Vladimir Nabokov

Balthasar's spade, stone king & Tessera Square in Pale Fire

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 29 April, 2020

In VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) Balthasar, Prince of Loam (Kinbote’s black gardener) saves his tenant’s life by dealing Gradus (Shade’s murderer) a tremendous blow with his spade:

 

One of the bullet 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 to 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. (Kinbote’s note to Line 1000)

 

At the end of the second poem of his cycle Le Squelette laboureur (“Skeleton with a Spade”) Baudelaire mentions une lourde bêche (a heavy spade):

 

De ce terrain que vous fouillez,
Manants résignés et funèbres
De tout l'effort de vos vertèbres,
Ou de vos muscles dépouillés,

 

Dites, quelle moisson étrange,
Forçats arrachés au charnier,
Tirez-vous, et de quel fermier
Avez-vous à remplir la grange?

 

Voulez-vous (d'un destin trop dur
Epouvantable et clair emblème!)
Montrer que dans la fosse même
Le sommeil promis n'est pas sûr;

 

Qu'envers nous le Néant est traître;
Que tout, même la Mort, nous ment,
Et que sempiternellement
Hélas! il nous faudra peut-être

 

Dans quelque pays inconnu
Ecorcher la terre revêche
Et pousser une lourde bêche
Sous notre pied sanglant et nu?

 

From the soil that you excavate,
Resigned, macabre villagers,
From all the effort of your backs,
Or of your muscles stripped of skin,

 

Tell me, what singular harvest,
Convicts torn from cemeteries,
Do you reap, and of what farmer
Do you have to fill the barn?

 

Do you wish (clear, frightful symbol
Of too cruel a destiny!)
To show that even in the grave
None is sure of the promised sleep;

 

That Annihilation betrays us;
That all, even Death, lies to us,
And that forever and ever,
Alas! we shall be forced perhaps

 

In some unknown country
To scrape the hard and stony ground
And to push a heavy spade in
With our bare and bleeding feet?

(tr. W. Aggeler)

 

According to Kinbote, his gardener wanted to study French in order to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas:

 

He had worked for two years as a male nurse in a hospital for Negroes in Maryland. He was hard up. He wanted to study landscaping, botany and French ("to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas"). I promised him some financial assistance. He started to work at my place the very next day. He was awfully nice and pathetic, and all that, but a little too talkative and completely impotent which I found discouraging. Otherwise he was a strong strapping fellow, and I hugely enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of watching him buoyantly struggle with earth and turf or delicately manipulate bulbs, or lay out the flagged path which may or may not be a nice surprise for my landlord, when he safely returns from England (where I hope no bloodthirsty maniacs are stalking him!). How I longed to have him (my gardener, not my landlord) wear a great big turban, and shalwars, and an ankle bracelet. I would certainly have him attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king - or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit). You will chide me, my modest man, for writing so much about you in this note, but I feel I must pay you this tribute. After all, you saved my life. You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as; you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood - (Superstitiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.) (note to Line 998)

 

The father of Alexandre Dumas was a mulatto. Charles Baudelaire called his mistress Jeanne Duval (who hailed from Haiti) “the black Venus.” In his memoir essay Muni (1926) Hodasevich mentions Muni’s “little tragedy” Oburevaemyi negr (“The Obsessed Negro”) in which the author predicted his own destiny:

 

Муни написал две маленькие"трагедии" довольно дикого содержания. Одна называлась "Обу­реваемый негр". Её герой, негр в крахмальной рубашке и в подтяжках, только показывается в разных местах Петербурга: на Зимней Канавке, в модной мастерской, в окне ресторана, где компания адвокатов и дам отплясывает кэк -уок. Появляясь, негр бьет в барабан и каж­дый раз произносит приблизительно одно и то же:

"Так больше продолжаться не может. Трам-там-там. Я обуреваем". И еще: "Это-го ни-че-го не бу-дет".

В последнем действии на сцене, изображен поперечный разрез трамвая, который, жужжа и качаясь, как бы уходит от публики. В глубине, за стеклом виден вагоновожатый. Поздний вечер. Пассажиры дремлют, покачиваясь. Вдруг раз­даётся треск, вагон останавливается. За сценою замешательство. Затем выходит театральный механик и заявляет:

-- Случилось несчастие. По ходу действия негр попадает под трамвай. Но в нашем театре все декорации устроены так добросовестно и реально, что герой раздавлен на самом деле. Представление отменяется. Недовольные могут получить деньги обратно.

В этой "трагедии" Муни предсказал соб­ственную судьбу. Когда "события", которых он ждал, стали осуществляться, он сам погиб под их "слишком реальными" декорациями.

 

In his poem beginning “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane” John Shade (the poet in VN's novel) predicted his own destiny. 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”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok (who did not know what a coda is).

 

One of the chapters of Hodasevich’s essay Muni is entitled Semipudovaya kupchikha (“A Seven-Pood Merchant’s Wife”). The allusion is to Dostoevski’s novel Brothers Karamazov (1880) in which the devil tells Ivan Karamazov that he would like to take fleshy form in the person of a seven-pood merchant’s wife (one pood is equal to sixteen kilograms). In the “Seven-Pood Merchant’s Wife” chapter of his memoir essay Hodasevich says that at the beginning of 1908 Muni decided to develop an alternative personality and indeed managed to become a totally different man, Alexander Beklemishev:

 

После одной тяжелой любовной истории, в начале 1908 года, Муни сам вздумал довоплотиться в особого человека, Александра Александровича Беклемишева (рассказ о Большакове был написан позже, именно на основании опыта с Беклемишевым). Месяца три Муни не был похож на себя, иначе ходил, говорил, одевался, изменил голос и самые мысли. Существование Беклемишева скрывалось, но про себя Муни знал, что, наоборот, - больше нет Муни, а есть Беклемишев, принужденный лишь носить имя Муни "по причинам полицейского, паспортного порядка".

 

In his poem Smotryu v okno – i prezirayu… (I look out from a window and despise…” 1921) included in Tyazhyolaya Lira (“Heavy Lyre”) Hodasevich compares himself to a worm cut by a heavy spade:

 

Смотрю в окно - и презираю.

Смотрю в себя - презрен я сам.

На землю громы призываю,

Не доверяя небесам.

 

Дневным сиянием объятый,

Один беззвёздный вижу мрак...

Так вьётся на гряде червяк,

Рассечен тяжкою лопатой.

 

I look out from a window and despise,

I look into myself with contempt.

Not trusting the skies,

I call thunder on earth.

 

I see only starless dark

In a broad daylight - thus

Cut with a heavy spade,

A worm would whirl on a garden bed.

(Ian Probstein’s slightly corrected translation)

 

Hodasevich is the author of a book (1931) on Derzhavin. In his great ode Bog (“God,” 1784) Derzhavin calls himself “a king, a slave, a worm, a god:”

 

Я царь, я раб, я червь, я бог.

I’m a king, I’m a slave, I’m a worm, I'm God.

 

Pushkin (who, like Dumas, had African blood) used this line as the epigraph to Chapter Two of his unfinished novella Egipetskie nochi (“The Egyptian Nights,” 1835). “A stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava” to which Kinbote compares himself seems to blend Pushkin’s Kamennyi gost’ (“The Stone Guest”) with Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman”). It is supposed that Pushkin completed his little tragedy “The Stone Guest” on the morning before his fatal duel (Jan. 27, 1837). In Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” 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 only all so quickly felt the power
of harmony! But no, in that event
the world could not exist; none would care
about the needs of ordinary life,
all would give themselves to free art. (Scene II)

 

Nikto b is Botkin in reverse. 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 of Kinbote’s commentary). It was God’s spade, as it were, that split Botkin into 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 Oct. 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.

 

A tessera (cf. the Tessera Square of Onhava where a stone king on a stone charger stands) is an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a cube, used in creating a mosaic. On the other hand, Tesserae are regions of heavily deformed terrain on Venus, characterized by two or more intersecting tectonic elements, high topography, and subsequent high radar backscatter. It is believed that the Star of Bethlehem, or Christmas Star, that inspired "wise men from the East" (Magi) to travel to Jerusalem is Venus. Balthasar was one of the three Magi who visited the infant Jesus after he was born. The name of Zemblan capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven.

 

Kon' being Russian for both "horse" and "chess knight," a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava also evokes a knight on a chess board square. In VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian Knight (who used to draw a black knight to sign his stories) dies in a sanatorium at St. Damier. Damier is French for "chess board." Clare Bishop (Sebastian's mistress and staunch friend) brings to mind the Bishop of Yeslove mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and clair emblème (clear symbol) in Baudelaire's poem Le Squelette laboureur. Describing his last meeting with Queen Disa, Kinbote mentions Embla Point and Emblem Bay:

 

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains; but the part concerning Garh displeased her as if, paradoxically, she would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome hough-magandy with the wench. She told him sharply to skip such interludes, and he made her a droll little bow. But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant express on appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared. That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. "I do have some business matters to discuss," he said. "And there are papers you have to sign." Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the roses. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white mantilla, brought certain documents from Disa's boudoir. Upon hearing the King's mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by his excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycines. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot. (note to ll. 433-34)

 

Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting, Fleur de Fyler brings to mind Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.