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) calls Shade "my beloved old conjurer:"
We never discussed, John Shade and I, any of my personal misfortunes. Our close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them. My admiration for him was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence. Here he is, I would say to myself, that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him. He is looking from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant lake. I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle's castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air.
Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat - and shook out a poem.
The characters in VN's story Kartofel'nyi Elf ("The Potato Elf," 1929) include the conjuror Shock:
Вернувшись в Лондон, он нашел нового партнера, - фокусника, по имени Шок. У Шока был певучий голос, тонкие, бледные, как бы бесплотные руки и каштановый клин волос, спадающий на бровь. Он напоминал скорее поэта, нежели фокусника, и фокусы свои показывал с какой-то нежной и плавной печалью, без суетливой болтовни, свойственной его профессии. Картофельный Эльф ему смешно прислуживал, а под конец - с радостным воркующим возгласом появлялся в райке, хотя за минуту до того все видели, как фокусник его запирал в черный ящик, стоявший посреди сцены.
Upon returning to London he found a new partner in the person of Shock, the conjuror. Shock had a tuneful delivery, slender, pale, virtually ethereal hands, and a lick of chestnut-brown hair that came down on one eyebrow. He resembled a poet more than a stage magician, and demonstrated his skill with a sort of tender and graceful melancholy, without the fussy patter characteristic of his profession. The Potato Elf assisted him amusingly and, at the end of the act, would turn up in the gallery with a cooing exclamation of joy, although a minute before everyone had seen Shock lock him up in a black box right in the middle of the stage. (1)
The story's main character, Fred Dobson (nicknamed the Potato Elf) is a circus dwarf. The Russian word for 'dwarf' is karlik. According to Kinbote, on his deathbed Conmal (the King’s uncle at whose castle young Charles Xavier Vseslav saw a conjurer) called his nephew “Karlik:”
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!” Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
At the beginning of his Commentary Kinbote mentions Shade's first eschatological shock:
The image in these opening lines evidently refers to a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly slower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space. We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint. When in the last year of Shade's life I had the fortune of being his neighbor in the idyllic hills of New Wye (see Foreword), I often saw those particular birds most convivially feeding on the chalk-blue berries of junipers growing at the corner of his house. (See also lines 181-182.)
My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name "robin" to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!
Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved (born 1915), whose glorious misfortunes I discussed so often with my friend.
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (note to Lines 1-4)
In lines 181-182 of his poem Shade says:
Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings
Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.
Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915).
The Potato Elf brings to mind Rabelais’s great Maybe, "the grand potato," mentioned by Shade at the beginning of Canto Three of his poem:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.
I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it--big if!--engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber).
You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 501-509)
In his note to Line 502 (the grand potato) Kinbote writes:
An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais' soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être.
In Canto the Seventh (III-IV) of Don Juan Byron lists the writers who knew this life was not worth a potato:
They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of
The present poem -- of -- I know not what --
A tendency to under-rate and scoff
At human power and virtue, and all that;
And this they say in language rather rough.
Good God! I wonder what they would be at!
I say no more than hath been said in Danté's
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;
By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,
By Fénélon, by Luther, and by Plato;
By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,
Who knew this life was not worth a potato.
T'is not their fault, nor mine, if this be so --
For my part, I pretend not to be Cato,
Nor even Diogenes. -- We live and die,
But which is best, you know no more than I.
Lermontov's poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy ("No, I'm not Byron, I'm another," 1832) ends in the line Ya - ili Bog - ili nikto ("Myself - or God - or none at all"). Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody") was Innokentiy Annenski's penname. In a letter of Oct. 17, 1908, to Ekaterina Mukhin, Annenski says that people who ceased to believe in God but who continue to fear the devil created this otzyvayushchiysya kalamburom (smacking of a pun) terror before the smell of sulfuric pitch, Le grand Peut-Etre:
Люди, переставшие верить в бога, но продолжающие трепетать чёрта... Это они создали на языке тысячелетней иронии этот отзывающийся каламбуром ужас перед запахом серной смолы - Le grand Peut-Etre. Для меня peut-etre - не только бог, но это всё, хотя это и не ответ, и не успокоение…
On December 13, 1909, Annenski died of heart failure on the steps of the Tsarskoselski Railway Station in St. Petersburg. VN's story The Potato Elf ends as follows:
Широкая, пыльная дорога вела прямо к вокзалу. Было по-воскресному пустынно, но ненароком из-за угла вышел мальчишка с крикетной лаптой в руке. Он-то первый и заметил карлика. Хлопнул себя по цветной кепке, глядя на удалявшуюся спину Фреда, на мелькание мышиных гетр.
