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), the surname Lukin (the maiden name of Shade’s mother) comes from Luke:
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
At the beginning of his letter of August 17, 1825, to Zhukovski Pushkin quotes Jesus Christ’s last words (Luke 23:46) “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit:”
Отче, в руце твои предаю дух мой. Мне право совестно, что жилы мои так всех вас беспокоят — операция аневризма ничего не значит, и, ей-богу, первый псковской коновал с ними бы мог управиться. Во Псков поеду не прежде как в глубокую осень, оттуда буду тебе писать, светлая душа. — На днях виделся я у Пещурова с каким-то доктором-аматёром: он пуще успокоил меня — только здесь мне кюхельбекерно; согласен, что жизнь моя сбивалась иногда на эпиграмму, но вообще она была элегией в роде Коншина. Кстати об элегиях, трагедия моя идёт, и думаю к зиме её кончить; вследствие чего, читаю только Карамзина да летописи. Что за чудо эти 2 последние тома Карамзина! какая жизнь! c’est palpitant comme la gazette d’hier, писал я Раевскому. Одна просьба, моя прелесть: нельзя ли мне доставить или жизнь Железного колпака, или житие какого-нибудь юродивого. Я напрасно искал Василия Блаженного в Четьих Минеях — а мне бы очень нужно.
Обнимаю тебя от души. Вижу по газетам, что Перовский у вас. Счастливец! он видел и Рим и Везувий.
According to Pushkin, his life sometimes resembled an epigram but on the whole it was elegiya v rode Konshina (an elegy in the genre of Konshin). In Chapter Four (L: 9-14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin says that, as an enemy of Hymen, he perceives in home life but a series of tedious images, a novel in the genre of Lafontaine. The author of numerous family novels, August Lafontaine (1758-1831) was a German writer. In Chapter Two of his poem Shade speaks of his married life and mentions Jean Lafontaine (the author of La Cigale et la Fourmi):
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
Espied on a pine’s bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song. (ll. 235-244)
In his epigram on life (Dec. 31, 1797) Karamzin says:
Что наша жизнь? Роман. — Кто автор? Аноним.
Читаем по складам, смеёмся, плачем... спим.
Life? A romance. By whom? Anonymous.
We spell it out; it makes us laugh and weep,
And then put us
To sleep.
In his letter to Zhukovski Pushkin says that he is writing a tragedy (“Boris Godunov”) and therefore is reading only Karamzin and the chronicles. According to Pushkin, the last two volumes of Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State” are palpitant comme la gazette d’hier (as exciting as yesterday’s newspaper). Describing Gradus’ stay in New York, Kinbote imagines him reading a newspaper:
He had never visited New York before; but as many near-cretins, he was above novelty. On the previous night he had counted the mounting rows of windows in several skyscrapers, and now, after checking the height of a few more buildings, he felt that he knew all there was to know. He had a brimming cup and a half a saucerful of coffee at a crowded and wet counter and spent the rest of the smoke-blue morning moving from bench to bench and paper to paper in the Westside alleys of Central Park.
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkum ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder.
According to Kinbote, Shade began Canto Two of his poem on July 5, 1959 (Shade’s sixty-first birthday). July 5 is not only Shade’s, but also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). In the draft of Pushkin's poem Iz Pindemonti ("From Pindemonte," 1836) the date under the text is July 5.
Shade is seventeen years Kinbote’s and Gradus’ senior. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski twice uses the word gradus (degree):
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает Бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God and consequently does the philosopher's work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than poetical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
In the same letter to his brother Dostoevski quotes the last two lines of Pushkin’s sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1830):
Байрон был эгоист: его мысль о славе — была ничтожна, суетна... Но одно помышленье о том, что некогда вслед за твоим былым восторгом вырвется из праха душа чистая, возвышенно-прекрасная, мысль, что вдохновенье как таинство небесное освятит страницы, над которыми плакал ты и будет плакать потомство, не думаю, чтобы эта мысль не закрадывалась в душу поэта и в самые минуты творчества. Пустой же крик толпы ничтожен. Ах! я вспомнил 2 стиха Пушкина, когда он описывает толпу и поэта:
И плюет (толпа) на алтарь, где твой огонь горит,
И в детской резвости колеблет твой треножник!..
And (the crowd) spit on the altar, where your fire burns
And shake your tripod in childish playfulness.
Shade’s poem is almost finished when 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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1904) by Nik. T-o (I. Annenski’s penname). In the same letter of Oct. 31, 1838, to his brother Dostoevski says that it is hard to live without nadezhda (hope). 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). 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.
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 145) VN points out that in a bout-rimés exchange (using rhymes supplied by Dmitriev), Karamzin made the following New Year prophecy for 1799 (which was to be the year of Pushkin’s birth):
To sing all things, Pindar will be reborn.
In Pindar there is dar (gift). The characters in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) include Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski who went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha (a namesake of Jakob Gradus). Preparing to write a book about his father, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character in “The Gift”) mentions Karolina Schmidt (a character in Pushkin’s unfinished story “Maria Schoning”):
Закаляя мускулы музы, он как с железной палкой, ходил на прогулку с целыми страницами "Пугачева", выученными наизусть. Навстречу шла Каролина Шмидт, девушка сильно нарумяненная, вида скромного и смиренного, купившая кровать, на которой умер Шонинг. За груневальдским лесом курил трубку у своего окна похожий на Симеона Вырина смотритель, и так же стояли горшки с бальзамином. Лазоревый сарафан барышни-крестьянки мелькал среди ольховых кустов. Он находился в том состоянии чувств и души, когда существенность, уступая мечтаниям, сливается с ними в неясных видениях первосонья.
