"And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned."

Who rides so late in the night and the wind?
It is the writer's grief. It is the wild
March wind. It is the father with his child. (ll. 661-664)

Note the inner rhyme: knight – night. Russian for “knight” (chessman), kon’ also means “horse” and rhymes with ogon’ (fire); Russian for “night,” noch’ rhymes with doch’ (daughter). It seems that V. Botkin (the American scholar of Russian descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda (who becomes Hazel in Shade’s poem). In Russian, nadezhda means “hope,” the word that rhymes with Pope (the poet on whom Shade wrote a book:

I think she [Hazel] always nursed a small mad hope.

I'd finished recently my book on Pope. (ll. 383-384)

The title of Shade’s book on Pope, Supremely Blest, can be traced back to the lines in Pope’s Essay on Man (Epistle Two, VI):

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

The sot a hero, lunatic a king;

The starving chemist in his golden views

Supremely blest, the poet in his Muse.

In the same Epistle Two (V) of his Essay on Man Pope mentions Zembla (Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla):

But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:

Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where:

No creature owns it in the first degree,

But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he!

Russian for “degree” is Gradus (according to Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor in New Wye, the name of Shade’s murderer is Gradus).

As Kinbote points out in his Commentary, Line 662 of Shade’s poem and indeed the whole passage (lines 653-664) allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. Kinbote quotes Goethe’s ballad in English and in Zemblan. In Dva lesnykh tsarya (“Two Forest Kings,” 1933) Marina Tsvetaev compares Lesnoy tsar’ (“The Forest King,” 1818), Zhukovski’s Russian version of Goethe’s poem, to the original. The author begins her essay offering her own word-for-word translation of Goethe’s poem and proceeds:

Остановимся сначала на непереводимых словах, следовательно – непередаваемых понятиях. Их целый ряд. Начнём с первого: хвост. Хвост, по-немецки, и Schwanz и Schweif; например – у собаки Schwanz и Schweif – у льва, у дьявола, у кометы – и у Лесного Царя. Поэтому моим "хвостатым" и "с хвостом" хвост у "Лесного Царя" принижен, унижен.

First of all, let’s dwell on untranslatable words and therefore on notions that cannot be rendered in another language. They are quite a few and the first of them is khvost (tail). In German, khvost is both Schwanz and Schweif: a dog has a Schwanz, but a lion, a devil, a comet and the forest king have a Schweif.

It seems that to be completed Shade’s unfinished poem needs two lines. Line 1000 (I was the shadow of the waxwing slain) is identical with Lines 1 and 131, Line 1001 (By its own double in the windowpane) is the poem’s “coda.” In Italian, coda means “tail.” While koda (Russ., coda; VN’s Zoilus and author of the sonnet with a coda, G. Ivanov affirms in his memoirs that Alexander Blok did now know what a coda was) rhymes with oda (Russ., ode) and with moda (Russ., fashion), khvost (tail) rhymes with prokhvost (Russ., scoundrel) and with most (Russ., bridge). The latter word occurs in VN’s poem Lastochka (“The Swift”) from his novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937):

Однажды мы под вечер оба
стояли на старом мосту.
Скажи мне, спросил я, до гроба
запомнишь вон ласточку ту?
И ты отвечала: ещё бы!
И как мы заплакали оба,
как вскрикнула жизнь на лету…
До завтра, навеки, до гроба —
однажды, на старом мосту…

One night between sunset and river
On the old bridge we stood, you and I.
Will you ever forget it, I queried,
That particular swift that went by?
And you answered, so earnestly: Never!
And what sobs made us suddenly shiver,
What a cry life emitted in flight!
Till we die, till tomorrow, for ever,
You and I on the old bridge one night.

The last word in the poem’s English version, “night” is a homophone of “knight.” Russian for “knight” (person) is rytsar’. In rytsar’ there is tsar’ (tsar). In his sonnet Poetu (“To a Poet,” 1830), in which ogon’ (fire) and podvig (noble feat) are mentioned, Pushkin addresses a poet and says: ty tsar’: zhivi odin (you are a king, live alone):

Поэт! не дорожи любовию народной.
Восторженных похвал пройдёт минутный шум;
Услышишь суд глупца и смех толпы холодной,
Но ты останься твёрд, спокоен и угрюм.

