In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions a story in a magazine about a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand:
It was a story in a magazine
About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been
Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.
She told her interviewer of "The Land
Beyond the Veil" and the account contained
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained
Windows, and some soft music, and a choice
Of hymnal items, and her mother's voice;
But at the end she mentioned a remote
Landscape, a hazy orchard - and I quote:
"Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke
I glimpsed a tall white fountain - and awoke." (ll. 747-758)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, 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 last line of his poem Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1844) Apollon Maykov calls his heartless double khirurg besposhchadnyi (a ruthless surgeon):
Назвавши гостей, приготовил я яств благовонных,
В сосуды хрустальные налил вина золотого.
Убрал молодыми цветами свой стол, и, заране
Веселый, что скоро здесь клики и смех раздадутся,
Вокруг я ходил, поправляя приборы, плоды и гирлянды.
Но гости не идут никто… Изменила и ты, молодая
Царица стола моего, для которой нарочно
Я лучший венок приготовил из лилий душистых,
Которой бы голос и яркие очи, уста и ланиты
Служили бы солнцем веселости общей, законом
И сладкой уздой откровенному Вакху… Что ж делать?
Печально гляжу я на ясные свечи, ряд длинный приборов…
А где же друзья? Где она?.. Отчего не явилась?..
Быть может…
Ведь женское сердце и женская клятва что ветер…
Эх, сяду за кубок один я… Один ли?.. А он, неотступный,
Зачем он, непрошеный гость, предо мною уселся,
С насмешкой глядит мне в глаза? И напрасно движенья
Досады и ревности скрыть перед ним я стараюсь…
Ох, трудно привыкнуть к нему, хоть давно мы знакомы!
Всё страшно в нем видеть свой образ, но только без сердца,
Без страсти и с вечно холодной логической речью…
Софист неотступный, оставь меня! Что тебе пользы,
Хирург беспощадный, терзать мою душу?..
Maykov’s poem is included in his cycle Ocherki Rima (“The Sketches of Rome,” 1847). In his fragment Rim ("Rome," 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана,
придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: "Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!"
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only (the unwritten) Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.
According to G. P. Danilevski (the author of a memoir essay in “Gogol in the Reminiscences of his Contemporaries,” 1952), in 1851 Gogol praised Maykov’s poetry and quoted the first two lines of Akh, chudnoe nebo, ey-Bogu, nad etim klassicheskim Rimom! (“Ah, what a wondrous sky, by God, above this classical Rome!” 1844), the third poem in Maykov’s cycle “The Sketches of Rome:”
Ах, чудное небо, ей-Богу, над этим классическим Римом!
Под этаким небом невольно художником станешь.
Природа и люди здесь будто другие, как будто картины
Из ярких стихов антологии древней Эллады.
Ну, вот, поглядите: по каменной белой ограде разросся
Блуждающий плющ, как развешанный плащ иль завеса;
В средине, меж двух кипарисов, глубокая темная ниша,
Откуда глядит голова с преуродливой миной
Тритона. Холодная влага из пасти, звеня, упадает.
К фонтану альбанка (ах, что за глаза из-под тени
Покрова сияют у ней! что за стан в этом алом корсете!)
Подставив кувшин, ожидает, как скоро водою
Наполнится он, а другая подруга стоит неподвижно,
Рукой охватив осторожно кувшин на облитой
Вечерним лучом голове... Художник (должно быть, германец)
Спешит срисовать их, довольный, что случай нежданно
В их позах сюжет ему дал для картины, и вовсе не мысля,
Что я срисовал в то же время и чудное небо,
И плющ темнолистый, фонтан и свирепую рожу тритона,
Альбанок и даже - его самого с его кистью!
In his poem Maykov mentions a fountain that flows out of a triton’s mouth. In his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833) Pushkin describes the disastrous Neva flood of 1824 and compares St. Petersburg to a triton:
Но силой ветров от залива
Перегражденная Нева
Обратно шла, гневна, бурлива,
И затопляла острова,
Погода пуще свирепела,
Нева вздувалась и ревела,
Котлом клокоча и клубясь,
И вдруг, как зверь остервенясь,
На город кинулась. Пред нею
Всё побежало, всё вокруг
Вдруг опустело — воды вдруг
Втекли в подземные подвалы,
К решеткам хлынули каналы,
И всплыл Петрополь как тритон,
По пояс в воду погружен. (Part I)
VN’s home city, St. Petersburg is often compared to Venice. In his unfinished draft V golubom nebesnom pole (“In the blue heavenly area,” 1833), in which he intended to describe a gondola sail of the old Doge of Venice and the Doge’s young wife, Pushkin mentions Vesper zolotoy (the golden Hesperus):
В голубом небесном поле
Светит Веспер золотой -
Старый дож плывет в гондоле
С догарессой молодой.
Воздух полн дыханья лавра,
. . . . . . . . морская мгла,
Дремлют флаги бучентавра,
Ночь безмолвна и тепла.
