According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), in a theological dispute with him Shade said that the password was Pity:
We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of "sin," of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of "crime," and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's high-backed seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumined concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon.
KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the password is – ?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (note to Line 549)
In his essay O poezii Innokentiya Annenskogo (“On the Poetry of Innokentiy Annenski,” 1910) included in his book Borozdy i mezhi (“Furrows and Boundaries,” 1916) Vyacheslav Ivanov says that it is zhalost’ (pity) that makes Annenski, this half-Frenchman, half-Hellene of the period of decline, a profoundly Russian poet:
Естественным результатом этого обращения к тюремному мученичеству своего или чужого я является в возможности, как последнее слово лирического порыва, целая гамма отрицательных эмоций — отчаяния, ропота, уныния, горького скепсиса, жалости к себе и своему соседу по одиночной камере. В поэзии Анненского из этой гаммы настойчиво слышится повсюду нота жалости. И именно жалость, как неизменная стихия всей лирики и всего жизнечувствия, [делает] этого полу-француза, полу-эллина времен упадка, — глубоко русским поэтом, как бы вновь приобщает его нашим родным христианским корням. Подобно античным скептикам, он сомневался во всем, кроме одного: реальности испытываемого страдания. Отсюда — mens pagana, anima christiana. И кто так, как он, думал о дочери Иаира, поистине должен был знать сердцем Христа. (I)
Polu-frantsuz, polu-ellin (“a half-Frenchman, half-Hellene,” as V. Ivanov calls Annenski) brings to mind polurusskiy sosed (a half-Russian neighbor), as in Eugene Onegin (Two: XII: 1-5) Pushkin calls Lenski:
Богат, хорош собою, Ленской
Везде был принят как жених;
Таков обычай деревенской;
Все дочек прочили своих
За полурусского соседа:
Wealthy, good-looking, Lenski
was as a suitor everywhere received:
such is the country custom;
all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
In his Commentary Kinbote mentions a contented Sosed (Zembla’s gigantic neighbor):
That King's reign (1936-1958) will be remembered by at least a few discerning historians as a peaceful and elegant one. Owing to a fluid system of judicious alliances, Mars in his time never marred the record. Internally, until corruption, betrayal, and Extremism penetrated it, the People's Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council. Harmony, indeed, was the reign's password. The polite arts and pure sciences flourished. Technicology, applied physics, industrial chemistry and so forth were suffered to thrive. A small skyscraper of ultramarine glass was steadily rising in Onhava. The climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer, and the rich a little poorer (in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote's Law). Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren. Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content - even the political mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented Sosed (Zembla's gigantic neighbor). But let us not pursue this tiresome subject. (note to Line 12)
The "prefix" polu- (half-, semi-, demi-) occurs five times in the first three lines of G. Ivanov's poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e... ("Half-pity. Half-disgust…" 1953):
Полу-жалость. Полу-отвращенье.
Полу-память. Полу-ощущенье,
Полу-неизвестно что,
Полы моего пальто:
Полы моего пальто? Так вот в чем дело!
Чуть меня машина не задела
И умчалась вдаль, забрызгав грязью.
Начал вытирать, запачкал руки:
Все ещё мне не привыкнуть к скуке,
Скуке мирового безобразья!
The poem's second half (“I was nearly hit by a car,” etc.) brings to mind a scene described by Kinbote in his Foreword to Shade’s poem:
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough, too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth--not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years--and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handful of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuna collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me.
In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret..." 1927) G. Ivanov (the author of an offensive article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review Chisla, “Numbers,” # 1, 1930) mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire). G. Ivanov's poem Polu-zhalost'. Polu-otvrashchen'e... brings to mind Pushkin’s epigram on Count Vorontsov (the Governor General of New Russia, Pushkin’s boss in Odessa):
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,)
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there's a hope
Thet he will be a full one at last.
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) that ends in the line Ya – ili Bog – ili nikto (Myself – or God – or none at all) Lermontov compares his soul to the ocean in which nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) lies. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet’s murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again.
In his poem Drugomu (“To Another”) included in Kiparisovyi larets (“The Cypress Box,” 1910) Annenski says that “it is impossible to be you and me at the same time,” mentions fire (“you are all fire”) and his dream’s shade:
Я полюбил безумный твой порыв,
Но быть тобой и мной нельзя же сразу,
И, вещих снов иероглифы раскрыв
Узорную пишу я четко фразу.
Фигурно там отобразился страх,
И как тоска бумагу сердца мяла,
Но по строкам, как призрак на пирах,
Тень движется так деланно и вяло.
Твои мечты — менады по ночам,
И лунный вихрь в сверкании размаха
Им волны кос взметает по плечам.
Мой лучший сон — за тканью Андромаха.
На голове ее эшафодаж,
И тот прикрыт кокетливо платочком.
Зато нигде мой строгий карандаш
Не уступал своих созвучий точкам.
Ты весь — огонь. И за костром ты чист.
Испепелишь, но не оставишь пятен,
И бог ты там, где я лишь моралист,
Ненужный гость, неловок и невнятен.
Пройдут года... Быть может, месяца...
Иль даже дни, — и мы сойдём с дороги
Ты — в лепестках душистого венца,
Я просто так, задвинутый на дроги.
Наперекор завистливой судьбе
И нищете убого-слабодушной,
Ты памятник оставишь по себе,
Незыблемый, хоть сладостно-воздушный...
Моей мечты бесследно минет день...
Как знать? А вдруг, с душой подвижней моря,
Другой поэт ее полюбит тень
В нетронуто-торжественном уборе...
Полюбит, и узнает, и поймёт,
И, увидав, что тень проснулась, дышит, —
Благословит немой ее полёт
Среди людей, которые не слышат...
