In his Commentary 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) calls his uncle Conmal (Shakespeare’s translator into Zemblan) “the venerable Duke:”
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
In VN’s story Poseshchenie muzeya (“The Visit to the Museum,” 1938) the narrator mentions zasluzhennye mineraly (venerable minerals) and a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading "Grand Duke" and "Middle Duke" if translated:
Всё было как полагается: серый цвет, сон вещества, обеспредметившаяся предметность; шкап со стертыми монетами, лежащими на бархатных скатиках, а наверху шкапа -- две совы,-- одну звали в буквальном переводе "Великий князь", другую "Князь средний"; покоились заслуженные минералы в открытых гробах из пыльного картона; фотография удивленного господина с эспаньолкой высилась над собранием странных черных шариков различной величины, занимавших почетное место под наклонной витриной: они чрезвычайно напоминали подмороженный навоз, и я над ними невольно задумался, ибо никак не мог разгадать их природу, состав и назначение.
Everything was as it should be: gray tints, the sleep of substance, matter dematerialized. There was the usual case of old, worn coins resting in the inclined velvet of their compartments. There was, on top of the case, a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading "Grand Duke" and "Middle Duke" if translated. Venerable minerals lay in their open graves of dusty papier mache; a photograph of an astonished gentleman with a pointed beard dominated an assortment of strange black lumps of various sizes. They bore a great resemblance to frozen frass, and I paused involuntarily over them, for I was quite at a loss to guess their nature, composition, and function.
In VN’s story a joker takes out a cigarette and prepares to borrow a light from the portrait that the narrator wants to ransom:
-- Кто эта старая обезьяна?-- спросил относительно портрета некто в полосатом нательнике, а так как дед моего приятеля был изображен с сигарой в руке, другой балагур вынул папиросу и собрался у портрета прикурить.
"Who's the old ape?" asked an individual in a striped jersey, and, as my friend's grandfather was depicted holding a glowing cigar, another funster took out a cigarette and prepared to borrow a light from the portrait.
In his biography of de Heeckeren d’Anthès (reprinted by Shchyogolev in “The Duel and Death of Pushkin”) Louis Metman (d’Anthès’ grandson) mentions his grandfather’s portrait (1878) by Carolus-Duran. According to Metman, the artist portrayed old Baron d'Anthès with a glowing cigar in his hand:
Портрет Каролюса Дюран, помеченный 1878 годом, одна из лучших работ художника, изображает барона Геккерена в его бодрой старости, которая, невзирая на жестокие припадки подагры, сохранила его уму всю его ясность.
Он изображён прямо сидящим в кресле и держащим в свисающей руке ещё горящую сигару, с несколько высокомерно закинутой головой, что было для него привычно и что мы видим и на маленьком портрете, писанном с него в Петербурге, на котором он изображён в кавалергардском мундире.
Серебристо-белые, откинутые назад волосы, длинные усы и густая бородка обрамляют мужественное лицо, с крупными чертами, со свежим цветом кожи. Темно-голубые глаза смотрят прямо и пристально, что было отличительной чертой его своеобразного лица, и дополняют живой образ барона Геккерена за последние двадцать лет его жизни...
In an anonymous letter (cooked up by Prince Pyotr Dolgoruki, nicknamed in society le bancal, "bowlegs") that Pushkin and his friends received on November 4, 1836, His Excellency Dmitri Lvovich Naryshkin (whose wife had been the mistress of Tsar Alexander I for many years) is called "the venerable Grand Master of the Order of the Cuckolds:"
Les Grands-Croix, Commandeurs et Chevaliers du Sérénissime Ordre des Cocus, réunis en grand Chapitre sous la présidence du vénérable grand-Maître de l'Ordre, S. E. D. L. Narychkine, ont nommea l'unanimité Mr. Alexandre Pouchkine coadjuteur du grand Maitre de l'Ordre de Cocus et historiographe del Ordre.
