It seems that to be completed Shade’s unfinished poem needs two lines: Line 1000 and Line 1001. Line 1000 = Line 1 = Line 131 (I was the shadow of the waxwing slain), Line 1001 (By its own double in the windowpane) is the poem’s coda. In Italian coda means “tail.” In his Oda ego siat. gr. Dm. Iv. Khvostovu (“Ode to his Excellency Count D. I. Khvostov,” 1825) Pushkin compares Khvostov (whose name comes from khvost, “tail”) to Byron. In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen’ya… (“Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret…” 1927) G. Ivanov mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire). G. Ivanov (who, as a boy of fifteen, asked Blok if a sonnet needed a coda) is the author of Ulichnyi podrostok (“The Street Adolescent”), a sonnet with a coda. Podrostok (“The Adolescent,” 1875) is a novel by Dostoevski, the author of Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1848).
According to Kinbote, had he been a poet, he would have composed an ode to suicide:
I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred such sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the note very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gentle--not fall, not jump--but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off--farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one's eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one's liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality. (Note to Line 493)
Hodasevich’s poem Zhiv Bog! Umyon, a ne zaumen… (“God alive! I’m not beyond my coherence…” 1923) ends in the lines:
О, если б мой предсмертный стон
Облечь в отчётливую оду!
Oh, if I could make an articulate ode
Of my last expiring groan!
Another poem from Hodasevich’s collection Evropeyskaya noch’ (“European Night”) ends in the lines:
Счастлив, кто падает вниз головой:
Мир для него хоть на миг – а иной.
Happy is the one who falls head down:
If only for a moment, the world looks different to him.
Kinbote, who commits suicide on Oct. 19, 1959 (the Lyceum anniversary; on Oct. 19, 1830, Pushkin burnt Chapter Ten of Eugene Onegin), after completing his work on Shade’s poem, manages to make an articulate ode of his last expiring groan. Shade, Kinbote and the killer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of V. Botkin, the American scholar of Russian descent who went mad after his daughter’s death. There is a hope that, after Kinbote’s suicide, Botkin will be “full” again.
Яго + Блок + ода + конец = яблоко + кода + гонец = ягодка + бок + Олонец = око + глянец + Набоков + еда - Нева/вена/Вена = Голконда + оборванец + янтарь + Ева - вратарь - Нева
Яго – Iago (a character in Shakespeare’s Othello)
Блок – A. A. Blok (the poet who, according to G. Ivanov, did not know what a coda is); one of the essays in Hodasevich’s memoir book Necropolis (1939) is Gumilyov and Blok
ода – ode
конец – end
яблоко – apple; cf. “the fortress of an apple” mentioned by Shade in Kinbote’s Foreword to PF
кода – coda
гонец – courier; herald
ягодка – little berry (diminutive of yagoda); in VN’s Soglyadatay (“The Eye,” 1930) Smurov mentions yadovitaya sovetskaya yagodka (“poisonous Soviet berry”), a Soviet spy exposed by Weinstock (the owner of a book shop in Berlin)
бок – side
Олонец – Olonets (a city in the North Russia); Derzhavin wrote his great ode Vodopad (“The Waterfall”) when he was a governor of the Province of Olonets; in PF the (probably fictitious) name of one of the two Soviet experts in Zembla is Niagarin; Hodasevich is the author of a book on Derzhavin; a few days before his death Derzhavin began one of his greatest odes (“The River of Times”) that remained unfinished
око – eye
глянец – gloss, luster
Набоков – Nabokov
еда – food
Нева – the Neva
вена – vein
Вена – Vienna
Голконда – Golconda (the capital of a medieval sultanate in India famous for the diamonds that were produced there); in his Foreword to PF Kinbote mentions an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links
оборванец – ragamuffin
янтарь – amber; according to Kinbote, Mrs. Goldsworth's intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen; the Russian word for “amber” begins with ya, the last letter of the alphabet
Ева – Eve; cf. The Three Faces of Eve, a 1957 film based on a case of multiple personality
вратарь – goalkeeper; at Cambridge VN was a goalkeeper of his College’s football team
Alexey Sklyarenko