UNFINISHED PICTURES

Starting from his observation that “a deep theme of Vasari’s biogra-phy of Leonardo [is] the painter’s tendency to leave works unfinished or ‘imperfect,’” Paul Barolsky discusses how literary art has generated many verbal paintings and portraits to learn the secrets of art and

artists. He argues how such quests have often ultimately become obses-sions, but unfortunately for them the “elusive” artists do not succumb to the scrutinizers as is indicated by the fact that the portraits remain unfinished (414). Barolsky mentions Leonardo, Flaubert and Sebastian Knight as examples of artists whose true identity remain mysterious.

In Sebastian Knight it is not Sebastian’s portrait alone that remains

“incomplete” and “unfinished” (118, 123). The portraits of Natasha are conspicuously fragmentary, only a “mere outline” is presented and a bit later she disappears altogether “except for the arm and a thin brown hand” (136, 137). (The “achrometic” representation is discussed in sec-tion 4, 6.) “The presentasec-tion of absence is obviously not a gratuitous device”; writes Lara Delage-Toriel, “it brings into relief the importance of the visual portraits by creating a sense of frustrated scopic desire which parallels the narrator’s own unfulfilled quest for Sebastian’s last love” (146). Without answering the question why Sebastian felt himself always “hopelessly alone” (42), V.’s quest, doomed by his obsessive fix-ation on a Russian lady, is bound to remain unaccomplished.

25. VALENTINO

Sebastian’s uncontrollable laughing when he sees a film with Clare trying to curb his mirth “prefigures,” writes Stacy Schiff, “the same scene at Cornell” (188). She refers to a recollection of Alfred Appel Jr. who in 1954 saw Nabokov laughing loudly when seeing Beat the Devil (Appel, Cinema 311). The movie that exhilarated Sebastian is The Sheik, which caused a furor in the 1920s. It features Rudolph Valentino, the patent beau, in his most famous role. The film was made after E.M.

Hull’s novel The Sheik and Claud Cockburn summarizes its theme by quoting “rape, rape, rape all summer long” (139). Sebastian was not the only one who could not stand the movie as many viewers in the 1920s howled at some scenes and droves of men walked out of the cinema during its showings (Leider 165, 169).

26. VARVARA

Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy remarried, after having divorced his first wife Nina, Varvara Mitrofanna, who comes from Sebastopol and who “has taken up dressmaking” (142). Varvara’s patronymic recalls the name of

the youth, Mitrofán, in Denis Fonvizin’s play The Infant (1782). This badly bred boy professes that he would like to get married, but finally concedes to join the army. The main intention of the comedy is to ridi-cule the terribly bad manners many characters of the play have.

Varvara is also the name of the second companion of Andrey Kovrin, the protagonist of Chekhov’s story The Black Monk, which Sebastian uses to pull “Mr. Goodman’s leg” (62).

Kovrin, a strained student, hallucinates that he sees a black monk who praises Kovrin’s “astonishing scholarship” and much more. Elated, he marries Tanya, who has him treated for his illness, but when he regains his health he misses the “delusions of grandeur,” starts hating Tanya and leaves her (84, 96). It is only in the last, ninth, section that one learns that Kovrin now lives with Varvara and that they have arrived in Sebastopol. They find a hotel and Varvara, being tired, goes to bed.

Then she is “asleep behind the screen and her breathing [is] audible”

(Chekhov, Selected Stories 102), just as “the sleeper’s breath” behind “a screen” (Sebastian Knight 200–201) is heard by V.

Like V. who takes the sleeper to be Sebastian, Kovrin is mistaken as he, mortally ill, falls and cries for Tanya.

27. WILDER

Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey is about a quest comparable to that of Sebastian Knight’s novel Success: “to discover the exact way in which . . . lines of life were made to come into contact”

(Sebastian Knight 94). Five people died when the bridge broke; “[w]

hy did this happen to those five? If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be dis-covered” (Wilder 9). The answer, a rather panacean one, might have disappointed Sebastian: “the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” (Wilder 124). Perhaps more opportune to the mysteries of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the story (told in the third of the novel’s five parts) of the brothers Manuel and Esteban who live together and are very close. Manuel falls in love with the beautiful actress Camila Perichole. As Esteban feels painfully excluded from his brother’s exalted emotions and grows miserable, Manuel stops seeing her. And the ques-tion is suggested who was more in love with Camila, Manual, her puta-tive admirer, or his reticent brother Esteban? The same question can be

asked with respect to the half-brothers in Sebastian Knight, as it is not clear who was captured more by Nina’s charms, Sebastian or V.

28. ZELLE

When V. visits Mademoiselle, the Swiss lady who had been his and Sebastian’s governess in St. Petersburg, she recalls Sebastian’s way of addressing her as “Zelle” (20). Maurice Couturier explains this by call-ing it an “[a]bréviation affectuese de ‘Mademoiselle’” (Oeuvres 1546).

