Vladimir Nabokov

Hotel Lazuli in Pale Fire

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 17 August, 2022

According to 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), in Nice Gradus (Shade’s murderer) stayed at Hotel Lazuli:

 

Gradus landed at the Côte d'Azur airport in the early afternoon of July 15, 1959. Despite his worries he could not help being impressed by the torrent of magnificent trucks, agile motor bicycles and cosmopolitan private cars on the Promenade. He remembered and disliked the torrid heat and the blinding blue of the sea. Hotel Lazuli, where before World War Two he had spent a week with a consumptive Bosnian terrorist, when it was a squalid, running-water place frequented by young Germans, was now a squalid, running-water place frequented by old Frenchmen. It was situated in a transverse street, between two thoroughfares parallel to the quay, and the ceaseless roar of crisscross traffic mingling with the grinding and banging of construction work proceeding under the auspices of a crane opposite the hotel (which had been surrounded by a stagnant calm two decades earlier) was a delightful surprise for Gradus, who always liked a little noise to keep his mind off things. ("Ça distrait," as he said to the apologetic hostler wife and her sister.) (note to Line 697)

 

The hotel’s name seems to hint at W. B. Yeats’s poem Lapis Lazuli (1936). Yeats mentions in it Hamlet and Lear:

 

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop-scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

 

According to Kinbote, Shade wanted his students get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear:

 

The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull."

Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"

Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." (note to Line 172)

 

In another conversation with Kinbote Shade mentioned Russian humorists:

 

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." (ibid.)

 

The characters in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stuliev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) include Nikifor Lapis-Trubetskoy, a poet nicknamed Lapsus. In his first attempt at prose Lapsus mentions the waves that rolled across the pier and fell headlong below like a jack (stremitel'nym domkratom):

 

— Вы писали этот очерк в «Капитанском мостике»?

— Я писал.

— Это, кажется, ваш первый опыт в прозе? Поздравляю вас! «Волны перекатывались через мол и падали вниз стремительным домкратом»... Ну, и удружили же вы «Капитанскому мостику». Мостик теперь долго вас не забудет, Ляпис!

— В чем дело?

— Дело в том, что... Вы знаете, что такое домкрат?

— Ну, конечно, знаю, оставьте меня в покое...

— Как вы себе представляете домкрат? Опишите своими словами.

— Такой... Падает, одним словом.

— Домкрат падает. Заметьте все. Домкрат стремительно падает. Подождите, Ляпсус, я вам сейчас принесу полтинник. Не пускайте его.

Но и на этот раз полтинник выдан не был. Персицкий притащил из справочного бюро двадцать первый том Брокгауза от Домиции до Евреинова. Между Домицием, крепостью в великом герцогстве Мекленбург-Шверинском, и Доммелем, рекой в Бельгии и Нидерландах, было найдено искомое слово.

— Слушайте! «Домкрат (нем. Daumkraft) — одна из машин для поднятия значительных тяжестей. Обыкновенный простой Д., употребляемый для поднятия экипажей и т. п., состоит из подвижной зубчатой полосы, которую захватывает шестерня, вращаемая с помощью рукоятки». И так далее и далее. «Джон Диксон в 1879 г. установил на место обелиск, известный под названием «Иглы Клеопатры», при помощи четырех рабочих, действовавших четырьмя гидравлическими Д.». И этот прибор, по-вашему, обладает способностью стремительно падать? Значит, усидчивые Брокгауз с Ефроном обманывали человечество в течение пятидесяти лет? Почему вы халтурите, вместо того чтобы учиться? Ответьте!

 

"Did you write this piece for The Captain's Bridge?"

"Yes, I did."

"I believe it was your first attempt at prose. Congratulations! 'The waves rolled across the pier and fell headlong below like a jack.' A lot of help to The Captain's Bridge you are!' The Bridge won't forget you for some time!"

"What's the matter?"

"The matter is . . . do you know what a jack is?"

“Of course I know. Leave me alone."

 "How do you envisage a jack? Describe it in your own words."

 "It. . . sort of. . . falls."

 "A jack falls. Note that, everyone. A jack falls headlong. Just a moment, Lapis, I'll bring you half a rouble. Don't let him go."

 But this time, too, there was no half-rouble forthcoming. Persidsky brought back the twenty-first volume of the Brockhaus encyclopaedia.

 "Listen! 'Jack: a machine for lifting heavy weights. A simple jack used for lifting carriages, etc., consists of  a mobile toothed bar gripped by a rod which is turned by means of a lever'  . . . And here . . . 'In 1879 John Dixon set up the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle by means of four workers operating four hydraulic jacks.' And  this instrument, in your opinion, can fall headlong? So Brockhaus and Efron have deceived humanity for fifty years? Why do you write such rubbish instead of  learning? Answer!" (Chapter 29 “The Author of the Gavriliad”)

 

The waves that roll across the pier and fall headlong below like a jack bring to mind the torrid heat and the blinding blue of the sea disliked by Gradus.

 

As explained in the Brockhaus encyclopaedia (consulted by Persidsky), domkrat (the Russian word for "jack") comes from German Daumkraft ("thumb power"). In Canto Two of his poem Shade describes the paring of his fingernails and compares his thumb to a grocer's son:

 

The little scissors I am holding are

A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

I stand before the window and I pare

My fingernails and vaguely am aware

Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,

Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum

College astronomer Starover Blue;

The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;

The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;

And little pinky clinging to her skirt.

And I make mouths as I snip off the thin

Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin." (ll. 183-194)

 

At the beginning of his poem Shade says that he was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane:

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)

 

W. B. Yeats’ one-act play The Words upon the Windowpane (1930) features a séance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium, along with those of his two lovers, Stella and Vanessa. Witnessing these forces at work, those attending the séance are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths in their own lives. The father of Starover Blue (the College astronomer mentioned by Shade), Sinyavin married Stella Lazurchik. While stella means in Latin "star," the surname Lazurchik comes from lazur' (azure).

 

Kinbote admits that there is a whiff of Swift in some of his notes:

 

It is so like the heart of a scholar in search of a fond name to pile a butterfly genus upon an Orphic divinity on top of the inevitable allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther! In this connection a couple of lines from one of Swift's poems (which in these backwoods I cannot locate) have stuck in my memory:

 

When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom

Advanced like Atalanta's star

 

As to the Vanessa butterfly, it will reappear in lines 993-995 (to which see note). Shade used to say that its Old English name was The Red Admirable, later degraded to The Red Admiral. It is one of the few butterflies I happen to be familiar with. Zemblans call it harvalda (the heraldic one) possibly because a recognizable figure of it is borne in the escutcheon of the Dukes of Payn. In the autumn of certain years it used to occur rather commonly in the Palace Gardens and visit the Michaelmas daisies in company with a day-flying moth. I have seen The Red Admirable feasting on oozy plums and, once, on a dead rabbit. It is a most frolicsome fly. An almost tame specimen of it was the last natural object John Shade pointed out to me as he walked to his doom (see, see now, my note to lines 993-995).

I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire. (note to Line 270)

 

Kinbote quotes Swift’s poem Cadenus and Vanessa (1713). In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade mentions poor old man Swift:

 

A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):

 

Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire

 

What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cf. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)

 

Kinbote is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name). An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum and of Swift’s death), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”) will be full again.