According to an anonymous joker, 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) has halitosis (bad breath):
Well did I know that among certain youthful instructors whose advances I had rejected there was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home from a very enjoyable and successful meeting of students and teachers (at which I had exuberantly thrown off my coat and shown several willing pupils a few of the amusing holds employed by Zemblan wrestlers) and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: “You have hal..…s real bad, chum,” meaning evidently “hallucinations,” although a malevolent critic might infer from the insufficient number of dashes that little Mr. Anon, despite teaching Freshman English, could hardly spell. (note to Line 62)
In a letter of Dec. 27, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov quotes Tolstoy’s words “the wife is repulsive because she has bad breath,” criticizes Bourget’s “psychological” experiments (in his novel Le Disciple, 1889) and mentions Dr. Botkin who just died:
Тоном Жана Щеглова, просящего Вас поговорить с ним о театре, я прошу: «Позвольте мне поговорить с Вами о литературе!» Когда я в одном из своих последних писем писал Вам о Бурже и Толстом, то меньше всего думал о прекрасных одалисках и о том, что писатель должен изображать одни только тихие радости. Я хотел только сказать, что современные лучшие писатели, которых я люблю, служат злу, так как разрушают. Одни из них, как Толстой, говорят: «не употребляй женщин, потому что у них бели; жена противна, потому что у нее пахнет изо рта; жизнь — это сплошное лицемерие и обман, так как человек по утрам ставит себе клистир, а перед смертью с трудом сидит на судне, причем видит свои исхудалые ляжки». Другие же, еще не импотенты, не пресыщенные телом, но уж пресыщенные духом, изощряют свою фантазию до зеленых чёртиков и изобретают несуществующего полубога Сикста и «психологические» опыты. Правда, Бурже приделал благополучный конец, но этот банальный конец скоро забывается, и в памяти остаются только Сикст и «опыты», которые убивают сразу сто зайцев: компрометируют в глазах толпы науку, которая, подобно жене Цезаря, не должна быть подозреваема, и третируют с высоты писательского величия совесть, свободу, любовь, честь, нравственность, вселяя в толпу уверенность, что всё это, что сдерживает в ней зверя и отличает ее от собаки и что добыто путем вековой борьбы с природою, легко может быть дискредитировано «опытами», если не теперь, то в будущем. Неужели подобные авторы «заставляют искать лучшего, заставляют думать и признавать, что скверное действительно скверно»? Неужели они заставляют «обновляться»? Нет, они заставляют Францию вырождаться, а в России они помогают дьяволу размножать слизняков и мокриц, которых мы называем интеллигентами. Вялая, апатичная, лениво философствующая, холодная интеллигенция, которая никак не может придумать для себя приличного образца для кредитных бумажек, которая не патриотична, уныла, бесцветна, которая пьянеет от одной рюмки и посещает пятидесятикопеечный бордель, которая брюзжит и охотно отрицает всё, так как для ленивого мозга легче отрицать, чем утверждать; которая не женится и отказывается воспитывать детей и т. д. Вялая душа, вялые мышцы, отсутствие движений, неустойчивость в мыслях — и всё это в силу того, что жизнь не имеет смысла, что у женщин бели и что деньги — зло.
Где вырождение и апатия, там половое извращение, холодный разврат, выкидыши, ранняя старость, брюзжащая молодость, там падение искусств, равнодушие к науке, там несправедливость во всей своей форме. Общество, которое не верует в бога, но боится примет и чёрта, которое отрицает всех врачей и в то же время лицемерно оплакивает Боткина и поклоняется Захарьину, не смеет и заикаться о том, что оно знакомо с справедливостью.
…Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms. The society that does not believe in God but fears bad tokens and the devil, that denies all physicians while hypocritically bewailing Botkin and worshipping Zakharyin, such a society simply has no right to say that it is familiar with justice.
Zelyonye chyortiki (the green devils) mentioned by Chekhov bring to mind “the man in green,” as Kinbote calls Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus (Shade’s murderer) a lift to Kinbote’s rented house in New Wye:
Gradus returned to the Main Desk.
"Too bad," said the girl, "I just saw him leave."
"Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy," muttered Gradus, who sometimes at moments of stress used Russian ejaculations.
"You'll find him in the directory," she said pushing it towards him, and dismissing the sick man's existence to attend to the wants of Mr. Gerald Emerald who was taking out a fat bestseller in a cellophane jacket.
Moaning and shifting from one foot to the other, Gradus started leafing through the college directory but when he found the address, he was faced with the problem of getting there.
"Dulwich Road," he cried to the girl. "Near? Far? Very far, probably?"
"Are you by any chance Professor Pnin's new assistant?" asked Emerald.
"No," said the girl. "This man is looking for Dr. Kinbote, I think. You are looking for Dr. Kinbote, aren't you?"
"Yes, and I can't any more," said Gradus.
"I thought so," said the girl. "Doesn't he live somewhere near Mr. Shade, Gerry?"
"Oh, definitely," said Gerry, and turned to the killer: "I can drive you there if you like. It is on my way."
