NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

Whose desperate escape from prison was
Brought off successfully only because
Some forty of his followers that night
Impersonated him and aped his flight -
He never would have reached the western coast had not a fad spread among his secret
supporters, romantic, heroic daredevils, of impersonating the fleeing king. They
rigged themselves out to look like him in red sweaters and red caps, and popped up
here and there, completely bewildering the revolutionary police. Some of the
pranksters were much younger than the King, but this did not matter since his pictures
in the huts of mountain folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could
buy worms, ginger bread and zhiletka blades, had not aged since his coronation. A
charming cartoon touch was added on the famous occasion when from the terrace of
the Kronblik Hotel, whose chairlift takes tourists to the Kron glacier, one merry mime
was seen floating up, like a red moth, with a hapless, and capless, policeman riding
two seats behind him in dream-slow pursuit. It gives one pleasure to add that before
reaching the staging point, the false king managed to escape by climbing down one of
the pylons that supported the traction cable (see also notes to lines 149 and 171).
Line 71: parents
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, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes
bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call
any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this.
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