In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his heart attack and mentions his wife's portrait by Lang:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)
Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. The Portrait of Sofia Botkin (1879) is a painting by Ivan Kramskoy (a Russian artist, 1837-1887, who died of a heart failure while painting a portrait of Karl Gottlieb Rauchfuß, a celebrated physician, 1835-1915):
The wife of art collector Dmitri Botkin (1829-1889), Sofia Botkin (born Mazurin, 1840-1889) was a granddaughter of Aleksey Mazurin (1772-1834), mayor of Moscow in 1828-1831. In the 1810s Aleksey Mazurin was portrayed by Vasiliy Tropinin, the author of Pushkin's portrait. Sofia Nikolaevna was the name and patronymic of Ivan Kramskoy's wife (born Sofia Prokhorov, 1840-1919). Kramskoy's most famous painting is Neizvestnaya ("Portrait of an Unknown Woman," 1883):
The woman is seated on an open carriage at the Anichkov Bridge (across the Fontanka canal on Nevski Avenue) in Saint Petersburg. During his heart attack Shade saw a tall white fountain:
I can't tell you how
I knew - but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. (ll. 698-707)
Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Professsor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. Lang means in German "long, tall." A tall white fountain seen by Shade during his heart attack brings to mind Theodor Fontane (a German novelist, 1819-1898). Fontane's first published work was the novella Geschwisterliebe ("Sibling Love," 1839). According to Kinbote, Shade's maternal grandmother was a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather:
John Shade's wife, née Irondell (which comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow"). She was a few months his senior. I understand she came of Canadian stock, as did Shade's maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather, if I am not greatly mistaken).
From the very first I tried to behave with the utmost courtesy toward my friend's wife, and from the very first she disliked and distrusted me. I was to learn later that when alluding to me in public she used to call me "an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius." I pardon her--her and everybody. (note to Line 247)