In his commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) calls Gradus (Shade’s murderer) “half-man who is half mad:"
I have considered in my earlier note (I now see it is the note to line 171) the particular dislikes, and hence the motives, of our "automatic man," as I phrased it at a time when he did not have as much body, did not offend the senses as violently as now; was, in a word, further removed from our sunny, green, grass-fragrant Arcady. But Our Lord has fashioned man so marvelously that no amount of motive hunting and rational inquiry can ever really explain how and why anybody is capable of destroying a fellow creature (this argument necessitates, I know, a temporary granting to Gradus of the status of man), unless he is defending the life of his son, or his own, or the achievement of a lifetime; so that in final judgment of the Gradus versus the Crown case I would submit that if his human incompleteness be deemed insufficient to explain his idiotic journey across the Atlantic just to empty the magazine of his gun; we may concede, doctor, that our half-man was also half mad. (note to Line 949)
In his notebook (the entry of June 26, 1908) Alexander Blok calls Andrey Bely (the penname of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934) polupomeshannyi (half mad):
«Хвала создателю! С лучшими друзьями и «покровителями» (А. Белый во главе) я внутренне разделался навек. Наконец-то! (разумею полупомешанных - А. Белый, и болтунов - Мережковские)».
Andrey Bely is the author of Peterburg (“Petersburg,” 1913). In 1914 (after the beginning of World War I) VN's home city was renamed Petrograd and, ten years later (after Lenin’s death), Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. In his commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered making it Vinogradu) Vinogradus and Leningradus:
Such things rankle - but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
and points out that Leningrad used to be Petrograd:
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)
Petrograd brings to mind Blok's poem Petrogradskoe nebo mutilos' dozhdyom ("The Petrograd sky was getting murky with rain," 1914):
Петроградское небо мутилось дождём,
На войну уходил эшелон.
Без конца — взвод за взводом и штык за штыком
Наполнял за вагоном вагон.
В этом поезде тысячью жизней цвели
Боль разлуки, тревоги любви,
Сила, юность, надежда… В закатной дали
Были дымные тучи в крови.
И, садясь, запевали Варяга одни,
А другие — не в лад — Ермака,
И кричали ура, и шутили они,
И тихонько крестилась рука.
Вдруг под ветром взлетел опадающий лист,
Раскачнувшись, фонарь замигал,
И под чёрною тучей веселый горнист
Заиграл к отправленью сигнал.
И военною славой заплакал рожок,
Наполняя тревогой сердца.
Громыханье колёс и охрипший свисток
Заглушило ура без конца.
Уж последние скрылись во мгле буфера,
И сошла тишина до утра,
А с дождливых полей всё неслось к нам ура,
В грозном клике звучало: пора!
Нет, нам не было грустно, нам не было жаль,
Несмотря на дождливую даль.
Это — ясная, твёрдая, верная сталь,
И нужна ли ей наша печаль?
Эта жалость — её заглушает пожар,
Гром орудий и топот коней.
Грусть — ее застилает отравленный пар
С галицийских кровавых полей…
Blok's poem is dated September 1, 1914. Kinbote and Gradus were born on July 5, 1915 (July 5 is also Shade's birthday, but Shade was born in 1898). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. Dvoynik ("The Double," 1909) is a poem by Blok:
Однажды в октябрьском тумане
Я брёл, вспоминая напев.
(О, миг непродажных лобзаний!
О, ласки некупленных дев!)
И вот — в непроглядном тумане
Возник позабытый напев.
И стала мне молодость сниться,
И ты, как живая, и ты…
И стал я мечтой уноситься
От ветра, дождя, темноты…
(Так ранняя молодость снится.
А ты-то, вернёшься ли ты?)
Вдруг вижу — из ночи туманной,
Шатаясь, подходит ко мне
Стареющий юноша (странно,
Не снился ли мне он во сне?),
Выходит из ночи туманной
И прямо подходит ко мне.
И шепчет: «Устал я шататься,
Промозглым туманом дышать,
В чужих зеркалах отражаться
И женщин чужих целовать…»
И стало мне странным казаться,
Что я его встречу опять…
Вдруг — он улыбнулся нахально, —
И нет близ меня никого…
Знаком этот образ печальный,
И где-то я видел его…
Быть может, себя самого
Я встретил на глади зеркальной?
In his notebook (the entry of Aug. 30, 1918) Blok mentions dvoyniki (the dopplegangers) whom he conjured up in 1901 (when he courted Lyubov Mendeleev, his future wife), drugoe ya (alter ego) and Botkinskiy period (the Botkin period) of his life:
К ноябрю началось явное моё колдовство, ибо я вызвал двойников ("Зарево белое...", "Ты - другая, немая...").
Любовь Дмитриевна ходила на уроки к М. М. Читау, я же ждал её выхода, следил за ней и иногда провожал её до Забалканского с Гагаринской - Литейной (конец ноября, начало декабря). Чаще, чем со мной, она встречалась с кем-то - кого не видела и о котором я знал.
Появился мороз, "мятель", "неотвязный" и царица, звенящая дверь, два старца, "отрава" (непосланных цветов), свершающий и пользующийся плодами свершений ("другое я"), кто-то "смеющийся и нежный". Так кончился 1901 год.
Тут - Боткинский период.
Blok and his future often met in M. P. Botkin's house on the Nikolaevskaya Embankment (hence the Botkin period). The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
Leningrad (1930) is a poem by Mandelshtam. In his poem My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany ("We live not feeling land beneath us," 1933) Mandelshtam mentions uslugi polulyudey (the attentions of half-men):
Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны,
Наши речи за десять шагов не слышны,
А где хватит на полразговорца,
Там припомнят кремлевского горца.
Его толстые пальцы, как черви, жирны,
И слова, как пудовые гири, верны,
Тараканьи смеются глазища
И сияют его голенища.
А вокруг него сброд тонкошеих вождей,
Он играет услугами полулюдей.
Кто свистит, кто мяучит, кто хнычет,
Он один лишь бабачит и тычет.
Как подкову, дарит за указом указ —
Кому в пах, кому в лоб, кому в бровь, кому в глаз.
Что ни казнь у него — то малина
И широкая грудь осетина.
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
our speech at ten paces inaudible,
and where there are enough for half a conversation
the name of the Kremlin mountaineer is dropped.
His thick fingers are fatty like worms,
but his words are as true as pound weights.
his cockroach whiskers laugh,
and the tops of his boots shine.
Around him a rabble of thick-skinned leaders,
he plays with the attentions of half-men.
Some whistle, some miaul, some shivel,
but he just bangs and pokes.
He forges his decrees like horseshoes —
some get it in the groin, some in the forehead.
some in the brows, some in the eyes.
Whatever the execution — it's a raspberry,
And he has the broad chest of an Osette.
(tr. David McDuff)