Did they talk in the car, these two characters, the man in green and the man in brown? Who can say? They did not. After all, the drive took only a few minutes (it took me, at the wheel of my powerful Kramler, four and a half).
"I think I'll drop you here," said Mr. Emerald. "It's that house up there."
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels. As he began hurriedly fumbling at the car door, unfastidious Emerald leaned, close to him, across him, almost merging with him, to help him open it - and then, slamming it shut again, whizzed on to some tryst in the valley. My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer; he will appreciate them even more if I tell him that, according to the legend spread later by the police, Jack Grey had been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a lonesome trucker! One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library - or in Mr. Emerald's car. (note to Line 949)
Gerald Emerald, “bad Bob” (Kinbote’s former roomer) and “Mr. Anon” (the author of a brutal anonymous note) seem to be one and the same person. At the beginning of Eugene Onegin (One: I: 6) Pushkin uses the phrase bozhe moy (good God):
“Мой дядя самых честных правил,
Когда не в шутку занемог,
Он уважать себя заставил
И лучше выдумать не мог.
Его пример другим наука;
Но, боже мой, какая скука
С больным сидеть и день и ночь,
Не отходя ни шагу прочь!
Какое низкое коварство
Полуживого забавлять,
Ему подушки поправлять,
Печально подносить лекарство,
Вздыхать и думать про себя:
Когда же чёрт возьмёт тебя!”
“My uncle has most honest principles:
when he was taken gravely ill,
he forced one to respect him
and nothing better could invent.
To others his example is a lesson;
but, good God, what a bore to sit
by a sick person day and night, not stirring
a step away!
what base perfidiousness
to entertain one half-alive,
adjust for him his pillows,
sadly serve him his medicine,
sigh — and think inwardly
when will the devil take you?”
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, pp. 235-236) VN points out that gentle Zhukovski made (in 1818, Lesnoy tsar') a miserable hash of Goethe's hallucinatory Erlkönig (as Lermontov was to do, in 1840, Gornye vershiny, of the marvelous Über allen Gipfeln). On the other hand, there are readers who prefer Pushkin's Scene from Faust (1825) to the whole of Goethe's Faust, in which they distinguish a queer strain of triviality impairing the pounding of its profundities.
The opening lines of Goethe’s hallucinatory poem, Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind (Who's riding so late through night and wind / It is the father with his child), are a leitmotif in Pale Fire.
In Chapter Two of EO Pushkin describes Lenski and mentions nebo Shillera i Gete (the sky of Schiller and of Goethe):
Негодованье, сожаленье,
Ко благу чистая любовь
И славы сладкое мученье
В нем рано волновали кровь.
Он с лирой странствовал на свете;
Под небом Шиллера и Гете
Их поэтическим огнём
Душа воспламенилась в нём;
И муз возвышенных искусства,
Счастливец, он не постыдил:
Он в песнях гордо сохранил
Всегда возвышенные чувства,
Порывы девственной мечты
И прелесть важной простоты.
Indignation, compassion,
pure love of Good,
and fame's delicious torment
early had stirred his blood.
He wandered with a lyre on earth.
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe,
with their poetic fire
his soul had kindled;
and the exalted Muses of the art
he, happy one, did not disgrace:
he proudly in his songs retained
always exalted sentiments,
the surgings of a virgin fancy, and the charm
of grave simplicity. (Two: IX)
Chekhov’s letter of Nov. 24, 1887, to “dearest Gusev” (as Chekhov calls his brother Alexander), in which the writer describes the unexpected success of his play “Ivanov,” is signed Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe. Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov. Describing King Alfin’s passion for flying apparatuses, Kinbote mentions his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev:
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
The name Gusev comes from gus’ (goose). In Chapter Four (XLII: 9-12) of EO Pushkin mentions a heavy goose that steps carefully upon the ice:
И вот уже трещат морозы
И серебрятся средь полей...
(Читатель ждет уж рифмы розы;
На, вот возьми ее скорей!)
Опрятней модного паркета
Блистает речка, льдом одета.
Мальчишек радостный народ24
Коньками звучно режет лед;
На красных лапках гусь тяжелый,
Задумав плыть по лону вод,
Ступает бережно на лед,
Скользит и падает; веселый
Мелькает, вьется первый снег,
Звездами падая на брег.
And now the frosts already crackle
and silver 'mid the fields
(the reader now expects the rhyme “froze-rose” —
here, take it quick!).
Neater than modish parquetry,
the ice-clad river shines.
The gladsome crew of boys24
cut with their skates resoundingly the ice;
a heavy goose with red feet, planning
to swim upon the bosom of the waters,
steps carefully upon the ice,
slidders, and falls. The gay
first snow flicks, whirls,
falling in stars upon the bank.
Pushkin's note 24: “This signifies,” remarks one of our critics, “that the urchins are skating.” Right.
