One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver." Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. (Kinbote’s Foreword)

Bobyor (or bobr) being Russian for “beaver,” Kinbote’s silly cognomen can also hint at baba Babarikha, in Pushkin’s “Fairy Tale about the Tsar Saltan” (1831) Saltan’s svat’ya (the matchmaker or, more likely, the evil mother of Saltan’s envious sisters-in-law) who wants to exterminate Saltan’s wife and son Gvidon.

The King escapes from Zembla in a powerful motorboat. In his Commentary Kinbote mentions the Umruds and their umyaks (hide-lined boats):

He was a merry, perhaps overmerry fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant "of the Umruds," an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. (note to Line 741)

In Pushkin’s fairy tale Prince Gvidon and his mother cross the sea in a tarred barrel. In the golden nuts that the squirrel cracks in the island of Buyan (where Prince Gvidon lives and rules) the kernels are chistyi izumrud (of pure emerald).

In “The Fairy Tale about the Tsar Saltan” Chernomor (a namesake of the bearded dwarf in Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila) is staryi dyad’ka (the old uncle or tutor) of the thirty tree bogatyrya (knights) who appear from the sea. In his Commentary Kinbote mentions the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior):

Sometimes, upon returning to the comfortable old chair he [Charles Xavier] would find her [Fleur de Fyler whose mother, Countess de Fyler, after Queen Blenda’s death told her daughter to seduce Prince Charles] in it contemplating sorrowfully the picture of a bogtur (ancient warrior) in the history book. (note to Line 80)

Kinbote compares Fleur to a cat and Charles Xavier, to a dog:

That was the end of Charles Xavier’s chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus). (ibid.)

In Pushkin’s Skazka o myortvoy tsarevne i semi bogatyryakh ("The Fairy Tale about the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights," 1833) there is a dog Sokolko that eats the poisoned apple in order to show to the knights how their sister died.

He [Charles Xavier] awoke to find her [Fleur] standing with a comb in her hand before his—or, rather, his grandfather’s—cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young—little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing. (ibid.)

King Thurgus’ miraculous mirror brings to mind the Queen’s magical looking-glass in "The Fairy Tale about the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights." Sudarg of Bokay is the mirrored name of Jakob Gradus. Sokolko = oskolok (splinter, shiver; fragment, piece) = kolosok (diminutive of kolos, ear, spike). At the end of Pushkin’s fairy tale the Dead Princess resurrects and the Queen (the girl’s evil step-mother) breaks her magical talking looking-glass (that refuses to say a lie) to pieces. Kolosok rhymes with/is almost homonym of golosok (little voice). In the last line of his poem Snova more, snova pal’my (“Again the sea, again the palms…”) G. Ivanov wonders if the singing of a certain bird that he never saw and does not know what it looks like could be iz ada golosok (a voice from hell):

Снова море, снова пальмы
И гвоздики, и песок,
Снова вкрадчиво-печальный
Этой птички голосок.

Никогда её не видел
И не знаю, какова.
Кто её навек обидел,
В чём, своем, она права?

Велика иль невеличка?
любит воду иль песок?
Может, и совсем не птичка,
А из ада голосок?

In “The Fairy Tale about the Tsar Saltan” tale Prince Gvidon kills the kite (the evil sorcerer in disguise of a bird of prey) in order to save the swan (the beautiful Swan Princess whom Gvidon marries). According to Shade, he “was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane” (ll. 1-2). Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of Professor Botkin’s split personality. (An American scholar of Russian descent, Vsevolod Botkin went mad after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda.)

Borodino + slava + Tanagra dust = boroda + Saltan + vinograd + usta = dobro/Bordo + son/nos + vina/niva/Ivan + talant + Gradus

Saltan + Borodino + zhena + Marksizm + raduga = Stalin + boroda + nozh + izmena + marka/karma/Makar + Gradus

Stalin/nastil + Gradus = Stalingrad + us = list + as + dragun

Saltan + Gradus + Nabokov = satana + drug + slovo/volos + bank

Saltan + Gradus + marka/karma/Makar = strana + sluga + dar + mak

strana + Gradus + dar + vino/ovin/voin + slava + satana + krot = narstran + raduga + dva + Saltan + krasota

vino + Gradus = vinograd + us = Vinogradus

vino + spasitel’ + zhena + Marksizm + raduga = svinopas + zhitel’ + izmena + marka/karma/Makar + Gradus

