In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes a winter morning and mentions a pheasant's footprints in the snow:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
"Dot, arrow pointing back" may hint at Turgenev's poem in prose Vorobey ("The Sparrow") and the Viardot family with whom Turgenev lived ("on the edge of someone else's nest"). A Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) died on September 3, 1883, from a spinal abscess caused by metastatic cancer (myxoid liposarcoma / myxosarcoma) that had spread to his spine. "Dot, arrow pointing back" also brings to mind tochka puli (the full stop of bullet) mentioned by Mayakovski (a Russian and Soviet poet, 1893-1930, who lived with the Brik family) in the Prologue to his poem Fleyta-pozvonochnik ("The Backbone Flute," 1915):
Все чаще думаю —
не поставить ли лучше
точку пули в своем конце.
Сегодня я
на всякий случай
даю прощальный концерт.
More and more often I think:
it might be far better for me
to punctuate my end with a bullet.
This very day,
just in case,
I'm staging my final performance.
Mayakovski shot himself dead on April 14, 1930, in Moscow. On October 19, 1959, immediately after completing his work on Shade's poem, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) commits suicide. There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) will be whole again.
In Sovetskaya azbuka ("The Soviet ABC," 1919) Mayakovski mentions fazan (a pheasant):
Фазан красив. Ума ни унции.
Фиуме спьяну взял д'Аннунцио.
A pheasant is beautiful. It has no brains at all.
D'Annunzio, while drunk, took Fiume.
Mayakovski wrote "The Soviet Alphabet" in 1919. John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Knbote calls the poet's wife, born Sybil Irondell) were married in 1919:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)