When Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman) shows to Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) his lending library, Vadim recognizes – among the people who have a business meeting there – his friend Morozov and Boyarski (a sycophant of the critic Basilevski):
I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending library spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed the brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors were vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in a magic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompanied the animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists Shipogradov and Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero of Our Era") and two young poets, Lazarev (collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). Some of the heads turned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to his feet, grinning--but my host said they were having a business meeting and should be left alone. (2.4)
The names Boyarski and Morozov hint at Boyarynya Morozov (1632-75), a partisan of the Old Believer movement who lived in the reign of the tsar Alexey Mikhaylovich. Boyarynya Morozova (1887) is a painting by Surikov. In a footnote to his essay Nasledstvo Bloka (“The Heritage of Blok,” 1956) G. Adamovich quotes the words of Ivan Bunin (who served as a model for Morozov) about Alexander Blok’s cycle Na pole Kulikovom (“On the Field of Kulikovo,” 1908), “Listen, but this is Vasnetsov:”
По поводу «Куликова поля» Бунин как-то мне сказал: «Послушайте, да ведь это же Васнецов». На словах я, как водится, запротестовал, а про себя подумал: «Как верно, как убийственно метко». Да, Васнецов, то есть маскарад и опера... Но тут мы возвращаемся к стилю, а если в «Куликово поле» вслушаться, то чудится, что татарские орды где-то в двух шагах, схватка неминуема и отстоять надо не древнерусские города, а что-то такое, без чего нельзя жить.
According to Adamovich (who thought to himself that Bunin was right), if one listens attentively to the poems of Blok’s cycle, one feels that the Tartar hordes are near, that the battle is inevitable and that one has to defend not the ancient Russian cities, but something without which one cannot live.
Bunin probably had in mind Vasnetsov’s painting Bitva na Kulikovom Pole (“The Battle on the Field of Kulikovo,” 1915). But he would also remember that Blok’s poem Sirin i Alkonost, ptitsy radosti i pechali ("Sirin and Alkonost, the Birds of Joy and Sadness," 1899) was inspired by a painting (1896) of Victor Vasnetsov. VN's Russian nom de plume was Sirin. Victor is the name of the hero of Vadim’s novel The Dare (1950):
The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general way about my Russian fictions of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties, for I assume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in their English versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about The Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "a gift to the fatherland"). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however that it would be almost as long as General Pudov's vile and fatuous "historical" romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about four years in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed at least twice. Most of it had been serialized in émigré magazines by May, 1939, when she and I, still childless, left for America; but in book form, the Russian original appeared only in 1950 (Turgenev Publishing House, New York), followed another decade later by an English translation, whose title neatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies but also to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.
The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (much happier, though not less opulent than mine). After that comes adolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life in émigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and the tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote "on a dare": this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of émigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt's challenge and accomplishes a final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Soviet territory and as casually strolling back. (2.5)