[fifteen] Hazel + Anastasia Nikolaevna

Throughout class discussions and our blogs, a strong resemblance is beginning to form between Kimbote/Zembla and Nabokov/Russia. Zembla or the “Great North” seems to be a metaphor for the nation of Russia with Kimbote acting as a symbol for Nabokov and his “exile” from Russia and later Germany. With Kimbote’s invention of Shade, the poem, Hazel’s death, etc., I began to realize a close resemblance between the story of Hazel’s “suicide” and the story of Anastasia Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. After Bolshevik revolutionaries executed the royal family in 1917, rumors began to spread about Anastasia’s escape prior to her family’s death because the location of her body was not well known, if such a location even existed. In Pale Fire, Shade writes "I'm reasonably sure that we survive/ and that my darling somewhere is alive”, which led me to think that Nabokov, being from Russia, would have played off the idea that Hazel could still be alive because of his reference(?) to the story of Anastasia.