After the interview V. is much dismayed having spend time on “this useless pilgrimage” (21).

In V.’s interview with Pahl Rechnoy, he compares his former wife with “an international spy. Mata Hari! That’s her type Oh, absolutely”

(143).

Mata Hari is the name the Dutch Margarete Getrude Zelle (1876–

1917) used for her performances as a dancer in France. By coupling Nina Rechnoy with Mata Hari/“Zelle,” it is implied that V.’s search for Nina might turn out to be another “useless pilgrimage.”

C H A P T E R 4

CONTENTS

1. Baring... 110 2. Brooke, Gray, Housman, and Kipling ... 111 3. Byron’s “Dream” ... 114 4. Celadon ... 114 5. Chess ... 115 6. Colors ... 115 7. Cox ... 120 8. Dead Souls ...120 9. Douglas ... 122 10. Enchanted Garden ... 123 11. Jekyll and Hyde ...124 12. Joan of Arc ... 125 13. “L” and “V” ... 126 14. Mann ... 127 15. Moon ... 130 16. “Mrs. Bathurst”... 131 17. Nesbit... 131 18. Proust ... 132 19. Queer ... 134 20. Robinsonnade ... 135 21. Rubáiyát ...136 22. Sexuality... 138 23. Sherlock Holmes ... 140 24. Snakes ... 142

25. St Sebastian ... 145 26. Success ...145 27. The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight ...146 28. Ulysses ...150 29. Uncle Ruka... 153 30. Velimir Khlebnikov ... 156 31. V.’s Dream ... 158 32. Woman in White ...159

1. BARING

Nabokov was acquainted with Maurice Baring as well as with his works and connections. Coming from the Baring family of bankers, he was educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford (he entered Trinity College in 1894 about a quarter of a century before Sebastian and Nabokov, and like Sebastian, frequented the Pitt Club [Baring Puppet 143, 153]). He was a highly prolific writer and, having become a staunch Russophile, many of his books are devoted to Russia, its people and its literature. In 1914 Baring accompanied H.G. Wells during his visit to Russia (Boyd, VNRY 178). When in St. Petersburg Wells was invited to dinner at the Nabokovs and this invitation was extended to Baring, whose social standing was similar to that of Nabokov’s father (Letters to Véra 663). Two decades later Nabokov, in a letter to his friend Gleb Struve in which he inquired about the possibility for lecturing on lit-erature in England, mentions Baring as someone who might help in furthering this idea (Efimov 228; see also Boyd, VNRY 431). In 1948 Nabokov commented to Edmund Wilson on Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March: “The thing is much too easy—and has been done so many times in England. Maurice Baring did it quite as well” (Karlinsky, Dear Bunny 226).

In his article on Nabokov and Prince D.S. Mirsky, Mikhail Efimov writes that “[a]ccording to Gennady Barabtarlo’s recent discovery, the manuscript copy of the third chapter of Nabokov’s first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, contains ‘a deleted paragraph which among Knight’s “not very numerous friends-literati” mentions a well-known English philologist Maurice Baring’” (229).

Like Sebastian, Baring happened to throw inkpots and wrote an experimental detective novel, Overlooked (Baring, Puppet 183; Smyth

239). But one is tempted to explain the initial inclusion as well as the final exclusion of Baring in Sebastian Knight in the same way as in which V. tries to discover the secret of Sebastian’s life, that is by means of his love affairs. In Baring’s case it was rather the absence of any love affair that puzzled his acquaintances. In her biography of Baring, Emma Letley records the many speculations about this subject, and provides a key to its answer as well (216). When discussing Baring’s friendship’s she writes: “The women Maurice knew well at this time divide sharply into the Beauties (that succession of lovely women with whom Maurice populated his life . . .) and on the other hand the redoubtable Sapphists”

(196). Although no greater distinction can be imagined than between the elegance of the “Beauties” whom Letley mentions and the formi-dability of the Sapphists, no amorous overtures were expected from Baring as all the beautiful ladies were married. In his autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory, which spans the years until 1914 and was published in 1932 (Ethel Smyth’s biography followed in 1938) no romances are mentioned. But perhaps one should not forget Baring’s friendship with Auberon Herbert, “the most intensely admired of his friends” (Smyth 50). Herbert was killed in World War I, which caused Baring to write one of his best poems, the elegiac In Memoriam, A.H. Of course the likeness with Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam A.H.H.

cannot be missed and does not end with the titles. And the line “And on your sandals the strong wings of youth” recalls the perplexing effect Baring felt when seeing “the Hermes of Praxiteles” (In Memoriam 259;

Puppet 254).