Le sécrétaire perpetuel: C-te J. Borch".
The secretary is Count Joseph Borch: him and his wife, Lyubov, the monde dubbed a model couple because "she lived with the coachman, and he with the postilion." The venerable Grand Master is His Excellency Dmitri Lvovich Naryshkin, whose wife, Maria, had been the mistress of Tsar Alexander I for many years. It is surmised that this "certificate" should be construed in the sense that Pushkin had been cocufied by the tsar. This was not so. Although the potentate had had his eye on Natalia Pushkin even before she married, she is thought to have become his mistress for a brief spell only after our poet's death (Eugene Onegin Commentary, vol. III, pp. 48-49). Natalia Naryshkin (1651-94) was the mother of Peter I, the founder of St. Petersburg (VN's home city).
Pushkin died on Jan. 29, 1837, two days after his duel with d’Anthès. In his poem January 29th, 1837 Tyutchev calls the poet's murderer tsareubiytsa (regicide):
Из чьей руки свинец смертельный
Поэту сердце растерзал?
Кто сей божественный фиал
Разрушил, как сосуд скудельный?
Будь прав или виновен он
Пред нашей правдою земною,
Навек он высшею рукою
В «цареубийцы» заклеймен.
Who fired the shot?
Who stilled the life which quivered
in the poet’s heart?
In whose hands was the fragile phial shivered?
Innocent or deserving blame,
in the eyes of earthly justice
and branded forever by heaven,
Regicide will be his name.
According to Kinbote, his name means in Zemblan "a king's destroyer:"
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied. (note to Line 894)
"The mirror of exile" brings to mind Hodasevich's poem Pered zerkalom ("In Front of the Mirror," 1925) and izgnanie (exile) mentioned by Hodasevich in his poem Ya rodilsya v Moskve ("I was born in Moscow," 1923):
Я родился в Москве. Я дыма
Над польской кровлей не видал,
И ладанки с землей родимой
Мне мой отец не завещал.
России – пасынок, а Польше –
Не знаю сам, кто Польше я.
Но: восемь томиков, не больше, –
И в них вся родина моя.
Вам – под ярмо ль подставить выю
Иль жить в изгнании, в тоске.
А я с собой свою Россию
В дорожном уношу мешке.
Вам нужен прах отчизны грубый,
А я где б ни был – шепчут мне
Арапские святые губы
О небывалой стороне.
According to Hodasevich, the eight slim volumes of Pushkin's works is his homeland. Vosem' tomikov (eight slim volumes) remind one of Iris Acht (acht is German for "eight"), a celebrated actress mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index to Shade's poem:
Acht, Iris, celebrated actress, d .1888, a passionate and powerful woman, favorite of Thurgus the Third (q. v.), 130. She died officially by her own hand; unofficially, strangled in her dressing room by a fellow actor, a jealous young Gothlander, now, at ninety, the oldest, and least important, member of the Shadows (q. v.) group. (Index)
The last line of Hodasevich's poem "I was born in Moscow," O nebyvaloy storone (About the fabulous land), makes one think of Kinbote's Zembla. In his essay On Hodasevich (1939) VN calls Hodasevich "Pushkin's literary descendant in Tyutchev's line of succession:"
Крупнейший поэт нашего времени, литературный потомок Пушкина по тютчевской линии, он останется гордостью русской поэзии, пока жива последняя память о ней. Его дар тем более разителен, что полностью развит в годы отупения нашей словесности, когда революция аккуратно разделила поэтов на штат штатных оптимистов и заштатных пессимистов, на тамошних здоровяков и здешних ипохондриков, причем получился разительный парадокс: внутри России действует внешний заказ, вне России -- внутренний. Правительственная воля, беспрекословно требующая ласково-литературного внимания к трактору или парашюту, к красноармейцу или полярнику, т. е. некой внешности мира, значительно могущественнее, конечно, наставления здешнего, обращенного к миру внутреннему, едва ощутимого для слабых, презираемого сильными, побуждавшего в двадцатых годах к рифмованной тоске по ростральной колонне, а ныне дошедшего до религиозных забот, не всегда глубоких, не всегда искренних. Искусство, подлинное искусство, цель которого лежит напротив его источника, то есть в местах возвышенных и необитаемых, а отнюдь не в густо населенной области душевных излияний, выродилось у нас, увы, в лечебную лирику. И хоть понятно, что личное отчаяние невольно ищет общего пути для своего облегчения, поэзия тут ни при чем, схима или Сена компетентнее.
