When I asked why he [the narrator's friend who wants to ransom the portrait of his
grandfather] did not get in touch with the museum, he replied that
he had written several times, but had never received an
answer.
(The Visit to the Museum, written in the
fall, 1938, and published next year in Sovremennye
Zapiski)
Pisat' k praottsam (to write to one's forefathers) is
a common euphemism for "to die." In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
(Eight: XXXII: 1-3) Onegin, in love with Princess N.,
beforehand
is ready to his forefathers [ko pradedam] to
write
of an impending meeting.
"What can I do for you?" he [M. Godard, the museum's director] asked, throwing the
letter he had just sealed into the wastebasket.
Small wonder that the narrator's friend never received an
answer from the museum.
Like Matt Roth, I always had doubts as to
whether the narrator managed to escape the tires of a furious red
bus.
In his remarkable article Pushkinskiy fon rasskaza
Nabokova "Poseshchenie muzeya" (The Pushkin Background of
Nabokov's story The Visit to the Museum, Nabokovskiy vestnik, # 1,
1998, pp. 66-71) Vadim Stark compares the narrator of VN's story to Hermann, the
mad gambler in Pushkin's Queen of Spades (1833), and to the hero
of Jacques Offenbach's opéra bouffon* Orpheus in the
Underworld (1858). A Russian Nobleman portrayed by
Leroy "bore a likeness to Offenbach." Stark points out the similarity
of Offenbach's portraits to those of Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, VN's
grandfather who died in his pied-à-terre on the Palace Quay in St. Petersburg (but thinking he
was still in Nice) "at the time of the Russo-Japanese
War:"
...and a bit of house wall that
could be just glimpsed from the window was painted a brilliant white,
so every time he [DNN] rereverted to a state of
comparative lucidity he found himself safe on the illusory Riviera artistically
staged by my mother; and there, on 28 March 1904, exactly eighteen years
before my father, day for day, he peacefully died. (Speak,
Memory, Chapter Three, 1)
The portrait of the grandfather of the narrator's friend
is by Gustave Leroy. As pointed out by Stark, the watchmaker
Pierre Leroy (1717-85) is mentioned in The Queen of
Spades:
Two portraits, painted in Paris
by Mme. Lebrun, hang on the wall [of the
old Countess's bedroom]. One of them showed a man about forty years old,
red-faced and portly, wearing a light green coat with a
star; the other a beautiful young woman with an aquiline
nose, with her hair combed back over her temples, and with a
rose in her powdered locks. Every nook and corner was crowded with china shepherdesses,
table clocks made by the famous
Leroy, little boxes, bandalores, fans, and diverse other ladies’ toys invented
at the end of the last century, along with Montgolfier’s balloon and Mesmer’s
magnetism. (chapter III)
Pushkin's "St. Petersburg Tales" - particularly
The Queen of Spades - are also important in LATH, whose narrator
and main harlequin, Vadim Vadimovich N. (son of Count Starov?), visits
Leningrad (the Soviet hell to him) and manages to return to Paris. According to V. V., "the I of the
book can not die in the book."
*Misteriya buff (Mystery Bouffe, 1918) is a
play in verse by VN's "late namesake," V. V. Mayakovski. According to
Stark, Montisert hints at Monte Carlo. In his poem Monte Carlo (1929)
Mayakovski mentions eighty-seven-year-old Queens of Spades and calls
the inhabitants of the city poganen'kie montekarliki ("vile dwarfish
Montecarlians").
Alexey Sklyarenko