Alexey wrote: Dear Jansy,No, lazur' doesn't mean "heaven" in Russian.By the way, lozhnaia lazur', as Vera Nabokov accurately renders this phrase ("false azure") in her (unrhymed) literal translation of Shade's poem, sounds wonderful to my tin ear.

GS added:There is a difference, important to Russian ear, between blue and clear sky blue – azure. Or perhaps, one should say that in Russian there are more shades of blue, and that a tin ear works sometimes like a blind eye.

Jansy: I'm still rather confused. Was Shade as familiar with the Russian language as was Kinbote? So he had in fact a Russian ear? 

 

At least one thing is now as clear as a silver bell. The word "azure" needs not to be a synonym of sky since, as GS rendered it, it is a reference to the color: "clear sky blue"... And, after all, the sky is already metaphorically implied and needs no further explicitation.

 

It is unnecessary to point out that also Shade is not a waxwing and was very much alive when he wrote these lines... And, since birds may smash against the windowpanes either when the latter are transparent, or when serving as a reflecting surface, Shade seems to be metaphorically suggesting that the obstacle he crashed against ( to split in three: the shadow of the flying bird, the ashen fluf and the reflection of a live bird ) was a "mirror".   

 

"Feigned remoteness" ( instead of the false azure) made me think about a "far, far away land", a place of "semblances", glass factories and mirrors.

 

The choice for "azure" instead of "blue" shall be very special, as B. Boyd pointed out: "The 'azure' of the poem's opening couplet also clearly engages with Stéphane Mallarmé's recurrent image of the 'Azur," representing the Ideal, as opposed to the ‘Ici-bas,' the here-below, the here and now. "  but I prefer to interpret it as an allusion presented mainly at the end of the story ( "open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening azure.", in Kinbote's words) since, if used in that sense at the poem's opening couplet, it would imply Shade had already felt he'd been shattered by the "Ideal", instead of achieving it in the end when Gradus, at long last, managed to fire a shot that hit a "reflected" target.