p. 224
"She had weaned her husband not only from the Episcopal Church of his fathers, but from all forms of sacramental worship"

K blames Sybil for Shade's apostasy.

p. 224
"nebulation"

From Webster's 1913:

neb"u*la`ted (?), a. Clouded with indistinct color markings, as an animal.

p. 224
"Confession with us is auricular"

auricular "Of confession: spoken into the ear, private. LME" (OED).

p. 224
"shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king"

Perhaps alluding to the "Stone of Scone" or Stone of Destiny, reputedly first referred to in Genesis 28:18 as Jacob's pillow, passed on to the Egyptians and then to the King of Spain. In 700 BCE it supposedly traveled to Ireland with an invasion force led by Simon Brech, the Spanish King's son, and placed atop the sacred Hill of Tara where it was called the Stone of Desinty ("Lia-Fail" or the "fatal" stone). When an Irish king sat on it during his coronation, it was said to groan aloud if the king was of the royal race but remain silent if he was a pretender. Something like a millennium later it was brought to Scotland by Fergus Mor MacEirc, the founder of the Scottish monarchy, and later installed in the monastery of Scone in Perthshire where it remained as the seat of the throne upon which the kings of Scotland were crowned. In 1296 King Edward I brought it to Westminster Abbey and installed it in a new Coronation Chair. For a long time thereafter it became a symbol of oppression for Scottish nationalists, who eventually managed to steal it in 1950. It was recovered a few months later and stored in a vault until 1996 when John Major had it returned finally to Scotland. It can now be seen in Edinburgh Castle, but will travel back to Westminster for the next coronation.

Reference

p. 224
"SHADE:" etc

The dramatic format of the next several pages parallels a number of similar passages from Boswell's Life of Johnson, notably:

BOSWELL. 'But you would not have me to bind myself by a solemn obligation?' JOHNSON. (much agitated,) 'What! a vow--O, no, Sir, a vow is a horrible thing, it is a snare for sin. The man who cannot go to Heaven without a vow-- may go--' Here, standing erect, in the middle of his library, and rolling grand, his pause was truly a curious compound of the solemn and the ludicrous; he half-whistled in his usual way, when pleasant, and he paused, as if checked by religious awe. Methought he would have added--to Hell--but was restrained. I humoured the dilemma. 'What! Sir, (said I,) In caelum jusseris ibit?' alluding to his imitation of it,--

'And bid him go to Hell, to Hell he goes.'

(Boswell, Chapter XXIX)

p. 225
"L'homme est né bon"

Man was born good.

p. 225
"SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."

See Emerson's "Circles": "Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow."

Reference

Shade's speech reinforces the surprise / death connection, as with Dim Gulf / Gulf of Surprise (p. 68, 138).

p. 226
"psychopompos"

"A mythical conductor of souls to the place of the dead. Also, the spiritual guide of a (living) person's soul" (OED)

p. 227
"St Augustine said"

The quote is from Augustine's _De Trinitate_ (On the Trinity).

Reference
Reference

p. 228
"I have no time for such stupidities"

He doesn't have time because he will be dead soon. He's making amends for any of his perceived sins in anticipation of having just one to report (suicide) when he arrives in the afterlife.

p. 228
"Far be it from me to hint at the existence of some other woman in my friend's life."

Kinbote then does exactly that.

p. 229
"A farcical pedant of whom the less said the better"

In reference to Professor Pnin from VN's novel of the same name. Note that _Pnin_ is shorter than _Pale Fire_.

p. 230
"as Parmentier had his pet tuber undergo"

French agriculturalist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813) who introduced the potato to France.

Reference

p. 231
"see note to line 664"

It's unclear whether this is a typo or if there's some deeper meaning, but there is no note to line 664; the Goethe reference is in the note to line 662.

p. 231
"Tanagra Dust"

Tanagra, a Boeotian town near Pindar's Thebes. Birthplace of the Greek poet Korinna (~500 BCE), one of the nine earthly muses, who according to Pausanias defeated Pindar in a poetry competition.

"Korinna wrote choral poetry for celebrations using a Boeotian dialect. Unlike Pindar, she focused on local myths, and drew parallels between the world of mythology and ordinary human behavior."

Reference

Tanagra was also the site of a large battle in 457 BCE (First Peloponnesian War) in which the Spartans defeated the Athenians (recorded by Thucydides). The Peloponnesian Wars eventually ended in the domination of Sparta and the destruction of Athens, so Gradus is more or less being equated with the end of classical civilization.

Reference

Tanagra is also a site where archeologists discovered terracotta figurines dating from 330-200 BCE (recalling the cracked krater near the headless statue of Mercury in the tunnel under the Onhava palace).

Reference

And finally in mythology Tanagra was the daughter of Aeolus and Enarete, written of by Korinna, who married Poemander (another name worth investigated qua PF) who named his city after her. Later in life, Tanagra was nicknamed Graea (shades of Gradus?).

Reference

Graea may have formed some source material for Shakespeare's MacBeth: they were three withered old crones who shared one eye and one tooth between them, extorted by Perseus for information (he took their eye). The word Graea shares the root for "old man" and "old woman", so they may have personified old age.

Reference
Reference

p. 231
"/shargar/"

Has some similarity to garđr.

p. 231
"'Lenin/grad/ /us/ed to be Petrograd?' 'A pri/g/ /rad/ (obs. past tense of read) /us/?'"

Movement of time and change embodied again by Gradus as associated with Leningrad / Petrograd. "prig rad us" has a similarity to "prigorod," a Russian suburb, which is derived from "grad" for city from which the word "gorod" has evolved. In the suburbs of St. Petersburg (aka Petrograd, Leningrad) is the Vyra estate, once the summer home of the Nabokov family.

p. 232
"his eyesight was not too good"

Again, Gradus as a bat.

p. 232
"Oh my sweet Boscobel!"

Charles II of England's departure point into exile.

p. 232
"the maddening intimations, and the star that no party member can ever reach"

Wordsworth's Intimations Ode again.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.


Reference

p. 233
"I am thinking of yet another Charles, another long dark man above two yards high"

Charles II of England.

p. 234
"Edsel Ford"

The name of Henry Ford's son after whom the famously failed automobile is named. They were in production around the time Shade writes his poem and Kinbote his commentary.

Reference

p. 235
"Now it is quieter" etc

Kinbote is completely alone now as his work nears completion.

p. 235
"two tongues"

Aside from Zemblan, English/American is the only non-Slavic language. "American and European" would be VN himself.