In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) where he lectured and dealt with childhood memories of strange nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range:
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.
Among our auditors were a young priest
And an old Communist. Iph could at least
Compete with churches and the party line. (ll. 632-637)
“Strange nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range” seem to hint at “the visionary gleam” mentioned by William Wordsworth in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1804):
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Six: XXI: 3-4) Lenski’s last verses begin “Whither, ah! whither are ye fled, my springtime's golden days:”
Стихи на случай сохранились,
Я их имею; вот они:
“Куда, куда вы удалились,
Весны моей златые дни?
Что день грядущий мне готовит?
Его мой взор напрасно ловит,
В глубокой мгле таится он.
Нет нужды: прав судьбы закон.
Паду ли я, стрелой пронзенный,
Иль мимо пролетит она,
Всё благо: бдения и сна
Приходит час определенный;
Благословен и день забот,
Благословен и тьмы приход!”
The verses chanced to be preserved;
I have them; here they are:
Whither, ah! whither are ye fled,
my springtime's golden days?
“What has the coming day in store for me?
In vain my gaze attempts to grasp it;
in deep gloom it lies hidden.
It matters not; fate's law is just.
Whether I fall, pierced by the dart, or whether
it flies by ― all is right:
of waking and of sleep
comes the determined hour;
blest is the day of cares,
blest, too, is the advent of darkness!
The Eugene Onegin stanza “is patterned on a sonnet.” Pushkin’s Sonet (“Sonnet,” 1830) is closely modeled on Wordsworth's Sonnet (“Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned…”) whose first line it has for the epigraph:
Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
Wordsworth
Суровый Дант не презирал сонета;
В нём жар любви Петрарка изливал;
Игру его любил творец Макбета;
Им скорбну мысль Камоэнс облекал.
И в наши дни пленяет он поэта:
Вордсворт его орудием избрал,
Когда вдали от суетного света
Природы он рисует идеал.
Под сенью гор Тавриды отдаленной
Певец Литвы в размер его стесненный
Свои мечты мгновенно заключал.
У нас ещё его не знали девы,
Как для него уж Дельвиг забывал
Гекзаметра священные напевы.
Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
Wordsworth
Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;
Into it Petrarch poured out the ardor of love;
Its play the creator of Macbeth loved;
With it Camoes clothed his sorrowful thought.
Even in our days it captivates the poet:
Wordsworth chose it as an instrument,
When far from the vain world
He depicts nature's ideal.
Under the shadow of the mountains of distant Tavrida
The singer of Lithuania in its constrained measure
His dreams he in an instant enclosed.
Here the maidens did not yet know it,
When for it even Delvig forgot
The sacred melodies of the hexameter.
(tr. Ober)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author (who lives in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith) 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”).
Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade’s poem in Cedarn, Utana. Cedarn is an anagram of “nacred,” a word that, like "nacreous," comes from nacre, also known as mother of pearl, an organic-inorganic composite material produced by some mollusks as an inner shell layer. In his Commentary Kinbote mentions conchologists (the people who study conchology, a branch of zoology dealing with the shells of mollusks):
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla—partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle’s raucous dying request: “Teach, Karlik!” (Kinbote’s note to Line 12)
Karlik (as Conmal calls Charles Xavier Vseslav) is Russian for “dwarf.” In his poem Net, karlik moy! Trus besprimernyi!.. (“No, my dwarf! The Unparalleled coward!...” 1850) Tyutchev calls the State Chancellor of Russia, Count Karl Nesselrode (1780-1862), karlik and trus (a coward). In the spring of 1824 Nesselrode, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, kept receiving letters from Count Vorontsov, Governor General of New Russia, who asked Nesselrode to rid him of Pushkin, “a weak imitator of Lord Byron” – but also the author of original epigrams and an admirer of the countess (Elizaveta Vorontsov, the daughter of Count Francis-Xavier Branitsky). (see EO Commentary, vol. III, pp. 305-306)
Shade’s full name is John Francis Shade. In his famous epigram on Count Vorontsov Pushkin calls Vorontsov "half-merchant, half-milord, half-sage, half-ignoramus, half-scoundrel" and adds that there is nadezhda (a hope) that he will be full at last:
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.
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 will be full again. 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). In one of his sonnets Wordsworth mentions the concentrated hazels:
MARK the concentrated hazels that enclose
Yon old grey Stone, protected from the ray
Of noontide suns:--and even the beams that play
And glance, while wantonly the rough wind blows,
Are seldom free to touch the moss that grows
Upon that roof, amid embowering gloom,
The very image framing of a Tomb,
In which some ancient Chieftain finds repose
Among the lonely mountains.--Live, ye trees!
And thou, grey Stone, the pensive likeness keep
Of a dark chamber where the Mighty sleep:
For more than Fancy to the influence bends
When solitary Nature condescends
To mimic Time's forlorn humanities.
In his poem Nutting Wordsworth mentions “the shady nook of hazels:”
Then up I rose,
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being: and, unless I now
Confound my present feelings with the past;
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.—
In the next stanza of Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Wordsworth says that heaven lies about us in our infancy and mentions shades of the prison-house that begin to close upon the growing Boy:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
The name of Zemblan capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven.