Describing the king's arrival in America, 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) says that Sylvia O'Donnell inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son (Odon, the world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla) was said to be living in sin:
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. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements. (note to Line 691)
Zhit' vo grekhe (to live in sin) and Gradus's pea-shooter (which Gradus should not aim at people even in dreams) bring to mind vo grakhe (in a pea field), a phrase in the well-known mock-archaic verses attributed (by D. L. Mordovtsev who, in his 1879 historical novel Dvenadtsatyi god, "Year 1812," makes eight-year-old Pushkin recite them) to Vasily Trediakovski (a poetaster, 1703-1769):
Стрекочущу кузнецу
В зленом блате сущу,
Ядовиту червецу,
По злакам ползущу,
Журавель летящ, во грахе
Скачущ через ногу,
Забываючи все страхи,
Урчит хвалу Богу.
Элефанты и леонты,
И лесные сраки,
И орлы, оставя монты,
Учиняют браки.
О, колико се любезно,
Превыспренно взрачно,
Нарочито преполезно
И сугубо смачно!
In a letter of July 31 - Aug. 2, 1882, to his brothers Alexander Chekhov (the writer's elder brother, 1855-1913) says that in the Tula railway station he saw Anton's bride with her mammy who was said to have broken a horse's spine when mounting a saddle. According to Alexander Chekhov, she could break a spine of an elephant, of a mastodon and even of a lesnaya sraka (a silvan magpie, an allusion to the above quoted mock-archaic poem):
"В Туле, Антоша, я видел на вокзале твою невесту, иже во Грачиках, и ее маменьку. Об этой маменьке говорят, что она, садясь в седло, сломала лошади спину. Я же убежден, что она в состоянии сломать спину любому элефанту, мостодонту и даже лесной сраке, а посему и не советую тебе жениться, ибо, если такая теща насядет на шею, то — согласись сам..."
Alexander Chekhov does not recommend Anton to marry the girl, because if such a mother-in-law ever attempts to sit on his neck... After his wife had left him, Gradus (Shade's murderer) had lived in sin with his mother-in-law:
At his hotel the beaming proprietress handed him a telegram. It chided him in Danish for leaving Geneva and told him to undertake nothing until further notice. It also advised him to forget his work and amuse himself. But what (save dreams of blood) could be his amusements? He was not interested in sightseeing or seasiding. He had long stopped drinking. He did not go to concerts. He did not gamble. Sexual impulses had greatly bothered him at one time but that was over. After his wife, a beader in Radugovitra, had left him (with a gypsy lover), he had lived in sin with his mother-in-law until she was removed, blind and dropsical, to an asylum for decayed widows. Since then he had tried several times to castrate himself, had been laid up at the Glassman Hospital with a severe infection, and now, at forty-four, was quite cured of the lust that Nature, the grand cheat, puts into us to inveigle us into propagation. No wonder the advice to amuse himself infuriated him. I think I shall break this note here. (note to Line 697)
According to Kinbote, Gradus never became a real success in the glass business:
Gradus never became a real success in the glass business to which he turned again and again between his wine-selling and pamphlet-printing jobs. He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He also worked as teazer, and later as flasher, at governmental factories – and was, I believe, more or less responsible for the remarkably ugly red-and-amber windows in the great public lavatory at rowdy but colorful Kalixhaven where the sailors are. He claimed to have improved the glitter and rattle of the so-called feuilles-d'alarme used by grape growers and orchardmen to scare the birds. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time. (note to Line 171)
Pis'mo o pol'ze stekla (“Letter on the Use of Glass," 1752) is a famous poem by Lomonosov (Trediakovski's main rival, 1711-1765). Orchardsmen mentioned by Kinbote bring to mind Chekhov's play Vishnyovyi sad ("The Cherry Orchard," 1904). Like Chekhov (1860-1904), Kinbote and Gradus die at age forty-four. In 1901 Chekhov (whom Shade listed among Russian humorists and who famously called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress) married Olga Knipper, a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater. Nevesta ("The Betrothed," 1903) and Grekh ("The Sin," 1904) are Chekhov's last stories.
