NPPF Comm3: Misc notes (1)

[Jasper Fidget]

p. 118
"[I am] a tricky wrestler"
Kinbote reminding his reader not to understand him too quickly.  Anybody up
for some Zemblan calisthenics?

p. 118
"As children playing in a castle find
In some old closet full of toys, behind
The animals and masks, a sliding door
[four words heavily crossed out] a secret corridor--"

Probably Kinbote's most glaringly fake "variant" to the poem, relating as it
does directly to the Zembla story to follow.  Was Kinbote just unable to
think of anything for the fourth line, or is there some secret passage here
that a reader might discover...?

p. 118
"The index card on which the variant has been preserved is dated July 4"

July 4 is the American Independence Day on which independence from England
is celebrated.

p 118
"Mrs. Shade sat quietly enjoying a video drama."

Kinbote again tries to trivialize Sybil, this time just before relating the
story of Charles' daring escape (part four of the glorious "adventures of
Charles Xavier, last King of Zembla").  While Sybil goes in for drama,
Kinbote is all about Romance.

p. 119
"Solus Rex"

Kinbote informs us that Charles is "the only black piece in what a composer
of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the _solus rex_
type." (pp 118-119).  A return of the chess-problem motif recalls the scene
in C.47-80 where Kinbote works out the problem of attacking Shade's home.
This time the black king must devise a means of escape from his castle (a
chess position in which the king and a rook transpose -- the rook is Odon,
who will soon move off to the Royal Theater).  The "composer" of this
problem is both Nabokov himself, who thought of chess problems as a means
for working out plot, but also perhaps KinBotkin, who may think of them as a
means for inventing it.  Charles Xavier is the king alone in his empty
corner of the board; another name for this kind of position is "mating
scenario" -- he has only to be mated for the game to end.  (see Fleur de
Fyler.)

_Solus Rex_ was the title of the original prototype for _Pale Fire_ written
1939-40, the first chapter of which is called "Ultima Thule".  

http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/iultima.htm
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/wultima.htm

p. 119
"tainted gold"

Perhaps implies the money (reportedly 40 to 50 million gold marks) Lenin was
supposed to have acquired from the German government in order to finance the
Russian Revolution (supposedly deposited into Stockholm banks and moved
through the Bank of Siberia in Petrograd), in return for which Lenin signed
the Brest-Litovsk treaty taking Russia out of World War I and opening up the
Spring Offensive of 1918.

[Other theories concerning the financing of the Bolsheviks do exist, but
they reek of anti-Semitism]

p. 119
"robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea
miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution"

Several anti-monarchical revolutions are evoked by the state of Onhava in
this passage.  The "powerful police state" reflects Soviet Russia, but the
anti-Karlists also reflect the Spanish "Carlist" civil wars of the 1830s
(also implied by the Basque tennis coach).

Jasper Fidget