Пушкин входил в его кровь. С голосом Пушкина сливался голос отца. Он целовал горячую маленькую руку, принимая ее за другую крупную, руку, пахнувшую утренним калачом. Он помнил, что няню к ним взяли оттуда же, откуда была Арина Родионовна, - из-за Гатчины, с Суйды: это было в часе езды от их мест - и она тоже говорила "эдак певком". Он слышал, как свежим летним утром, когда спускались к купальне, на досчатой стенке которой золотом переливалось отражение воды, отец с классическим пафосом повторял то, что считал прекраснейшим из всех когда-либо в мире написанных стихов: "Тут Аполлон - идеал, там Ниобея - печаль", и рыжим крылом да перламутром ниобея мелькала над скабиозами прибрежной лужайки, где в первых числах июня попадался изредка маленький "черный" аполлон.
To strengthen the muscles of his muse he took on his rambles whole pages of Pugachyov learned by heart as a man using an iron bar instead of a walking stick. Toward him out of a Pushkin tale came Karolina Schmidt, “a girl heavily rouged, of meek and modest appearance,” who acquired the bed in which Schoning died. Beyond Grunewald forest a postmaster who resembled Simeon Vyrin (from another tale) was lighting his pipe by the window, and there also stood pots with balsam flowers. The sky-blue sarafan of the Damsel turned Peasant could be glimpsed among the alder bushes. He was in that state of feeling and mind “when reality, giving way to fancies, blends with them in the nebulous visions of first sleep.”
Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin’s hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling of the breakfast kalach (a blond roll). He remembered that his and Tanya’s nurse hailed from the same place that Pushkin’s Arina came from—namely Suyda, just beyond Gatchina: this had been within an hour’s ride of their area—and she had also spoken “singsong like.” He heard his father on a fresh summer morning as they walked down to the river bathhouse, on whose plank wall shimmered the golden reflection of the water, repeating with classic fervor what he considered to be the most beautiful not only of Pushkin’s lines but of all the verses ever written in the world: “Tut Apollon-ideal, tarn Niobeya-pechal’” (Here is Apollo-ideal, there is Niobe-grief) and the russet wing and mother-of-pearl of a Niobe fritillary flashed over the scabiosas of the riverside meadow, where, during the first days of June, there occurred sparsely the small Black Apollo. (Chapter Two)
In Canto Two and then again at the end of his poem Shade mentions a Vanessa butterfly:
Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,
My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest
My Admirable butterfly! Explain
How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,
Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade
Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade? (ll. 269-274)
A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 993-999)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
One minute before his death, as we were crossing from his demesne to mine and had begun working up between the junipers and ornamental shrubs, a Red Admirable (see note to line 270) came dizzily whirling around us like a colored flame. Once or twice before we had already noticed the same individual, at that same time, on that same spot, where the low sun finding an aperture in the foliage splashed the brown sand with a last radiance while the evening's shade covered the rest of the path. One's eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its setting upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next morning sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banister on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it. (note to Lines 993-995)
The word "demesne" used by Kinbote occurs in Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Describing Aunt Maud's room, Shade mentions Chapman's Homer:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
Zhukovski translated Homer’s Odyssey into Russian. In his essay Ob Annenskom (“On Annenski,” 1921) Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Ilyich Golovin, the main character in Tolstoy’s story Smert’ Ivana Ilyicha (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886) and points out that Annenski’s penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”) is a translation of Greek Outis, the pseudonym under which Odysseus concealed his identity from the Cyclops Polyphemus:
Чего не додумал Иван Ильич, то знал Анненский. Знал, что никаким директорством, никаким бытом и даже никакой филологией от смерти по-настоящему не загородиться. Она уничтожит и директора, и барина, и филолога. Только над истинным его "я", над тем, чтo отображается в "чувствах и мыслях", над личностью -- у неё как будто нет власти. И он находил реальное, осязаемое отражение и утверждение личности -- в поэзии. Тот, чьё лицо он видел, подходя к зеркалу, был директор гимназии, смертный никто. Тот, чьё лицо отражалось в поэзии, был бессмертный некто. Ник. Т-о -- никто -- есть безличный действительный статский советник, которым, как видимой оболочкой, прикрыт невидимый некто. Этот свой псевдоним, под которым он печатал стихи, Анненский рассматривал как перевод греческого "outis", никто, -- того самого псевдонима, под которым Одиссей скрыл от циклопа Полифема своё истинное имя, свою подлинную личность, своего некто. Поэзия была для него заклятием страшного Полифема -- смерти. Но психологически это не только не мешало, а даже способствовало тому, чтобы его вдохновительницей, его Музой была смерть.
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (“none would”), Botkin in reverse:
Моцарт
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.
Mozart
If all could feel like you the power of harmony!
But no: the world could not go on then. None
Would bother with the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)