Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) is a novel by Benjamin Disraeli (who would later become Prime Minister of Great Britain). In Disraeli’s novel The Infernal Marriage (1834) Pluto, the king of hell, whisks Proserpine, the daughter of Jupiter, away to Hades. Hades = Shade; Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) = Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) = Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). In his poem Prozerpina (“Proserpine,” 1824) Pushkin mentions koni blednogo Plutona (pale Pluto’s horses):
Плещут волны Флегетона,
Своды Тартара дрожат,
Кони бледного Плутона
Быстро к нимфам Пелиона
Из аида бога мчат.
The waves of the Phlegethon splash,
The vaults of Tartarus tremble,
Pale Pluto’s horses
Quickly to the nymphs of Pelion
Rush the god from Hades.
In a letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to Pushkin Delvig (who soon married Sofia Saltykov) says that Pushkin’s poem “Proserpine” is pure music:
Милый Пушкин, письмо твоё и «Прозерпину» я получил и тоже в день получения благодарю тебя за них. «Прозерпина» не стихи, а музыка: это пенье райской птички, которое слушая, не увидишь, как пройдёт тысяча лет. Эти двери давно мне знакомы. Сквозь них, ещё в Лицее, меня [иногда] часто выталкивали из Элизея. Какая искусная щеголиха у тебя истина. Подобных цветов мороз не тронет!
In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the black cat that appeared on the threshold of the music room:
The Goldsworth château had many outside doors, and no matter how thoroughly I inspected them and the window shutters downstairs at bedtime, I never failed to discover next morning something unlocked, unlatched, a little loose, a little ajar, something sly and suspicious-looking. One night the black cat, which a few minutes before I had seen rippling down into the basement where I had arranged toilet facilities for it in an attractive setting, suddenly reappeared on the threshold of the music room, in the middle of my insomnia and a Wagner record, arching its back and sporting a neck bow of white silk which it could certainly never have put on all by itself. (note to Line 62)
Kinbote believes that this is his landlord’s cat that came with the house. Actually, it is a different animal altogether (presumably, some neighbor’s cat). In E. A. Poe’s story The Black Cat (1945) the name of the first black cat is Pluto (and the second cat has, unlike Pluto, a white spot on its breast):
It was a black cat -- a very large one -- fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.
Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it -- knew nothing of it -- had never seen it before.
The capital of Zembla, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. In Dante’s Inferno the City of Dis encompasses the sixth through the ninth circles of hell. The third part of Dante's Divine Comedy is Paradiso. According to Kinbote, Villa Disa was at first called Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa:
In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of that year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend's past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S. S.?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa's grandfather in 1908; and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, "for reasons of health" (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells. (note to Lines 433-434)
Disraeli + London + cat = Disa + Irondell + canto
Shade’s poem is divided into four cantos. Irondell is Sybil Shade’s maiden name:
John Shade's wife, née Irondell (which comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow"). She was a few months his senior. I understand she came of Canadian stock, as did Shade's maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather, if I am not greatly mistaken).
From the very first I tried to behave with the utmost courtesy toward my friend's wife, and from the very first she disliked and distrusted me. I was to learn later that when alluding to me in public she used to call me "an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius." I pardon her--her and everybody. (note to Line 247)
In the first stanza of his poem Kogda Psikheya-zhizn’ spuskaetsya k tenyam… (“When Psyche-Life goes down to the shades…” 1920) Mandelshtam mentions shades, Persephone (Proserpine’s Greek name) and slepaya lastochka (a blind swallow):
Когда Психея-жизнь спускается к теням
В полупрозрачный лес, вослед за Персефоной,
Слепая ласточка бросается к ногам
С стигийской нежностью и веткою зелёной.
When Psyche-Life goes down to the shades,
In the semitransparent forest, after Persephone,
a blind swallow, with Stygian tenderness
and a green twig, hurls itself at her feet.
