A Note on Pale Fire and Khodasevich's "Ballada"
by Kevin Frazier
page two of two

Reflections of "Ballada" in the poem Pale Fire

The opening stanzas of the poem Pale Fire share with "Ballada" the following traits:

a. Both poems begin in rooms with artificial skies.

"Ballada": The poet looks at a plaster sky with a sixty-watt sun.
Pale Fire: Shade watches "the false azure in the windowpane" (line 2).5

"Ballada": The poet "outgrows" himself and "rises above" his "dead being."6 Then the plaster sky and the sixty-watt sun vanish, and the poet is apparently transformed into Orpheus, standing on black boulders and holding the lyre handed to him from another world.
Pale Fire: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; /…and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky…" (lines 1-4).7

"Ballada": The furniture ("chairs, and a table, and a bed") are the "things" that the narrator pities and that apparently "harken" to his "wild song" as the entire room begins to flow and revolve.8
Pale Fire: "Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass / Hang all the furniture above the grass, / And how delightful when a fall of snow / Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so / As to make chair and bed exactly stand / Upon that snow, out in that crystal land…" (lines 7-12).

"Ballada": "Frozen white palms / bloom noiselessly on the windowpanes."
Pale Fire: Nabokov relies on a much more elaborate melding of the window with frost and snow. The vision of furniture hanging "[u]pon that snow, out in that crystal land" leads to the second stanza: "Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake / Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, / A dull dark white against the day's pale white / … / And then the gradual and dual blue / As night unites the viewer and the view, / And in the morning, diamonds of frost / Express amazement…" (lines 13-20).

More importantly, lines 146-156 of Pale Fire expand on Khodasevich's description of the poet growing out of himself "[w]ith steps into the subterranean flame, / With brow into the fleeting stars." Nabokov describes Shade's first childhood swoon in similar terms:

There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.

These specific similarities belong to a more general resemblance between "Ballada" and Nabokov's novel. Both works involve the possibility of a ghost or spirit from the afterworld or another realm communicating with a writer.

In "Ballada," the poet begins to talk with himself in verse. This brings about a visit from another world beyond his "dead being." He receives a "heavy lyre through the wind" in the revolving room, and becomes Orpheus after the room disappears.10 The "heavy lyre" of the poet's inspiration arrives from a place outside of life.11

Brian Boyd has convincingly argued that Pale Fire also involves literary inspiration from the dead. Boyd proposes that Shade's ghost or spirit influences Kinbote's writing.12 This interpretation of the novel is certainly not the only one possible.13 Still, the theme of the dead communicating with the living is a large part of Pale Fire, and the references to "Ballada" are part of this theme.

The Shade/Kinbote Relationship as a Parody of the Khodasevich/Nabokov Relationship

The use of "Ballada" in Pale Fire suggests that in some ways the literary relationship between Shade and Kinbote might be a parody of the literary relationship between Khodasevich and Nabokov. As far as the biographical record is able to reveal, Khodasevich was a writer for whom Nabokov had a strong personal and artistic admiration.14 It is pointless to push the comparison too far, but the Kinbote-Shade connection might burlesque the (largely unknown) way that Khodasevich and Nabokov felt about each other.15

Conclusion

The references to "Ballada" in Pale Fire are clear, but their significance should not be overstated. They pay tribute to a poet Nabokov admired, and they are, of course, used to reinforce other aspects of the novel. Yet they do not appear to change our reading of the book so much as to add another layer of interest.

It also seems possible that Nabokov made the "Ballada" references as a way of ensuring future rediscovery of Khodasevich. Nabokov was aware that Khodasevich was in danger of being more or less forgotten as a poet.16 Nabokov was equally aware that his own work would be studied in detail, and that the "Ballada" touches would be recognized. By working "Ballada" into Pale Fire, Nabokov guaranteed that Khodasevich would be read in the future. Both the generosity of the gesture and the discretion with which the generosity is offered seem characteristic of Nabokov.

