J. M.: Thank you, Alexey, for your
patience.
What patience, Jansy? Or do
you mean that by forming new words from the same letters I'm
indulging in a kind of card patience (solitaire)?
But to return to the flowers on a
window-sill in Varen'ka Dobrosyolova's room (Dostoevsky, "Poor Folks"). One of
them, a balsam, also reminds me of Joseph Balsamo, aka "Count of
Cagliostro" (who is mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory, as the man
who foresaw a Versailles ditch full of human heads). What is interesting about
Cagliostro (1743-1795?*), he was born in Palermo (in the heart
of "Palermontovia," so to say) and his second wife was Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, de Beauharnais in the second
marriage, and, in the third, Madame Bonaparte (see A. Dumas père's
"Joseph Balsamo: Mémoires d'un médecin," 1846-48, its sequel "Le collier de
la reine," 1849-50, and M. Leblanc's "La comtesse de Cagliostro," 1924).
Cf. Queen [sic!] Josephine, mentioned as one of the famous beauties by
Marina (1.5) and Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis. In my
article "'Grattez le Tartar...' or Who were the parents of Ada's Kim
Beauharnais" (The Nabokovian, # 59, 60), I argue that Kim is the son
of Arkadiy Dolgorukiy, the hero of Dostoevsky's novel "The Adolescent" (1875),
and Alfonsinka ("a local Josephine," as Arkadiy calls St. Petersburgian
prostitutes), a character in the same novel.
* Some think that Cagliostro didn't die in his cell at the Castle of
Saint-Leon in Urbin in 1795 where he was imprisoned in 1789, but managed to
emigrate to America where he adopted a new name. According to their
speculations, Arthur Gordon Pym, the hero of E. A. Poe's "The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1837) can be Joseph Balsamo's son or even
Cagliostro himself.
Alexey Sklyarenko