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) speaks of misprints and mentions the artistic correlation between the English crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series:
Translators of Shade's poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of "mountain" into "fountain:" it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words. However! There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words are involved. The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocryphal). A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this apologetically "corrected," it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation. (note to Line 803)
A domestic cow or bull in its first year is called calf (in German, Kalb). The German word for 'half' is halb. There is a correlation similar to that cited by Kinbote between the English calf-half pair and the German Kalb-halb pair. In his famous epigram (1824) on Count Vorontsov (the Governor of New Russia, Pushkin's boss in Odessa) Pushkin uses the prefix polu- (half-) five times:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there's a hope
That he will be a full one at last.
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor calls Zina Mertz "half-Mnemosyne" and "half-fantasy" and mentions a half-shimmer in her surname:
Как звать тебя? Ты полу-Мнемозина, полу-мерцанье в имени твоем, – и странно мне по сумраку Берлина с полувиденьем странствовать вдвоем. Но вот скамья под липой освещенной… Ты оживаешь в судорогах слез: я вижу взор сей жизнью изумленный и бледное сияние волос. Есть у меня сравненье на примете, для губ твоих, когда целуешь ты: нагорный снег, мерцающий в Тибете, горячий ключ и в инее цветы. Ночные наши, бедные владения, – забор, фонарь, асфальтовую гладь – поставим на туза воображения, чтоб целый мир у ночи отыграть! Не облака – а горные отроги; костер в лесу, – не лампа у окна… О поклянись, что до конца дороги ты будешь только вымыслу верна…
What shall I call you? Half-Mnemosyne? There's a half-shimmer in your surname too. In dark Berlin, it is so strange to me to roam, oh, my half-fantasy, with you. A bench stands under the translucent tree. Shivers and sobs reanimate you there, and all life's wonder in your gaze I see, and see the pale fair radiance of your hair. In honor of your lips when they kiss mine I might devise a metaphor some time: Tibetan mountain-snows, their glancing shine, and a hot spring near flowers touched with rime. Our poor nocturnal property-that wet asphaltic gloss, that fence and that street light-upon the ace of fancy let us set to win a world of beauty from the night. Those are not clouds-but star-high mountain spurs; not lamplit blinds-but camplight on a tent! O swear to me that while the heartblood stirs, you will be true to what we shall invent. (Chapter Three)
Zina Mertz's late father, Oscar Mertz, is a namesake of Dr. Oscar Nattochdag, a distinguished Zemblan scholar, head of Kinbote's department at Wordsmith University. Dr. Nattochdag's nickname, Netochka, hints at Dostoevski's unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). Dostoevski is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double (Kinbote and Gradus were born on the same day: July 5, 1915; July 5 is also Shade's birthday, but Shade was born in 1898). Shade's poem is almost finished when, in the evening of July 21, 1959, 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”).
The characters in The Gift include the Chernyshevski couple, Alexander Yakovlevich and his wife Alexandra Yakovlevna. After the suicide of his son Yasha, poor Alexander Yakovlevich went mad and began to see the ghost of his dead son. The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. 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), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be “full” again.
The characters in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs") include Alexander Yakovlevich (the bashful chiseler, head of a Charity House in Stargorod) and his wife Alexandra Yakovlevna. The sequel novel to The Twelve Chairs is entitled Zolotoy telyonok ("The Golden Calf," 1931). According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade listed Dostoevski among Russian humorists, along with those joint authors of genius, Ilf and Petrov:
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)
In Canto One of his poem Shade speaks of his childhood and mentions the taste, half-fish, half-honey, of nature's golden paste:
My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste! (ll. 99-104)
Jesus Christ died at the age of thirty-three. In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri calls Mozart (the composer who lived to the age of thirty-five) Bog (God):
Сальери
Ты с этим шел ко мне
И мог остановиться у трактира
И слушать скрыпача слепого! — Боже!
Ты, Моцарт, недостоин сам себя.
Моцарт
Что ж, хорошо?
Сальери
Какая глубина!
Какая смелость и какая стройность!
Ты, Моцарт, бог, и сам того не знаешь;
Я знаю, я.
Моцарт
Ба! право? может быть...
Но божество мое проголодалось.
Сальери
Послушай: отобедаем мы вместе
В трактире Золотого Льва.
Salieri
You were bringing this to me
And could just stop and listen at some inn
To a blind fiddler scraping! -- Oh, my goodness!
You, Mozart, are unworthy of yourself.
Mozart
So, it is good then?
Salieri
What profundity!
What symmetry and what audacity!
You, Mozart, are a god -- and you don't know it.
But I, I know.
Mozart
Well! rightly? well, perhaps...
But My Divinity has gotten hungry.
Salieri
Then listen: how about we dine together,
Say, at the Golden Lion's Inn? (Scene I)
In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
Nikto b is Botkin in reverse. In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says that she twisted words:
She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force
Of character - as when she spent three nights
Investigating certain sounds and lights
In an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top,
Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."