The poems in Mandelshtam's collection Kamen' ("Stone," 1915) include Aya-Sofia (Hagia Sophia, 1912) and Tennis (1913). In his Commentary Kinbote mentions an especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist):
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was a member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages--not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a heft male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared. (note to Line 171)
Der Philanthrop (“The Philanthropist,” 1853) is a poem by Heinrich Heine. According to Heine (who lived in exile in Paris), his French friends often mispronounced his name Henri Enn and sometimes even shortened it to Rien (“Mr. Nobody”). Heine’s poem Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen (“The night is quiet, the streets are calm…”) was set to music (as Der Doppelgänger) by Schubert. Franz Schubert also set to music Goethe’s Erlkönig, a poem whose opening lines are a leitmotif in Pale Fire.
In his "Verses to Natasha Shtempel" (1937) Mandelshtam deplores that he is not Heinrich Heine and says that, if he were Heine's translator, he would rhyme golovka (little head) with plutovka (imp):
Наташа, ах, как мне неловко,
Что я не Генрих Гейне:
К головке — переводчик ейный —
Я б рифму закатил: плутовка.
In plutovka there is Pluto. In his poem My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany... ("We live not feeling land beneath us," 1933) Mandelshtam says that Stalin ("the Kremlin mountaineer") plays with the attentions of half-men. According to Kinbote, Gradus (Shade's murderer) is a half-man who is half mad:
I have considered in my earlier note (I now see it is the note to line 171) the particular dislikes, and hence the motives, of our "automatic man," as I phrased it at a time when he did not have as much body, did not offend the senses as violently as now; was, in a word, further removed from our sunny, green, grass-fragrant Arcady. But Our Lord has fashioned man so marvelously that no amount of motive hunting and rational inquiry can ever really explain how and why anybody is capable of destroying a fellow creature (this argument necessitates, I know, a temporary granting to Gradus of the status of man), unless he is defending the life of his son, or his own, or the achievement of a lifetime; so that in final judgment of the Gradus versus the Crown case I would submit that if his human incompleteness be deemed insufficient to explain his idiotic journey across the Atlantic just to empty the magazine of his gun; we may concede, doctor, that our half-man was also half mad. (note to Line 949)
Describing Shade’s murder by Gradus, Kinbote mentions the baton of life passed to him by Shade in a sublime relay race:
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)
In her memoirs Vtoraya kniga (“The Second Book,” 1983) Nadezhda Mandelshtam (the poet’s widow) says that madness is infectious – one madman simply passes the baton to another. The subject matter of a mania is changeable, but a light of madness is kept intact and continues to burn:
После смерти Хлебникова в Москве появился предстатель, обвинявший Маяковского в сплошном плагиате у Хлебникова. Он ходил из дома в дом и бессвязно кричал о плагиате. Мандельштам пытался разубедить и остановить, но убедился, что ничего втолковать ему нельзя, и просто выставил его. И мы тогда поняли, что безумие заразительно — один безумец попросту передаёт эстафету другому. Содержание бреда изменчиво, но огонёк безумия сохранён и продолжает гореть.
According to Nadezhda Mandelshtam, she and her husband realized this after Khlebnikov’s death, when a person (Alvek, the author of Nakhlebniki Khlebnikova, "The Dependents of Khlebnikov," 1927) appeared in Moscow who accused Mayakovski (VN’s “late namesake”) of shameless plagiarism from Khlebnikov. A futurist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov is the author of Tam, gde zhili sviristeli (“There where the Waxwings Lived…” 1908), a poem in which besporyadok dikiy teney (a wild confusion of shadows) is mentioned:
В беспорядке диком теней,
Где, как морок старых дней,
Закружились, зазвенели
Стая лёгких времирей.
Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). At the beginning (and, presumably, at the end) of his poem Shade compares himself to the shadow of the waxwing:
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)
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 Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”).
The rub is that Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s “Second Book” appeared only in 1983 (twenty-one years after Pale Fire). But perhaps the chapter on Khlebnikov was published separately somewhere earlier? Maybe, in a collection of memoir essays Tarusskie stranitsy (“The Tarusa Pages,” 1961) to which Nadezhda Mandelshtam contributed her stuff under the penname Yakovleva (cf. Jakob Gradus)?