In his Foreword to Shade’s poem 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) quotes the words of Professor Hurley who asked Shade about the stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questionsmere fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed.
In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions a widower who lost two wives both of whom were blond:
We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another. Time means growth.
And growth means nothing in Elysian life.
Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,
But with a touch of tawny in the shade,
Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade
The other sits and raises a moist gaze
Toward the blue impenetrable haze. (ll. 569-580)
In the first lines of his poem, “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,” Shade predicts his own death. Shade is killed by Gradus on July 21, 1959. July 21 is the 202nd day of the year. A fortune-teller predicted to Pushkin that he will die in the thirty-seventh year of his life because of a white head or a white horse. Pushkin’s murderer, d’Anthès was blond. Pushkin’s fatal duel took place near Chyornaya Rechka (the Black River). In his poem Bal v zhenskoy gimnazii (“The Ball at a School for Girls,” 1922) Sasha Chyorny (whose penname means “black”) calls a jealous schoolboy nemoy Monblan prezren’ya (the mute Mont Blanc of contempt):
В простенке - бледный гимназист,
Немой Монблан презренья.
Мундир до пяток, стан как хлыст,
А в сердце - лава мщенья.
Он презирает потолок,
Оркестр, паркет и люстры,
И рот кривится поперёк
Усмешкой Заратустры.
Мотив презренья стар как мир...
Вся жизнь в тумане сером:
Его коричневый кумир
Танцует с офицером! (1)
In Canto Three Shade describes his visit to Mrs. Z. who mentioned Shade’s poem about Mon Blon that appeared in the Blue Review:
"I can't believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound--But I'm so dense!" (ll. 781-786)
In Sasha Chyorny’s poem the pale schoolboy’s korichnevyi kumir (brown idol) is dancing with an officer. D’Anthès was an officer. In the Tsarist Russia the schoolgirls wore brown. Kinbote calls Gradus (Shade’s murderer) “the man in brown:”
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." (note to Line 949)
In Sasha Chyorny’s poem prezren’ya (of contempt) rhymes with mshchen’ya (of revenge). In his Parodii na russkikh simvolistov (“The Parodies on the Russian Symbolists,” 1895) Vladimir Solovyov (the author of “The Fate of Pushkin,” 1897) mentions leopardy mshchen’ya (the leopards of revenge):
На небесах горят паникадила,
А снизу - тьма.
Ходила ты к нему иль не ходила?
Скажи сама!
Но не дразни гиену подозрения,
Мышей тоски!
Не то смотри, как леопарды мщенья
Острят клыки!
И не зови сову благоразумья
Ты в эту ночь!
Ослы терпенья и слоны раздумья
Бежали прочь.
Своей судьбы родила крокодила
Ты здесь сама.
Пусть в небесах горят паникадила,
В могиле - тьма.
“Leopard” differs in only one letter from “leotard” (the garment made famous by the French acrobatic performer Jules Leotard, 1838-70). The stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202 also brings to mind blondinka-devushka (the blond girl) in Sasha Chyorny’s poem Amur i Psikheya (“Amor and Psyche,” 1910):
Пришла блондинка-девушка в военный лазарет,
Спросила у привратника: «Где здесь Петров, корнет?»
Взбежал солдат по лестнице, оправивши шинель:
«Их благородье требует какая-то мамзель».
Корнет уводит девушку в пустынный коридор;
Не видя глаз, на грудь ее уставился в упор.
Краснея, гладит девушка смешной его халат,
Зловонье, гам и шарканье несется из палат.
«Прошел ли скверный кашель твой? Гуляешь или нет?
Я, видишь, принесла тебе малиновый шербет...»
— «Merci. Пустяк, покашляю недельки три еще».
И больно щиплет девушку за нежное плечо.
Невольно отодвинулась и, словно в первый раз,
Глядит до боли ласково в зрачки красивых глаз.
Корнет свистит и сердится. И скучно, и смешно!
По коридору шляются — и не совсем темно...
Сказал блондинке-девушке, что ужинать пора,
И проводил смущенную в молчаньи до двора...
В палате венерической бушует зычный смех,
Корнет с шербетом носится и оделяет всех.
Друзья по койкам хлопают корнета по плечу,
Смеясь, грозят, что завтра же расскажут всё врачу.
Растут предположения, растет басистый вой,
И гордо в подтверждение кивнул он головой...
Идет блондинка-девушка вдоль лазаретных ив,
Из глаз лучится преданность, и вера, и порыв.
Несет блондинка-девушка в свой дом свой первый сон:
В груди зарю желания, в ушах победный звон.
In Sasha Chyorny’s poem ensign Petrov pinches the girl’s tender shoulder. In “The Poem” (1944) VN mentions a delicate bare shoulder glimmering in the mirror within him and, in the last stanza, the leopards of words:
Not the sunset poem you make when you think
aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink
cloud;
nor the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme --
the tiny music that tells the time;
and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
not the things you can say so much better in plain
prose --
but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
-- when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then --
in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.