On July 7, 1959, Jakob Gradus (one of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade's murderer) visits Oswin Bretwit (the former Zemblan consul) in Paris:
I, too, was wont to draw my poet’s attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky. Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture.
The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows’ neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit’s father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to “young” Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:
Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent.
The scripta in question were two hundred and thirteen long letters which had passed some seventy years ago between Zule Bretwit, Oswin's grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his, Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros. This correspondence, a dismal exchange of bureaucratic pla titudes and fustian jokes, was devoid of even such parochial interest as letters of this sort may possess in the eyes of a local historian - but of course there is no way of telling what will repel or attract a sentimental ancestralist - and this was what Oswin Bretwit had always been known to be by his former staff. I would like to take time out here to interrupt this dry commentary and pay a brief tribute to Oswin Bretwit.
Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland. His face was singularly featureless. He had café-au-lait eyes. One remembers him always as wearing a mourning band. But this insipid exterior belied the quality of the man. From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit! Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water over the golden wake of an emblematic sun. Let no insurance firm or airline use this insigne on the glossy page of a magazine as an ad badge under the picture of a retired businessman stupefied and honored by the sight of the technicolored snack that the air hostess offers him with everything else she can give; rather, let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation. How fervently one had dreamed that a similar symbol but in verbal form might have imbued the poem of another dead friend; but this was not to be... Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, indeed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade! (note to Line 286)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), on the day following Gradus' visit Oswin Bretwit was hospitalized, operated upon and died under the knife:
But to return to the roofs of Paris. Courage was allied in Oswin Bretwit with integrity, kindness, dignity, and what can be euphemistically called endearing naïveté. When Gradus telephoned from the airport, and to whet his appetite read to him Baron B.'s message (minus the Latin tag), Bretwit's only thought was for the treat in store for him. Gradus had declined to say over the telephone what exactly the "precious papers" were, but it so happened that the ex-consul had been hoping lately to retrieve a valuable stamp collection that his father had bequeathed years ago to a now defunct cousin. The cousin had dwelt in the same house as Baron B., and with all these complicated and entrancing matters uppermost in his mind, the ex-consul, while awaiting his visitor, kept wondering not if the person from Zembla was a dangerous fraud, but whether he would bring all the albums at once or would do it gradually so as to see what he might get for his pains. Bretwit hoped the business would be completed that very night since on the following morning he was to be hospitalized and possibly operated upon (he was, and died under the knife). (ibid.)
On July 5 (according to other sources, on July 15), 1957, Vasiliy Maklakov, aged 88, died in Baden (Switzerland). In October 1917, Maklakov was appointed to replace Alexander Izvolsky as Russian Ambassador to France. When he arrived in Paris, Maklakov learned of the Bolshevik takeover (October Revolution) and he represented a no longer existent government. 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). In 1959 Kinbote and Gradus are 44. 44 + 44 = 88 (Maklakov's age at the moment of death). Like VN's father, Maklavov was a member of the Kadet Party (Constitutional Democrats). According to Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames), the name Bretwit means Chess Intelligence:
His smile gone, Bretwit (the name means Chess Intelligence) got up from his chair. In a larger room he would have paced up and down - not in this cluttered study. Gradus the Bungler buttoned all three buttons of his tight brown coat and shook his head several times. (ibid.)
In 1929 (Russkoe slovo, March 9) Pyotr Struve said of Pavel Milyukov (the leader of the Kadets, 1859-1943):
Если бы политика была шахматной игрой и люди были деревянными фигурками, П. Н. Милюков был бы гениальным политиком.
If politics were a game of chess and people were little wooden chessmen, P. N. Milyukov would have been a politician of genius.
On March 28, 1922, VN's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was killed in an assassination, while heroically intervening to protect fellow politician Pavel Milyukov during a lecture in a Berlin hall. Shade is killed by Gradus on July 21, 1959. VN's father was born on July 20, 1869. VN's uncle, Konstantin Dmitrievich Nabokov (1872-1927), was a Russian diplomat who served as the counselor and later chargé d'affaires at the Russian Embassy in London from December 1915 until the Bolshevik revolution forced his departure. Following his diplomatic service, he authored The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921), documenting this period. VN's uncle Konstantin translated Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov (1825) into English.
A king of Deira in northern England, Oswin (died Aug. 20, 651) was the son of Osric (a cousin of king Edwin of Northumbria). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (5.2) Horatio calls Osric (the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes) this lapwing:
"This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head."
At the beginning (and, presumably, at the end) of his poem Shade calls himself "the shadow of the waxwing." In 1880 Nikolay Maklakov (a doctor and writer, 1811 or 1813 - 1882, no relation of Vasiliy Maklakov) published his Russian translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Nikolay Maklakov spells the name Osric (usually spelt in Russian Озрик, Ozrik) thus: Осрик, придворный (a courtier). In Russian spelling, the name Oswin Bretwit would be: Освин Бретвит, дипломат. Oswin Bretwit brings to mind Oswald Rayner (1888-1961), a British spy who is believed to be Rasputin's murderer. As a jurist, Maklakov advised Felix Yusupov and Purishkevich (a member of the Duma who participated in the murder of Rasputin) how to avoid punishment and promised to defend them in court, if need be.