Dear Jansy,

But my "games" are not alliterative at all!  Fulmerford = Dr Lemuroff is an anagramatic play (n.b. to our anagrams master, this is a "krugliy" anagram, if I may put it that way). The rest of the path down Lemur Lane, to make an alliterative detour,  is - I don't exactly know what it is - a series of associations of submarine and other lemurian associations. The association of occult ideas, leading betweem Lemuria and Thule, have not been explored yet so far as I know in the Nabokovian context. The submarine associations aren't necessarily particular to our VN - but perhaps they are, now that I think of Marina and sub-Marine motifs in Ada ...

Well, Ada's not my girl, as you may recall! But what, I wonder, can the internal parasite resembling the written word 'deified' refer to? You also bring up Sebastian Knight. I haven't read him since high school - let me count the decades! so I can't comment. But the Lehmann's apparently belongs in the Lemurian-Lemansian mix. And Priscilla Meyer's link between Lehmann's and occultism is surely an important key. Throw in her "pale kings, princes and pale warriors" and you have another lane to travel - a fire road perhaps?

But to return to Kalmakov, there is only one person curled up in the painting. If he is Sadko, a merchant, he is perhaps wearing some kind of musulman costume - or could he have wandered in from the Arabian Nights? - although Sadko was from Novgorod (I've googled a bit). I plan to take some time to visit Sadko in Novgorod soon, but for now I'll just close with a quote I found on the net:

Thanks for a pleasant journey with a pleasant "sputnitsa" (fellow traveler of the feminine persuasion),

Carolyn