About the author: Kevin Frazier's poems, stories and reviews have appeared in Bricolage and Poetry Review, among other places, and he is the former editor of Cheshire Art & Literary Magazine. He works for a joint Russian-EU project to develop media and literary activities in the Barents region, including Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. He has also worked for the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow.

5. All Pale Fire citations come from the Everyman's Library edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

6. Unless otherwise noted, all "Ballada" citations come from the literal Bethea translation.

7. The first stanza of Pale Fire uses the same "I / sky" rhyme Nabokov used in his translation of the first stanza of "Ballada": "…this is I- / looking up at a sky made of stucco, / at a sixty-watt sun in that sky…"

8. Transparent Things, which also involves a ghost speaking from the afterlife, repeats the image of a room where the things in it (vegetables, in this case) are whirling at the moment of a transition to death. See Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 104. This is one of Nabokov's harlequin dual references: it simultaneously acknowledges both the children's comic Little Nemo and "Ballada."

9. Pale Fire, p. 79. Brian Boyd notes that "stillicide" means a continual falling of drops, particularly raindrops. See Brian Boyd, "Shade and Shape in Pale Fire," originally appearing in Nabokov Studies #4 (1997), reprinted on the Zembla website, p. 5, www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/boydpf1.htm. Boyd also notes that the word "stillicide" is used in the Hardy poem "Friends Beyond," where the sound of a "lone cave's stillicide" is the whispering of the dead. See "Shade and Shape in Pale Fire," Zembla website, p. 5. By making the stillicide "frozen" in Pale Fire, Nabokov possibly connects the Hardy poem to the frozen white palms that bloom on the windowpane in "Ballada." Both Hardy's and Khodasevich's poems are about signals from beyond life, and the frozen stillicide image neatly links both poems to Nabokov's own variations on this theme.

10. Orpheus, of course, was the poet and musician who could use his lyre so eloquently that when he played and sang, living creatures and inanimate objects would be set in motion. The lyre was a gift to him from Apollo.

11. In Nabokov's "Ballada" translation it is "a ghost" who hands the lyre to the poet, while in Bethea's literal translation there is no explicit ghost, only an uncharacterized "someone."

12. Boyd summarizes his main argument as follows: "Shade's shade, his ghost, influences Kinbote's paranoia in such a way that his developing fantasy that Jack Grey was a regicide from Zembla, not an escapee from a local Appalachian asylum, takes shape as the Gradus story, and then through Shade's unrecognized guidance is shaped into a complex narrative counterpoint to the composition of the poem." Boyd, "Shade and Shape in Pale Fire," Zembla website, p. 5.

13. Boyd's case is impressive, but naturally it is does not diminish the pleasure of continuing to consider other ways of reading the novel.

14. See Bethea, Khodasevich: His Life and Art, pp. 15, 32, 135, 186, 187, 237, 240-41, 253, 254, 255, 276, 318, 323, 330, 345, 347-348, 350, 351-52. In addition to sharing Nabokov's literary interests, Khodasevich was a butterfly collector and believed that fidelity to the original was critical in making translations. Nabokov and Khodasevich were, of course, part of the same Russian émigré literary community, and they joined together in the polemical battle with the Adamovich circle. Khodasevich appears to have been Nabokov's closest literary friend in this community, and Nabokov repeatedly praised Khodasevich's verse after the poet's death in 1939. See also Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

15. Obviously Nabokov had already described a fictional literary relationship that was in some ways inspired by his relationship with Khodasevich, in the form of the (imaginary) conversations between Koncheyev and Fyodor in The Gift.

16. "I find it odd myself that in this article, in this rapid inventory of thoughts prompted by Hodasevich's death, I seem to imply a vague non-recognition of his genius and engage in vague polemics with such phantoms as would question the enchantment and importance of his poetry." Nabokov, "On Hodasevich," Strong Opinions, p. 226.