Don Johnson. ... “Ole Lukoie”
by Mr. H. C. Anderson..involves a sleeping boy entering a nursery wall
picture: Martyn, the young hero of the VN novel Glory (Podvig) who seems
to enter the picture hanging above his bed, thus launching the fatal
peregrinations of his future himself in a mysterious
dark kingdom suggesting woodsy Zoorland, a.k.a, Soviet Russia.
Any
thoughts pro or con? Other possible sources? ...There are doubtless scads of
fairy tales that conform to the schema but VN’s mother read such
tales to her predormitory son.
JM: In Lewis Carroll's "Through the
Looking Glass" we find Alice entering a mirror instead of a
painting. Nabokov was familiar enough with Carroll's
mirror-worlds to be able to work them over in his
fantasies.
Google taught me that the
idea of entering into a painting is a fairly common one, particularly now with
cybergame challenges. " Paintings are
sometimes described as a 'window into another world'. ...A magic painting will
contain an entire world or dungeon which the heroes must enter to defeat the
enemies within. In some cases, the art style will shift to match that of the
painting, emphasizing the otherness of the painting world...In rare cases, some
nefarious ill-doer or oblivious Muggle may attempt to destroy a Portal Picture
while another character is inside the painting world. The results vary: if the
painting was literally a portal to another world, then destroying the portal
will leave the characters Trapped in Another World. The more common metaphysical
position, though, is that the painting world is actually formed out of the paint
and brushstrokes on the canvas, and by wiping away the painting, the world
itself disintegrates...Either way, the painting may be used as a prison."
(extracted from the internet)
Two stories turned into children's movies came
immediately to my mind (Mary Poppins, 1964 and The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950
"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader") but Nabokov's original "Glory" was written
long before, in the early thirties.
Another plot that fits the pattern of entering
into another dimension or of reaching the "the Other World," (as it is
figured in Greek Mythology and in other cultures), equally related
to Nabokov's childhood stories, is "La
Veneziana."*
......................................................................................................................................................................................
*- Dmitri Nabokov, in a
1995 preface writes about his father's
collected short-stories: "It would take much more than a brief preface to trace themes,
methods, and images as they weave and develop in these stories, or the echoes of
Nabokov's youth in Russia, his university years in
England, the emigre period in
Germany and
France, and the
America he was inventing, as
he put it, after having invented Europe. To
choose at random from the thirteen newly collected stories, "La Veneziana," with its
astonishing twist, echoes Nabokov's love for painting (to which he intended, as
a boy, to dedicate his life) against a backdrop that includes tennis, which
he played and described with a special
flair."