Describing his trip to Leningrad, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) calls Pushkin "our National Poet:"
I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet, leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken but still brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridor of the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch the earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sitting next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet wrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking Bloody Marshas, her joke--not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It was delightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Havemeyer (her rather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist's offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin's room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten something called "tabaka chicken"; and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful city without seeing a single ballet or variety show. "I happen to be," I explained, "a triple agent and you know how it is--" "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler angle. "Oh! But that's vurry glamorous!" (5.3)
In the postscript to his letter of Sept. 18, 1831, to Pushkin Chaadaev says that he has just read Pushkin's two poems ("The Anniversary of Borodino" and "To the Slanderers of Russia") and calls Pushkin the "national poet" (Enfin, vous voilà poète national):
Voilà que je viens de voir vos deux pièces de vers. Mon ami, jamais vous ne m'avez fait tant de plaisir. Enfin, vous voilà poète national; vous avez enfin deviné votre mission. Je ne puis vous exprimer la satistaction que vous m'avez fait éprouver. Nous en reparlerons une autre fois, — beaucoup. Je ne sais si vous m'entendez bien? — La pièce aux ennemis de la Russie est surtout admirable; c'est moi qui vous le dis: il y a là plus de pensées qne l'on n'en a dit et fait depuis un siècle en ce pays. Oui, mon ami, écrivez l'histoire de Pierre le Grand. Tout le monde n'est pas de mon avis ici, vous vous en doutez bien; mais laissons-les dire — et avançons; quand l' on a deviné <...> un bout de la puissance qui nous pousse, une seconde fois, on la dev<inera toute> entière, bien sûr. J'ai envie de me dire: voici venir notre Dante enfin <...> ce serait peut-être trop hâtif; attendons.
In his letter to Pushkin Chaadaev mentions "le grand moment ou la bonne nouvelle:"
Que le premier branle du mouvement qui doit achever les destinées du genre humain se fasse de telle ou telle sorte, qu'importe? Beaucoup de choses qui avaient précédé le grand moment ou la bonne nouvelle fut annoncée autrefois par un envoyé divin, avaient été destinées à préparer l'univers, beaucoup de choses aussi se passeront sans doute de nos jours à fin semblable, avant que la nouvelle bonne nouvelle nous soit apportée du ciel. Attendons.
Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) uses the phrase le grand moment:
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her pantiesshe had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutessay, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
VN's Lolita corresponds to Vadim's novel A Kingdom by the Sea (1962). At the Orly airport on his way back from Leningrad Vadim finds a copy of his novel:
I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of her leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf 12 1/2, creamy thigh 19 1/2, and Louise was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes. I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from the American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet--and preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book's art, the blurb on the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual plot of my Kingdom.
Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum for the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny to the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with the beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A state of affairs that looks at first blush--and "blush" is the right word--like a case of irresponsible perversion (described in brilliant detail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into a genuine dialogue of tender love. Garden's feelings are reciprocated by Ginny, the initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!] in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most rigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaotic course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken, the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliver and [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents from tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice. (5.3)