Ты царь: живи один. Дорогою свободной
Иди, куда влечёт тебя свободный ум,
Усовершенствуя плоды любимых дум,
Не требуя наград за подвиг благородный.

Они в самом тебе. Ты сам свой высший суд;
Всех строже оценить умеешь ты свой труд.
Ты им доволен ли, взыскательный художник?

Доволен? Так пускай толпа его бранит
И плюет на алтарь, где твой огонь горит,
И в детской резвости колеблет твой треножник.

Poet! do not cling to popular affection.
The temporary noise of ecstatic praises will pass;
You will hear the fool’s judgment, the laugh of the cold crowd,
But you must remain firm, calm, and morose.

You are a king; live alone. By way of the free road
Go wherever your free mind draws you,
Perfecting the fruits of your beloved thoughts,
Not asking any rewards for your noble feat.

They are inside you. You are your highest judge;
More strictly than anyone can you appraise your work.
Are you satisfied with it, exacting artist?

Satisfied? Then let the crowd treat it harshly
And spit on the altar, where your fire burns
And shake your tripod in childish playfulness.

(transl. Diana Senechal)

Koleblemyi trenozhnik (“The Shaken Tripod,” 1921) is the title of Hodasevich’s speech in which the author announces that Pushkin is the parole, the password, by which cultured Russians will recognize each other in the “encroaching darkness” of the twilight of civilization. Another speaker at Pushkinskiy vecher (the Pushkin Evening) in February, 1921, was Blok who read his article O naznachenii poeta (“On a Poet’s Destination”) in which taynaya svoboda (“a secret freedom,” a phrase used by Pushkin in one of his early poems) is mentioned. Kinbote’s Zembla has a lot in common with Martin’s and Sonya’s Zoorland in VN’s novel Podvig (“Glory,” 1932).

In Pushkin’s poem Zhil na svete rytsar’ bednyi… (“There was once a poor knight…” 1829), recited by Aglaya Epanchin in Dostoevski’s novel Idiot (1869), bednyi (poor) rhymes with blednyi (pale):

Жил на свете рыцарь бедный,
Молчаливый и простой,
С виду сумрачный и бледный,
Духом смелый и прямой.

There was once a poor knight,

Taciturn and simple,

Gloomy and pale in appearance,

With a spirit courageous and straightforward.

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). In his Ode to Count Khvostov (1825) Pushkin compares Khvostov (whose name comes from khvost, tail) to Byron. In his EO Commentary VN calls Byron “Pope’s pupil” (vol. II, p. 521) and quotes Byron and Pope in a note to his translation of Pushkin’s poem Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom (“Conversation of Bookseller with Poet,” 1824):

Byron went to Pope and Pushkin went to Pichot [Byron’s translator]. Pope (An Essay on Man, ep. IV, 237-38) has:

“What’s Fame? a fancy’d life in others breath,

A thing beyond us, ev’n before our death.”

Byron (Don Juan), I, ccxviii, 1-2, 7-8) has

“What is the end of Fame? ‘tis but to fill

A certain portion of uncertain paper:

………………

To have, when the original is dust,

A name, wretched picture and worse bust.” (vol. II, p. 15)

According to Pushkin’s Bookseller, slava (fame) is merely “a gaudy patch upon the songster’s threadbare rags.” Slava (1942) is a poem by VN. Slava rhymes with Poltava (a city in E Ukraine). Poltava (1829) is a long poem by Pushkin. In his Vozrazhenie kritikam “Poltavy” (“A Reply to the Critics of Poltava,” 1830) Pushkin mentions Byron’s poem Mazeppa (1819) and says that Byron (who knew Mazepa only as portrayed by Voltaire in his “History of Charles XII”) was merely startled by the picture of a man who is tied to a wild horse and tears along the steppes.

Кстати о Полтаве критики упомянули однако ж о Байроновом Мазепе; но как они понимали его! Байрон знал Мазепу только по Вольтеровой Истории Карла XII. Он поражён был только картиной человека, привязанного к дикой лошади и несущегося по степям.

Alexey Sklyarenko