At the end of Canto Two of his poem Shade describes his daughter’s death and mentions zesty scaters:
People have thought she tried to cross the lake
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. According to Alexandra Smirnov, Pushkin compared Goethe's Faust to Dante’s Divine Comedy and called it “the last word of German literature… alpha and omega of human thought from the times of Christianity:”
Вот как русский поэт понимает значение «Фауста»: «„Фауст“ стоит совсем особо. Это последнее слово немецкой литературы, это особый мир, как „Божественная Комедия“; это — в изящной форме альфа и омега человеческой мысли со времён христианства». (chapter IV)
In a letter of May 15, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the scientist:
Знания всегда пребывали в мире. И анатомия, и изящная словесность имеют одинаково знатное происхождение, одни и те же цели, одного и того же врага — чёрта, и воевать им положительно не из-за чего. Борьбы за существование у них нет. Если человек знает учение о кровообращении, то он богат; если к тому же выучивает еще историю религии и романс «Я помню чудное мгновение», то становится не беднее, а богаче, — стало быть, мы имеем дело только с плюсами. Потому-то гении никогда не воевали, и в Гёте рядом с поэтом прекрасно уживался естественник.
Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace. Anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have the same purpose and the same enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely nothing for them to fight about. There is no struggle for existence between them. If a man knows about the circulation of the blood, he is rich; if he also learns the history of religion and the song “I remember a marvellous moment,” he becomes richer, not poorer—that is to say, we are concerned with pluses alone. This is why geniuses have never fought, and in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the scientist.
In the same letter Chekhov says that, compared to Bourget, the Russian writer is gus' lapchatyi (a cunning fellow; literally: web-footed goose):
Русский писатель живет в водосточной трубе, ест мокриц, любит халд и прачек, не знает он ни истории, ни географии, ни естественных наук, ни религии родной страны, ни администрации, ни судопроизводства... одним словом, чёрта лысого не знает. В сравнении с Бурже он гусь лапчатый и больше ничего.
The ornithologists's son, Shade compares his daughter to a dingy cygnet:
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. (ll. 318-319)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
A pretty conceit. The wood duck, a richly colored bird, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, with black and white markings, is incomparably more beautiful than the much-overrated swan, a serpentine goose with a dirty neck of yellowish plush and a frogman's black rubber flaps.
Incidentally, the popular nomenclature of American animals reflects the simple utilitarian minds of ignorant pioneers and has not yet acquired the patina of European faunal names. (note to Line 319)
“The Wild Duck” (1884) is a play by Ibsen. In a letter of March 31, 1902, to Olga Knipper (a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater) Chekhov asks his wife if Stanislavski’s stage version of “The Wild Duck” was a flop:
«Дикая утка» осрамилась?
In the same letter to his wife Chekhov mentions the unexpected success of Gorki’s play Na dne (“The Lower Depths,” 1902):
Пьеса Горького имела успех? Молодцы!!
A character in Gorki's play, Luka brings to mind Caroline Lukin, the maiden name of Shade's mother (who assisted her husband in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico). Carline Lukin and Charles (or Karl) the Beloved bring to mind Karolina Karlovna, Major Shchelkolobov's young wife in Chekhov’s humorous story Za dvumya zaytsami pogonish’sya, ni odnogo ne poymaesh’ (“You’ll Chase Two Hares, You will not Catch a Single One,” 1880).
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his years at Cambridge and pairs Ibsen with Gorki and Gorki’s translator:
Today he is not unknown among his peers, which is, I admit readily, a pretty meaningless phrase, but then, I am doing my best to obscure his identity; let me refer to him by the name of ‘Nesbit’ as I dubbed him (or affirm now having dubbed him), not only because of his alleged resemblance to early portraits of Maxim Gorki, a regional mediocrity of that era, one of whose stories (“My Fellow Traveler” – another apt note) had been translated by a certain R. Nesbit Bain, but also because ‘Nesbit’ has the advantage of entering into a voluptuous palindromic association with ‘Ibsen,’ a name I shall have to evoke presently. (Chapter Thirteen, 3)
In Pale Fire VN is doing his best to obscure Botkin’s identity. The name Botkin has the advantage of entering into a voluptuous palindromic association with nikto (nobody), the last word in Lermontov’s poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832). In his essay “Pushkin” Merezhkovski points out that Pushkin is closer to Goethe, than to Byron, and also uses the word nikto:
С этой точки зрения становится вполне ясной ошибка тех, которые ставят Пушкина в связь не с Гёте, а с Байроном. Правда, Байрон увеличил силы Пушкина, но не иначе как побеждённый враг увеличивает силы победителя. Пушкин поглотил Евфориона, преодолел его крайности, его разлад, претворил его в своем сердце, и устремился дальше, выше — в те ясные сферы всеобъемлющей гармонии, куда звал Гёте и куда за Гёте никто не имел силы пойти, кроме Пушкина.
According to Merezhkovski, Pushkin followed Goethe to those clear spheres of all-embracing harmony where Goethe had called and where nobody, except Pushkin, was strong enough to go.
Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide on October 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum ). There is a hope that, after Kinbote’s death, Botkin (who went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda), like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.