Vesper zolotoy in Pushkin’s draft brings to mind promnad vespert mid J. S., a cancelled entry in Kinbote’s diary:
I crept back to my cheerless domicile with a heavy heart and a puzzled mind. The heart remained heavy but the puzzle was solved a few days later, very probably on St. Swithin's Day, for I find in my little diary under that date the anticipatory "promnad vespert mid J. S.," crossed out with a petulance that broke the lead in midstroke. Having waited and waited for my friend to join me in the lane, until the red of the sunset had turned to the ashes of dusk, I walked over to his front door, hesitated, assessed the gloom and the silence, and started to walk around the house. This time not a glint came from the back parlor, but by the bright prosaic light in the kitchen I distinguished one end of a whitewashed table and Sybil sitting at it with so rapt a look on her face that one might have supposed she had just thought up a new recipe. The back door was ajar, and as I tapped it open and launched upon some gay airy phrase, I realized that Shade, sitting at the other end of the table, was in the act of reading to her something that I guessed to be a part of his poem. They both started. An unprintable oath escaped from him and he slapped down on the table the stack of index cards he had in his hand. Later he was to attribute this temperamental outburst to his having mistaken, with his reading glasses on, a welcome friend for an intruding salesman; but I must say it shocked me, it shocked me greatly, and disposed me at the time to read a hideous meaning into everything that followed. "Well, sit down," said Sybil, "and have some coffee" (victors are generous). I accepted, as I wanted to see if the recitation would be continued in my presence. It was not. "I thought," I said to my friend, "you were coming out with me for a stroll." He excused himself saying he felt out of sorts, and continued to clean the bowl of his pipe as fiercely as if it were my heart he was hollowing out. (note to Lines 47-48)
The bowl of Shade's pipe brings to mind a heckler's pipe with which he pointed at Shade just before the poet's heart attack:
However, I demurred. In mind I kept
Replaying the whole thing. Again I stepped
Down from the platform, and felt strange and hot,
And saw that chap stand up, and toppled, not
Because a heckler pointed with his pipe,
But probably because the time was ripe
For just that bump and wobble on the part
Of a limp blimp, an old unstable heart. (ll. 728-735)
Describing King Victor’s last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions an ironic Hesperus that rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky :
In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,
— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (2.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): subsidunt etc.: mountains subside and heights deteriorate.
“An ironic Hesperus” (as Van calls the planet Venus) brings to mind “a little ironically,” a phrase used by Kinbote when he describes his first meeting with Shade:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
Pushkin’s unfinished draft V golubom nebesnom pole was completed by Maykov in 1888 and by Hodasevich in 1924. In a footnote to his version, entitled Staryi dozh ("The Old Doge"), Maykov says that the first four lines were found in Pushkin's papers as a beginning of something and asks ten' velikogo poeta (the shade of the great poet) to pardon him for his attempt to guess what happened next:
Эти четыре строчки найдены в бумагах Пушкина, как начало чего-то. Да простит мне тень великого поэта попытку угадать: что же было дальше?
Hodasevich entitled his (much more “Pushkinian”) version Romans ("Romance"). In his story Zhizn' Vasiliya Travnikova ("The Life of Vasiliy Travnikov," 1936) Hodasevich invents a poet who lived in Pushkin's time and whose poetry influenced Pushkin and Baratynski. Hodasevich's hoax was so convincing that the critic Adamovich (whose sexual tastes Kinbote shares) believed in the existence of Travnikov. Hodasevich attributed to Travnikov a poem by his friend and alter ego Muni (who committed suicide in 1916) in which serdtse (heart) and zemlya (earth; cf. Kinbote's Zembla) are mentioned:
Несомненно, он ждал и хотел смерти. В его черновиках я нашёл наброски стихотворения, кончавшегося такими словами:
О сердце, колос пыльный!
К земле, костьми обильной,
Ты клонишься, дремля.
Но приблизить конец искусственно было бы всё же противно всей его жизненной и поэтической философии, основанной на том, что, не закрывая глаз на обиды, чинимые свыше, человек из единой гордости должен вынести всё до конца.
Я в том себе ищу и гордости, и чести,
Что утешение отверг с надеждой вместе, -
говорит он.
In another poem Travnikov (whose name comes from trava, "grass") says that he rejected consolation together with nadezhda (hope). It seems that the “real” name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) is Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death, her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent), went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus. Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant,” etc.), will be “full” again.
The “real” name of both Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. In the penultimate line of Dvoynik Maykov calls his double Sofist neotstupnyi (the relentless Sophist). The poems in Maykov’s cycle Podrazhaniya drevnim (“Imitations of the Ancients”) include Tsintii (“To Cynthia,” 1841). In his poem Tivoli (included in “The Sketches of Rome”) Maykov mentions Sivilla (the Sibyl). In VN’s story The Vane Sisters (1951) the sisters’ names are Cynthia and Sybil.
There is tri (three) in triton and dozh (Doge) in dozhd' (rain). If it is raining on St. Swithin's day (July 15), it will rain for forty days:
St. Swithin's day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St. Swithin's day, if thou be fair,
For forty days 'twill rain na mair.
In the Orthodox tradition it is believed that after one's death the soul of the departed remains on Earth for forty days. Valerian Maykov (Apollon's younger brother, the critic) drowned in a lake near St. Petersburg on July 15, 1847, at the age of twenty-three. Hazel Shade (1934-57) was twenty-three when she drowned in Lake Omega.