Пусть только бы в круженьи бытия
Не вышло так, что этот дух влюблённый,
Мой брат и маг не оказался я,
В ничтожестве слегка лишь подновлённый.
Annenski fears that another poet, his brother and a magician who one day will recognize and love the shade of his dream, will turn out to be himself. In his essay Problema Gamleta (“The Problem of Hamlet”) included in Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy ("The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909) Annenski mentions Pushkin's Mozart and says that Hamlet is not Salieri:
Видите ли: зависть художника не совсем то, что наша...
Для художника это - болезненное сознание своей ограниченности и желание делать творческую жизнь свою как можно полнее. Истинный художник и завистлив и жаден... я слышу возражение - пушкинский Моцарт. - Да! Но ведь Гамлет не Сальери. Моцарта же Пушкин, как известно, изменил: его короткая жизнь была отнюдь не жизнью праздного гуляки, а сплошным творческим горением. Труд его был громаден, не результат труда, а именно труд.
In Pushkin’s little tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” (1830) Salieri compares music to a corpse and says that he proved harmony by algebra:
Звуки умертвив,
Музыку я разъял, как труп. Поверил
Я алгеброй гармонию.
I deadened
The sounds, dissected music like a corpse,
Proved harmony by algebra. (Scene I)
and Mozart mentions the power of harmony and uses the phrase nikto b (none would), Botkin in reverse:
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power of harmony!
But no: the world could not go on then. None
Would bother with the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to spontaneous art. (Scene II)
Zhivoy trup (“The Living Corpse,” 1900) is a play by Leo Tolstoy. In his essay Ob Annenskom (“On Annenski,” 1921) Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Ilyich Golovin (the main character in Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886) and points out that Annenski regarded his penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”) as a translation of Greek Outis (the pseudonym under which Odysseus conceals his identity from Polyphemus, the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey):
Чего не додумал Иван Ильич, то знал Анненский. Знал, что никаким директорством, никаким бытом и даже никакой филологией от смерти по-настоящему не загородиться. Она уничтожит и директора, и барина, и филолога. Только над истинным его "я", над тем, что отображается в "чувствах и мыслях", над личностью -- у неё как будто нет власти. И он находил реальное, осязаемое отражение и утверждение личности -- в поэзии. Тот, чьё лицо он видел, подходя к зеркалу, был директор гимназии, смертный никто. Тот, чьё лицо отражалось в поэзии, был бессмертный некто. Ник. Т-о -- никто -- есть безличный действительный статский советник, которым, как видимой оболочкой, прикрыт невидимый некто. Этот свой псевдоним, под которым он печатал стихи, Анненский рассматривал как перевод греческого "утис", никто, -- того самого псевдонима, под которым Одиссей скрыл от циклопа Полифема своё истинное имя, свою подлинную личность, своего некто. Поэзия была для него заклятием страшного Полифема -- смерти. Но психологически это не только не мешало, а даже способствовало тому, чтобы его вдохновительницей, его Музой была смерть.
Shade’s poem is almost finished, when the author is killed by Gradus (according to Kinbote, “a half-man who is also half mad”). 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”). Annenski is the author Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1904) and Son i net (“Sleep and No”), a fourteen-line poem whose title is a play on sonet (sonnet).
Homer's Odyssey was translated into Russian by Zhukovski. In his poem Ya muzu yunuyu, byvalo... ("It was time when I the young muse..." 1824) Zhukovski says thst Life and Poetry are One (zhizn' i poeziya - odno). In the last stanza of Nochnoy smotr (1836), Zhukovski's Russian version of Zedlitz's poem Die nächtliche Heerschau ("The Night-Time Review," 1827), the word parol' (password) is repeated three times:
И всех генералов своих
Потом он в кружок собирает,
И ближнему на ухо сам
Он шепчет пароль свой и лозунг;
И армии всей отдают
Они тот пароль и тот лозунг:
И Франция — тот их пароль,
Тот лозунг — Святая Елена.
Так к старым солдатам своим
На смотр генеральный из гроба
В двенадцать часов по ночам
Встает император усопший.
The Marshals and Generals
Close ranks in a circle
The Commander speaks to the nearest
A quiet word in his ear.
The word goes round,
Sounds again far and near,
"France" is the password,
The reply "St Helena".
That is the great parade
In the Elysian Fields
Which, at the twelfth hour,
The dead emperor holds.
The dead emperor is, of course, Napoleon. In Chapter Two (XIV: 5) of EO Pushkin says that we all expect to be Napoleons:
Но дружбы нет и той меж нами.
Все предрассудки истребя,
Мы почитаем всех нулями,
А единицами – себя.
Мы все глядим в Наполеоны;
Двуногих тварей миллионы
Для нас орудие одно;
Нам чувство дико и смешно.
Сноснее многих был Евгений;
Хоть он людей, конечно, знал
И вообще их презирал, —
Но (правил нет без исключений)
Иных он очень отличал
И вчуже чувство уважал.
But in our midst there’s even no such friendship:
Having destroyed all the prejudices,
We deem all people naughts
And ourselves units.
We all expect to be Napoleons;
the millions of two-legged creatures
for us are only tools;
feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
Dvunogikh tvarey milliony (the millions of two-legged creatures) who are for us orudie odno (only tools) bring to mind Odon (a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the King to escape from Zembla) and a million of photographers mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, health heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
In his essay Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable (“Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” 1937) VN points out that, had Pushkin lived a couple of years longer, we would have had his photograph. In his Foreword Kinbote mentions his favorite photograph of Shade:
I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that had belonged to his aunt Maud (see line 86). I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised - not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture; and the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally we separated at once, and through a chink in the window curtains I saw bad Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut, and shabby valise, and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything save treason.