She called you a didactic katydid.
She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll. 347-356)
According to Kinbote, it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest:”
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet's expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips," and "T.S. Eliot," "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. (note to Lines 347-348)
"God" in reverse is "dog." In a conversation with Kinbote Shade compared Shakespeare to a Great Dane and himself, to a grateful mongrel:
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 Dostoevski's novel Brat'ya Karamazovy ("Brothers Karamazov," 1880) Ivan Karamazov's devil has the tail of datskaya sobaka (a Great Dane). Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, Shade mentions fra Karamazov and his inept "all is allowed" (it is brother Ivan who thinks that, since God does not exist, all is allowed).
Describing Shade's murder, Kinbote calls Gradus (half-man who is half-mad) "good dog:"
One of the bullets that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart. His presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my balance, and, simultaneously, to complete the farce of fate, my gardener's spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow on the pate, felling him and sending his weapon flying from his grasp. Our savior retrieved it and helped me to my feet. My coccyx and right wrist hurt badly but the poem was safe. John, though, lay prone on the ground, with a red spot on his white shirt. I still hoped he had not been killed. The madman sat on the porch step, dazedly nursing with bloody hands a bleeding head. Leaving the gardener to watch over him I hurried into the house and concealed the invaluable envelope under a heap of girls' galoshes, furred snowboots and white wellingtons heaped at the bottom of a closet, from which I exited as if it had been the end of the secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to this Arcady. I then dialed 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage. The poor poet had now been turned over and lay with open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening azure. The armed gardener and the battered killer were smoking side by side on the steps. The latter, either because he was in pain, or because he had decided to play a new role, ignored me as completely as if I were a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava; but the poem was safe.
The gardener took the glass of water I had placed near a flowerpot beside the porch steps and shared it with the killer, and then accompanied him to the basement toilet, and presently the police and the ambulance arrived, and the gunman gave his name as Jack Grey, no fixed abode, except the Institute for the Criminal Insane, ici, good dog, which of course should have been his permanent address all along, and which the police thought he had just escaped from.
"Come along, Jack, we'll put something on that head of yours," said a calm but purposeful cop stepping over the body, and then there was the awful moment when Dr. Sutton's daughter drove up with Sybil Shade. (note to Line 1000)
It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword to Shade's poem not in "Cedarn, Utana," but in a mad house near Quebec (in the same lunatic asylum where Humbert Humbert, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, writes his poem "Wanted").
Btw., the correlation between the calf-half pair and the Kalb-halb pair makes one think of a similar correlation between the cold-hold pair and the German kalt-halt pair. Halb sind sie kalt, halb sind sie roh (The half are cold, the half are coarse) is a line in Vorspiel auf dem Theater ('Prelude at the Theater') in Goethe's Faust (1808). The opening lines of Goethe's Erlkönig (1782), Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind, are a leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem. In Canto One of his poem Shade speaks of his dead parents and mentions a preterist, one who collects cold nests. Actually, preterism is a Christian eschatological view or belief that interprets some (partial preterism) or all (full preterism) prophecies of the Bible as events which have already been fulfilled in history.
On the other hand, calf-half, Kalb-halb, cold-hold and kalt-halt are examples of the word golf (also known as word ladder, a game invented by Lewis Carroll). In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Shade's childish predilection for the so-called word golf:
Line 819: Playing a game of worlds
My illustrious friend showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five (with "lend" in the middle).
word golf = world + gof/fog = frow + gold = wolf + gord ('is proud' in Russian). In Welsh gof means "smith." Shade lives in the frame house between Wordsmith and Goldsworth. Wordsmith (Shade's and Kinbote's University) combines word with smith.
Gof is Hof (German for 'court') in the Russian spelling. In Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs Ostap Bender in jest calls Vorob'yaninov gofmarshal (the Russian counterpart of Hofmarschall, the administrative official in charge of a princely German court, supervising all its economic affairs). A tall white fountain that Shade saw during his heart attack makes one think of the Samson Fountain in the park of Petergof (Peterhof, the summer residence of Peter I near St. Petersburg on the South bank of the Gulf of Finland). In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his visit to Mrs. Z. who saw a tall white mountain (misprinted 'fountain' in a newspaper article) during her heart attack. Describing his heart attack in Canto Three of his poem, Shade quotes the words of a doctor "just half a shade:"
And presently I saw it melt away:
Though still unconscious I was back on earth.
The tale I told provoked my doctor's mirth.
He doubted very much that in the state
He found me in "one could hallucinate
Or dream in any sense. Later, perhaps,
But not during the actual collapse.
No, Mr. Shade." But, Doctor, I was dead!
He smiled. "Not quite: just half a shade," he said. (ll. 720-727)