This poet, the greatest Russian poet of our time, Pushkin's literary descendant in Tyutchev's line of succession, shall remain the pride of Russian poetry as long as its last memory lives. What makes his genius particularly striking is that it matured in the years of our literature's torpescence, when the Bolshevist era neatly divided poets into established optimists and demoted pessimists, endemic hearties and exiled hypochondriacs; a classification which, inci-dentally, leads to an instructive paradox: inside Russia the dictate acts from outside; outside Russia, it acts from within. The will of the government, which implicitly demands a writer's affectionate attention toward a parachute, a farm tractor, a Red Army soldier, or the participant in some polar venture (i.e. toward this or that externality of the world) is naturally considerably more powerful than the injunction of exile, addressed to man's inner world.
According to Kinbote, he arrived in America descending by parachute:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. (note to Line 691)
Vneshniy (outer) and vnutrenniy (inner) zakaz (order) mentioned by VN in his essay On Hodasevich bring to mind Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley:
It was a lovely breezy afternoon, with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing." "War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at every now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon. (note to Line 149)
Btw., regicide (kinbote means in Zemblan "a king's destroyer") brings to mind Axel Rex, the villain in Laughter in the Dark (1938), the English version of VN's novel Camera Obscura (1933). In VN's novel Rex tells Albinus (the art critic) that it is a pity he did not quote in his excellent biography of Sebastiano del Piombo the painter's sonnets:
"Fräulein Peters," said Albinus in a soothing tone, "this is the man who makes two continents--"
Margot started and swerved round.
"Oh, really, how do you do?"
Rex bowed and, turning to Albinus, remarked quietly:
"I happened to read on the boat your excellent biography of Sebastiano del Piombo. Pity, though, you didn't quote his sonnets."
"Oh, but they are very poor," answered Albinus.
"Exactly," said Rex. "That's what is so charming." (chapter 16)
"I work with Master on the architrave" (a line in Conmal's sonnet) reminds one of a great painter in Laughter in the Dark moving backward to view better his finished fresco:
A great painter one day, high up on the scaffold, began moving backward to view better his finished fresco. The next receding step would have taken him over, and, as a warning cry might be fatal, his apprentice had the presence of mind to sling the contents of a pail at the masterpiece. Very funny! But how much funnier still, had the rapt master been left to walk back into nothing--with, incidentally, the spectators expecting the pail. The art of caricature, as Rex understood it, was thus based (apart from its synthetic, fooled-again nature) on the contrast between cruelty on one side and credulity on the other. And if, in real life, Rex looked on without stirring a finger while a blind beggar, his stick tapping happily, was about to sit down on a freshly painted bench, he was only deriving inspiration for his next little picture. (chapter 18)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade quotes Pope's Essay on Man and mentions the blind beggar:
I went upstairs and read a galley proof,
And heard the wind roll marbles on the roof.
"See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing"
Has unmistakably the vulgar ring
Of its preposterous age. Then came your call,
My tender mockingbird, up from the hall.
I was in time to overhear brief fame
And have a cup of tea with you: my name
Was mentioned twice, as usual just behind
(one oozy footstep) Frost.
"Sure you don't mind?
I'll catch the Exton plane, because you know
If I don't come by midnight with the dough - " (ll. 417-428)
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.”
See also the full version of my previous post, "mirror of exile in Pale Fire."