A play on srat' (vulg., to shit), lesnye sraki (mock archaic, silvan magpies) bring to mind Gradus's stomack trouble:
Aboard the small and uncomfortable plane flying into the sun he found himself wedged among several belated delegates to the New Wye Linguistic Conference, all of them lapel-labeled, and representing the same foreign language, but none being able to speak it, so that conversation was conducted (across our hunched-up killer and on all sides of his immobile face) in rather ordinary Anglo-American. During this ordeal, poor Gradus kept wondering what caused another discompfort which kept troubling him on and off throughout the flight, and which was worse than the babble of the monolinguists. He could not settle what to attribute it to - pork, cabbage, fried potatoes or melon - for upon retasting them one by one in spasmodic retrospect he found little to choose between their different but equally sickening flavors. My own opinion, which I would like the doctor to confirm, is that the French sandwich was engaged in an intestinal internecine war with the "French" fries.
Upon arriving after five at the New Wye airport he drank two papercupfuls of nice cold milk from a dispenser and acquired a map at the desk. With broad blunt finger tapping the configuration of the campus that resembled a writhing stomach, he asked the clerk what hotel was nearest to the university. A car, he was told, would take him to the Campus Hotel which was a few minutes' walk from the Main Hall (now Shade Hall). During the ride he suddenly became aware of such urgent qualms that he was forced to visit the washroom as soon as he got to the solidly booked hotel. There his misery resolved itself in a scaldinging torrent of indigestion. Hardly had he refastened his trousers and checked the bulge of his hip pocket than a renewal of stabs and squeaks caused him to strip his thighs again which he did with such awkward precipitation that his small Browning was all but sent flying into the depths of the toilet. (note to Line 949)
Btw., Zhil greshno i umer smeshno ("He lived sinfully and died a funny death") is Ivan Barkov's self-epitaph. Ten' Barkova ("Barkov's Shade") is an obscene poem attributed to young Pushkin (the author of Ten' Fonvizina, "Fonvisin's Shade," 1815). In the first years of his married life Pushkin was on bad terms with his mother-in-law (Natalia Ivanovna Goncharov, born Zagryazhski, 1785-1848). During his courtship of Natalia Goncharov, Pushkin once told his future mother-in-law: "I want to marry your daughter, not you." Ekaterina Goncharov (Pushkin's sister-in-law) married George d'Anthès (the poet's murderer).
Describing his first trip to Ardalion's lakeside piece of ground, Hermann Karlovich (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Otchayanie, "Despair," 1934) mentions tyoshchino mesto (the rumble seat; literally: "the mother-in-law place") occupied in the car by Ardalion (the cousin of Hermann's wife Lydia, the painter who has a leonine face):
Оставив Лиду в отдрожавшем автомобиле, я пошел поднимать Ардалиона. Он спал. Он спал в купальном костюме. Выкатившись из постели, он молча и быстро надел тапочки, натянул на купальное трико фланелевые штаны и синюю рубашку, захватил портфель с подозрительным вздутием, и мы спустились. Торжественно-сонное выражение мало красило его толстоносое лицо. Он был посажен сзади, на тёщино место.
Leaving Lydia in the car, which by now had stopped throbbing, I went up to arouse Ardalion. I found him asleep. He slept in his one-piece bathing suit. Rolling out of bed, he proceeded with silent rapidity to slip on sandals, a blue shirt, and flannel trousers; then he snatched up a briefcase (with a suspicious lump in its cheek) and we went down. A solemn and sleepy expression did not exactly add charm to his fat-nosed face. He was put in the rumble seat. (Chapter Two)
A character in Despair, Orlovius (the insurance agent) brings to mind Vinogradus (as Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus) and I orly, ostavya monty, / Uchinyayut braki ("And the eagles, having left the mountains, / Are getting married"), the lines in the above quoted mock archaic poem. In Despair Hermann murders Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double (and whose name seems to hint at Derzhavin's poem Felitsa, 1782). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. 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”).