The 1913 painting in the Nabokov family's pre-revolutionary collection by Kalmakov may have been entitled "Death", but what is actually depicted? The scene is clearly submarine but the human curled up in the corner appears to be asleep, not dead - my guess is he is Sadko. Unfortunately I remember very little of the story, if I ever knew anything at all. If he is Sadko (who I think survives his visit to the sea floor) who is the stalking angel on the right? Is the "hat" a pagoda-like structure (as I first thought) or a seashell (a winkle perhaps)?
C Kunin
p.s. The artist's knowledge of submarine fauna is extraordinary for its time - could Kalmakov have known the work of Ernst Haeckl (1834 - 1919)? I remember Haeckl came up in my attempt to trace the word lemans which appears in "Ada" - very convoluted, but I include an outline below.* The depiction of submarine vent/plant/animals is also extraordinary for 1913.
* From the archives I was able to unspool the following thread of my thinking: from Fulmerford I got to [invented] Dr Lemuroff, and from there to lemur and Lemuria (Pacific counterpart to Atlantis, cf also Kitezh) and from there to Darwinian Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (who invented the idea of Lemuria) and from him to Blavatsky's Lemurians [related to occult ideas about Thule, btw] and finally back to "Ada" and what I called "those lemans" which now I can't remember for the life of me. Or was it a lake?