According to 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), Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer) 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 Vinogradus:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he 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 Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
Vinograd ("The Grapes," 1824) is a poem by Pushkin. Vincent van Gogh's painting The Red Vineyards near Arles (1888), the only painting known by name that Van Gogh sold in his lifetime, was purchased in 1909 by Ivan Morozov and is now in Moscow's Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. When asked by Alfred Appel what he would like a reader to experience when coming to the end of one of his novels, VN replied:
“…what I’d welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist’s Studio by Van Bock.” (Strong Opinions, p. 72)
Van Bock seems to hint at Nabokov himself, but he also makes one think of Théophile de Bock (a Dutch painter belonging to the Hague School, 1851-1904), Van Gogh's fellow artist. The Artist’s Studio is a 1666 painting by Jacob van Oost, the Elder (1603-71):
Jacob van Oost, the Elder (Oost is Dutch for "East") is the author of David Bearing the Head of Goliath (1643), oil on canvas:
The painting is now in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg. In 1914 VN's home city was renamed Petrograd, and in 1924 Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus "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)
In one of his epigrams on Count Vorontsov (the General Governor of New Russia, the poet's boss in Odessa in 1823-24) Pushkin compares himself to David and Vorontsov to Goliath:
Певец-Давид был ростом мал,
Но повалил же Голиафа,
Который был и генерал,
И, побожусь, не ниже графа.
David the bard was small,
but he managed to bring down Goliath,
who was a General and whose title,
I swear, was not lower than Count.
A Song to David (1763) is a poem by Christopher Smart (an English poet, 1722-71) written during the author's confinement in St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London. Ne day mne Bog soyti s uma ("The Lord Forbid my Going Mad," 1833) is a poem by Pushkin. According to Kinbote (the author of a remarkable book on surnames), the surname Lukin (the maiden name of Shade’s mother) comes from Luke:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
According to Kinbote, he writes his commentary, index and foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. But it seems that Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) writes them in a madhouse near Quebec - in the same sanatorium where Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) writes his poem "Wanted." 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.” In another epigram on Count Vorontsov Pushkin says that there is a hope that one day Vorontsov (“half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”) will be a full one at last:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is hope
That he will be a full one at last.
There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again. David (1501-04) is a sculpture by Michelangelo. At the end of Pushkin's little tragey Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri mentions Buonarotti (Michelangelo's family name):
Сальери
До свиданья.
(Один.)
Ты заснешь
Надолго, Моцарт! Но ужель он прав,
И я не гений? Гений и злодейство
Две вещи несовместные. Неправда:
А Бонаротти? Или это сказка
Тупой, бессмысленной толпы — и не был
Убийцею создатель Ватикана?
Salieri
See you later.
(Alone.)
You will sleep
For long, Mozart! But what if he is right?
I am no genius? "Genius and evildoing
Are incompatibles." That is not true:
And Buonarotti?..* Or is it a legend
Of the dull-witted, senseless crowd -- while really
The Vatican's creator was no murderer?
(Scene II, transl. G. Gurarie)
*rumors say Michelangelo murdered his model to portray the sufferings of Christ more realistically.
In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart uses the phrase nikto b (none would):
Моцарт
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! но нет; тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
Mozart
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother with the needs of lowly life;
all would surrender to free art.
(Scene II)
Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) liked to read words backwards. Nikto b is Botkin in reverse. Mozart (1838) is a biographical essay by Vasiliy Botkin (1812-69).