Anthony Stadlen: I don't think there's any "must". This list had a grand competition for line 1000, at my instigation, some years ago.

Well, I win. Once you’ve realized that Shade’s poem should have had a “coda,” you see that, first, Line 1000 = Line 1 = Line 131 (I was the shadow of the waxwing slain), and, second, Line 1001 (the poem’s coda) can not be anything but the version proposed by me: By its own double in the window pane.

Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of V. Botkin, the American scholar of Russian descent who can be, for all we know, VN’s double. Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1904) is also a poem by Nik. T-o (Annenski’s penname that means “nobody” and is almost Botkin backwards). It begins:

Ne ya, i ne on, i ne ty,

i to zhe, chto ya, i ne to zhe…

Not I, and not he, and not you,

Both what I am, and what I am not…

In one of his sonnets in Kiparisovyi larets (“The Cypress Casket,” published posthumously in 1910) Annenski mentions bronzovyi poet (the bronze poet, i. e. Pushkin) who any moment can leap off from the bronze bench on which he is reclining (the monument in the Lyceum garden in Tsarskoe Selo). In his story Ka (1915) Khlebnikov says that Ka (the soul’s shadow, her double) walks from dreams into dreams, crosses time and reaches the bronze (the bronze of time):

А Ка — это тень души, её двойник, посланник при тех людях, что снятся храпящему господину. Ему нет застав во времени; Ка ходит из снов в сны, пересекает время и достигает бронзы (бронзы времён).

Alexey Sklyarenko