моих
Ветхий Данте выпадает,
На устах начатый стих
Недочитанный затих —
Дух далече улетает.
Звук привычный, звук живой,
Сколь ты часто раздавался
Там, где тихо развивался
[Я давнишнею порой.]
Pushkin read Dante till dawn at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum. Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on Oct. 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum). It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem not "Cedarn, Utana," but 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 abduction from the Elphinstone hospital. According to Humbert, he can distinguish in Annabel Leigh (Humbert's childhood love) the initial fateful elf in his life:
Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve. (1.5)
Describing the King's flight, Kinbote mentions a shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) that ran between his shoulderblades:
He was still chuckling over the wench's discomfiture when he came to the tremendous stones amassed around a small lake which he had reached once or twice from the rocky Kronberg side many years ago. Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but, oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulderblades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on. But his heart was a conical ache poking him from below in the throat, and after a while he stopped again to take stock of conditions and decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks. He elected the second route and in due course reached the pass. (note to Line 149)
The fear of elves is called 'fayophobia.' The characters in Lolita include Fay Page, actress, and Dr. Byron (the Haze family physician). "A faunlet in my own right" (as Humbert calls himself) brings to mind Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England. Jane de Faun may hint at Jane Fonda, an American movie actress who made her first appearance in Tall Story (1960), a farcical social satire of American campus life. There is Fonda in Fondaminsky (one of the leaders of the SR Party, Ilya Fondaminsky, 1880-1942, VN's friend 'Fondik' who perished in Auschwitz). On the other hand, in Québec there is la rue de la Faune. Its name is a reference to the fauna in le Jardin zoologique du Québec. In his essay 'On a Book Entitled Lolita' (1958) VN says that the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage. In Canto One of his poem Shade speaks of his childhood and says that we are most artistically caged:
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged. (ll. 105-114)
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his visit to Mrs. Z. who mentioned Shade’s poem about Mon Blon that appeared in the Blue Review:
"I can't believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound--But I'm so dense!" (ll. 781-786)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
An image of Mont Blanc's "blue-shaded buttresses and sun-creamed domes" is fleetingly glimpsed through the cloud of that particular poem which I wish I could quote but do not have at hand. The "white mountain" of the lady's dream, caused by a misprint to tally with Shade's "white fountain," makes a thematic appearance here, blurred as it were by the lady's grotesque pronunciation. (note to Line 782)
Shade’s “white fountain” brings to mind Pushkin’s poem Bakhchisarayskiy fontan (“The Fountain of Bakhchisaray,” 1823). In his essay Sud’ba Pushkina (“The Fate of Pushkin,” 1897) Vladimir Solovyov quotes Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1828) and the lines from Byron’s Manfred (1816-17), in which Mont Blanc (“the monarch of mountains”) is mentioned:
Уже в сонете "Поэту" высота самосознания смешивается с высокомерием и требование бесстрастия - с обиженным и обидным выражением отчуждения.
Ты - царь, живи один!
Это взято, кажется, из Байрона: the solitude of kings. Но ведь одиночество царей состоит не в том, что они живут одни,- чего, собственно, и не бывает,- а в том, что они среди других имеют единственное положение. Это есть одиночество горных вершин.
Монблан - монарх соседних гор:
Они его венчали.
("Манфред" Байрона). (chapter VII)
Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crown'd him long ago (Manfred, Act One, scene 1).
According to Solovyov, the idea ty – tsar’, zhivi odin! (“You are a king, live alone!”) expressed by Pushkin in his sonnet To a Poet was borrowed from Byron (“the solitude of kings”). In Byron’s poem The Prophecy of Dante (1821) Dante (the poet who was expelled from Florence and wrote The Divine Comedy in exile) mentions the solitude of kings in which he feels “without the power that makes them bear a crown:”
A wanderer, while even wolves can find a den,
Ripped from all kindred, from all home, all things
That make communion sweet, and soften pain—
To feel me in the solitude of kings
Without the power that makes them bear a crown— (Canto the First, ll. 163-167)
Btw., Byron wrote The Prophecy of Dante in 1819 in Ravenna (the city where Dante died and was buried). The third (and last) part of Dante's Divine Comedy, Paradiso, brings to mind Villa Paradiso mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of that year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S.?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells. (note to lines 493-434)
The King's uncle Conmal is Duke of Aros:
Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K.'s uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q. v.); noble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962. (Index)
There is Aros in Pharos, a small island located on the western edge of the Nile Delta. The Lighthouse of Alexandria is sometimes called the Pharos of Alexandria (a city famous for its library). Nilskaya delta (“The Nile Delta,” 1898) is a poem by Vladimir Solovyov, the author of a doctrine about the Divine Sophia. The "real" name of both Sybil Shade (the poet's wife who moved to Quebec after her husband's death) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin.
Btw., Kneeling Female Faun (1889) is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin. It was used in the left half of the top panel of his The Gates of Hell. Standing Female Faun or Standing Fauness (1910) is another sculpture by Rodin.