(a) Sebastian's bout of nostalgia in
Roquebrune, Monte Carlo, before he learns that his English mother had died
in another city, namely, Roquebrune, Var. (cf.p.20);
(b) The narrator, SK's all Russian
half-brother, assuming that, in SK's book "Lost Property",
he is describing his feelings towards Russia - whereas the
reference seems to be to exiled R. Brooke's longing for
England.
[ Cp. Rupert Brooke's poem, written
in 1912 in Berlin, titled "The Old Vicarage, Granchester"*
and (on p.27) a quote from SK's Lost
Property: "that one of the purest emotions is that
of the banished man pining after the land of his birth[...]the blue remembered
hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial
rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant
spire...". if we keep in mind that this passage was
selected to confirm that " the romantic - and let me add, somewhat artificial - passion for
his mother's land, could not, I am sure, exclude the real affection for the
country where he had born and bred".]
Following links about R.Brooke, through Google, I reached Andrey Babikov's
paper: "On Germination of Nabokov’s “Main Theme” in his Story
“Natasha”, in which he informs us that in the spring of 1921 Nabokov
wrote an essay on "Rupert Brooke" and that,
for D.B.Johnson, "Rupert Brooke played a crucial role in the
formulation of the potustoronnost' [or “hereafter”] theme that was central to
much of Nabokov's later art and life.". A.Babikov also mentions
Alexander Dolinin's “The Real Life of the Writer Sirin,” in
which he "draws our attention to the presence of the theme of the hereafter
in Nabokov’s 1920’s Berlin poems, in which he tries to express “the mysterious
unseen connections of the living with the dead”.
It was when I realized that hidden behind this theme we come to another: Nabokov's own
sufferings in Berlin, at the time his father was shot, is hinted by a line that
is reminiscent of Bede's sparrow.
TRLSK: (page 18):"Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood [...] it
comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our
family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then
for a long interval fading into the night."
In The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, The Venerable Bede (AD673/AD735) compares man´s life on
earth to the arrow flight of a small sparrow crossing a lighted hall
"passing from winter into winter". Priscilla Meyer [ Find What the Sailor Has Hidden,Vladimir
Nabokov´s 'Pale Fire' (pg.73) notes, in relation to VN's father's
assassination and Bede, that "Nabokov uses the metaphor of the house,
of enclosure, for the concept of mortal time, with windows as the point of
transition into and out of it".