In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Kinbote's note to line 149 of Shade's poem, in which Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) describes the king's escape from Zembla, ends with the sentence "I trust the reader has enjoyed this note." Au lecteur ("To the Reader") is the introductory poem to Charles Baudelaire's collection Les Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil," 1857). In a letter of July 13, 1857, to Baudelaire Gustave Flaubert says: "Vous ne ressemblez à personne (ce qui est la première de toutes les qualités) et cette l'originalité du style découle de la conception ("You resemble no one—which is the first of all qualities—and this originality of style flows from the conception)." According to Kinbote, Zembla is a corruption of Semblerland (a land of reflections, of "resemblers"). A narcissistic person, Kinbote likes to praise himself. In Russian, we say: "Sam sebya ne pokhvalish', nikto tebya ne pokhvalit (if you don't praise youself, nobody will praise you)." Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody") was the penname of Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909), a poet and essayist who translated several poems of Baudelaire into Russian. A phrase used by Mozart at the end of Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830), nikto b (none would) is Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse. Canto Four of Shade's poem begins as follows:
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. (ll. 835-838)
In his note to these lines Kinbote compares Shade to a fiery rooster:
Lines 835-838: Now I shall spy, etc.
The canto, begun on July 19th, on card sixty-eight, opens with a typical Shadism: the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments. Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and 923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
The Gallic rooster (le coq gaulois) is the popular national symbol of France. "Ty budesh' solntse na nebo zvat', - / Solntse ne vstanet (You will call the sun onto the sky - / The sun won't rise)" are the lines from Alexander Blok's poem Golos is khora ("Voice from the Choir," 1910-1914). In his poem Skify ("The Scythians," 1918) Blok mentions ostryi gal'skiy smysl (The sharp Gallic wit)." Line 915 (Now I shall speak... Better than any soap) of Shade's poem reminds one of the fact that Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) were born in 1915, exactly seventeen years after Shade's birth (Shade's birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday). In Lines 923-924 of his poem Shade says that now he will speak of evil as none has spoken before:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 923-930)
In his sonnet Le Mort joyeux ("The Joyful Corpse") included in Le Fleurs du mal Baudelaire compares himself to a shark (un requin):
Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde,
Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde.
Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux;
Plutôt que d'implorer une larme du monde,
Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux
À saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.
Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux,
Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux;
Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture,
À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords,
Et dites-moi s'il est encor quelque torture
Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!
In a rich, heavy soil, infested with snails,
I wish to dig my own grave, wide and deep,
Where I can at leisure stretch out my old bones
And sleep in oblivion like a shark in the wave.
I have a hatred for testaments and for tombs;
Rather than implore a tear of the world,
I'd sooner, while alive, invite the crows
To drain the blood from my filthy carcass.
O worms! black companions with neither eyes nor ears,
See a dead man, joyous and free, approaching you;
Wanton philosophers, children of putrescence,
Go through my ruin then, without remorse,
And tell me if there still remains any torture
For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
A shark appears at the end of Chekhov's story (set on a ship in the Indian Ocean) Gusev (1890):
После этого показывается другое темное тело. Это акула. Она важно и нехотя, точно не замечая Гусева, подплывает под него, и он опускается к ней на спину, затем она поворачивается вверх брюхом, нежится в теплой, прозрачной воде и лениво открывает пасть с двумя рядами зубов. Лоцмана в восторге; они остановились и смотрят, что будет дальше. Поигравши телом, акула нехотя подставляет под него пасть, осторожно касается зубами, и парусина разрывается во всю длину тела, от головы до ног; один колосник выпадает и, испугавши лоцманов, ударивши акулу по боку, быстро идет ко дну.
А наверху в это время, в той стороне, где заходит солнце, скучиваются облака; одно облако похоже на триумфальную арку, другое на льва, третье на ножницы... Из-за облаков выходит широкий зеленый луч и протягивается до самой средины неба; немного погодя рядом с этим ложится фиолетовый, рядом с ним золотой, потом розовый... Небо становится нежно-сиреневым. Глядя на это великолепное, очаровательное небо, океан сначала хмурится, но скоро сам приобретает цвета ласковые, радостные, страстные, какие на человеческом языке и назвать трудно.
After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.
Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured.... The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech. (Chapter 5)
Describing the parents of Charles Xavier Vseslav, Kinbote mentions Colonel Peter Gusev, King Alfin's constant "aerial adjutant:"
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Rahl (by the time of King Alfin's death, Colonel Gusev is Duke of Rahl) seems to hint at Strahl (a ray or beam in German). In the last paragraph of his story Gusev, Chekhov (who died in Badenweiler, a German spa) mentions zelyonyi luch (a green ray). In a letter of February 22, 1892, to Viktor Bilibin (the author of humorous stories who wrote under the pennames I. Grec and Diogenes, 1859-1908) Chekhov says that he is buying an estate 70 km south of Moscow and that he wants to be a Duke (khochu byt' gertsogom):
Милый Виктор Викторович, простите, что так долго не отвечал на Ваше письмо. Только недавно вернулся из Воронежск<ой> губ<ернии> и по самое горло занят покупкой имения. Купчая уже написана и пошла к старшему нотариусу на утверждение. Через неделю буду уже знать, помещик я или нет.
Но увы! Я изменил хохлам и их песням. Волею судеб покупаю себе угол не в Малороссии, а в холодном Серпуховском уезде, в 70 верстах от Москвы. И покупаю, сударь, не 10—20 десятин, как хотел и мечтал, а 213. Хочу быть герцогом. За это удовольствие я буду платить процентов в год 490 р. Утешаюсь расчетом, что за квартиру и за дачу я платил гораздо дороже. Лесу 160 десятин. Дров-то, дров! Не хотите ли в подарочек сажень дров?