Borodino – site of the greatest battle in the Patriotic war of 1812; a poem (1837) by Lermontov

slava – glory; fame; Slava (“Fame,” 1942) is a poem by VN

boroda – beard

vinograd – vine; grapes

usta – obs., lips

dobro – good (noun, as opposed to zlo, evil)

Bordo – Bordeaux in Russian spelling; in Eugene Onegin Pushkin praises the Bordeaux (claret) and calls it his friend

son – sleep; dream

nos – nose; a story (1835) by Gogol

vina – guilt

niva – corn-field; the name of a popular magazine prior to 1917

Ivan – male given name; cf. Pushkin’s poem Svat Ivan, kak pit’ my stanem… (“Dear Ivan, when we will drink…” 1833); svat’ya (cf. svat’ya baba Babarikha) is a feminine form of svat (matchmaker; son-in-law’s or daughter-in-law’s father)

zhena – wife; according to Pushkin’s Swan Princess, zhena ne rukavichka, s beloy ruchki ne stryakhnyosh’ (a wife is not a glove, you cannot shake off it from your hand)

Marksizm – Marxism in Russian spelling (Marx, who is mentioned in Shade’s poem and in Kinbote’s Commentary, had a grand beard)

raduga – rainbow

nozh – knife

izmena – treason; according to Kinbote, he can pardon everything, save treason

marka – stamp

Makar – male given name; cf. the saying kuda Makar telyat ne gonyal (“far, far away,” onhava-onhava in Zemblan); Telema and Makar (1826) is a poem by Baratynski

nastil – flooring; planking

Stalingrad – in 1925-1961 the name of Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), the city on the Volga

us – whisker; Stalin wore usy (mustache); cf. po usam teklo, v rot ne popalo; da usy lish’ obmochil (it all flew down my whiskers, but I got nothing into my mouth), the usual endings of Pushkin’s fairy tales

list – leaf

as – (air) ace

dragun – dragoon

satana – Satan

drug – friend (Izumrudov calls Gradus “friend Gradus”)

slovo – word

volos – a hair

strana – land, country

sluga – servant

dar – gift; a novel (1937) by VN

mak – poppy

vino – wine

ovin – barn

voin – warrior, soldier

krot – mole

narstran – in Zemblan legends, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault

dva – 2

krasota – beauty

Vinogradus – Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus “Vinogradus” and “Leningradus”

spasitel’ – savior; in his sonnet Madona (1830) Pushkin mentions nash bozhestvennyi Spasitel’ (our heavenly Savior)

svinopas – swineherd

zhitel’ – inhabitant

According to Kinbote, in a discarded variant Shade mentions the “Tanagra dust:”

We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft—and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:

Should the dead murderer try to embrace
His outraged victim whom he now must face?
Do objects have a soul? Or perish must
Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?

The last syllable of “Tanagra” and the first three letters of “dust” form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. “Leningrad used to be Petrograd?” “A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?”

This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem. (note to Line 596)

In the “weak” lines 627-630 Shade mentions the great Starover Blue:

The great Starover Blue reviewed the role

Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go. (ll. 627-31)

“The Great Beaver” seems also to hint at the constellation of the Great Bear. Bol’shaya Medveditsa (“The Great Bear,” 1918) is a poem by VN composed in the Crimea:

Был грозен волн полночный рёв...

Семь девушек на взморье ждали

невозвратившихся челнов

и, руки заломив, рыдали.

Семь звёздочек в суровой мгле

над рыбаками чётко встали

и указали путь к земле...

Sem’ zvyozdochek (seven tiny stars) that rose in the sky and showed to the fishermen the way to land correspond to the poem’s seven lines (half of a sonnet). The poem’s last word is zemle (Dat. of zemlya, land). Bear = Bera (the Bera range, “a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains, not quite reaching the northern end of the Zemblan peninsula,” that the King has to cross in order to reach the sea and escape form Zembla). Bera rhymes with Vera (the name of VN’s wife that means “faith”). In line 626 (immediately preceding the one in which Starover Blue is mentioned) of his poem Shade says:

We all avoided criticizing faiths.

Alexey Sklyarenko (who hopes that everybody enjoyed his anagradusy that intoxicated him a little)