И сразу Бог весть откуда взявшись, появились другие мальчишки и, разинув рты, стали вкрадчиво догонять карлика. Он шел все быстрее, поглядывая на золотые часы, посмеиваясь и волнуясь. От солнца слегка поташнивало. А мальчишек все прибавлялось, и редкие прохожие в изумлении останавливались, где-то звонко пролились куранты, сонный городок оживал и вдруг разразился безудержным, давно таимым смехом.
Не в силах сладить со своим нетерпением, Картофельный Эльф пустился бежать. Один из мальчишек прошмыгнул вперед, заглянул ему в лицо; другой крикнул что-то грубым, гортанным голосом. Фред, морщась от пыли, бежал,- и вдруг показалось ему, что мальчишки, толпой следовавшие за ним,- все сыновья его, веселые, румяные, стройные,- и он растерянно заулыбался, и все бежал, крякая, стараясь забыть сердце, огненным клином ломавшее ему грудь.
Велосипедист на сверкающих колесах ехал рядом с ним, прижимал рупором кулак ко рту, ободрял его, как это делается во время состязаний. На пороги выходили женщины, щурились от солнца, громко смеялись, указывая друг другу на пробегавшего карлика. Проснулись все собаки в городке; прихожане в душной церкви невольно прислушивались к лаю, к задорному улюлюканью. И все густела толпа, бежавшая вокруг карлика. Думали, что это все - великолепная шутка, цирковая реклама, съемки...
Фред начинал спотыкаться, в ушах гудело, запонка впивалась в горло, нечем было дышать. Стон смеха, крик, топот ног оглушили его. Но вот сквозь туман пота он увидел перед собой черное платье. Нора медленно шла вдоль кирпичной стены в потоках солнца. И вот - обернулась, остановилась. Карлик добежал до нее, вцепился в складки юбки...
С улыбкой счастья взглянул на нее снизу вверх, попытался сказать что-то,- и тотчас, удивленно подняв брови, сполз на панель. Кругом шумно дышала толпа. Кто-то, сообразив, что все это не шутка, нагнулся над карликом и тихо свистнул, снял шапку. Нора безучастно глядела на крохотное тело Фреда, похожее на черный комок перчатки. Ее затолкали. Кто-то взял ее за локоть.
- Оставьте меня,- вяло проговорила Нора,- я ничего не знаю... У меня на днях умер сын...
A broad dusty road led straight to the station. It was more or less deserted on Sundays-but unexpectedly a boy with a cricket bat appeared at a corner. He was the first to notice the dwarf. In gleeful surprise he slapped himself on the top of his bright-colored cap as he watched Fred's receding back and the flicking of his mouse-gray spats.
And instantly, from God knows where, more boys appeared, and with gaping stealthiness started to follow the dwarf. He walked faster and faster, now and then looking at his watch, and chuckling excitedly. The sun made him feel a little queasy. Meanwhile, the number of boys increased, and chance pa.s.sersby stopped to look in wonder. Somewhere afar church chimes rang forth: the drowsy town was coming to life-and all of a sudden it burst into uncontrollable, long-restrained laughter.
The Potato Elf, unable to master his eagerness, switched to a jog. One of the lads darted in front of him to have a look at his face; another yelled something in a rude hoarse voice. Fred, grimacing because of the dust, ran on, and abruptly it seemed to him that all those boys crowding in his wake were his sons, merry, rosy, well-built sons-and he smiled a bewildered smile as he trotted along, puffing and trying to forget the heart breaking his chest with a burning ram.
A cyclist, riding beside the dwarf on glittering wheels, pressed his fist to his mouth like a megaphone and urged the sprinter along as they do at a race. Women came out on their porches and, shading their eyes and laughing loudly, pointed out the running dwarf to one another. All the dogs of the town woke up. The parishioners in the stuffy church could not help listening to the barking, to the inciting halloos. And the crowd that kept up with the dwarf continued to grow around him. People thought it was all a capital stunt, circus publicity or the shooting of a picture.
Fred was beginning to stumble, there was a singing in his ears, the front stud of his collar dug into his throat, he could not breathe. Moans of mirth, shouts, the tramping of feet deafened him. Then through the fog of sweat he saw at last her black dress. She was slowly walking along a brick wall in a torrent of sun. She looked back, she stopped. The dwarf reached her and clutched at the folds of her skirt.
With a smile of happiness he glanced up at her, attempted to speak, but instead raised his eyebrows in surprise and collapsed in slow motion on the sidewalk. All around people noisily swarmed. Someone, realizing that this was no joke, bent over the dwarf, then whistled softly and bared his head. Nora looked listlessly at Fred's tiny body resembling a crumpled black glove. She was jostled. A hand grasped her elbow.
"Leave me alone," said Nora in a toneless voice. "I don't know anything. My son died a few days ago." (7)