"Shall I grow a beard to cross the
frontier?" muses homesick General Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her
Parandrus.
"Better than none," said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers.
"But," he added, "do it before we glue on and stamp O. B.'s picture and don't
lose weight afterwards." So I grew it--during the atrocious heartracking wait
for the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample
Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It
reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat, commingling
on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. (5.1)
In Rasputin and the Jews (Riga, 1921) Aron Simanovich
(Rasputin's private secretary) mentions General Gurko:
Она [Alexandra
Fyodorovna] поручила статскому советнику Валуеву съездить в ставку и там
принять шаги к прекращению дела. Она посоветовала ему сперва
обратиться к генералу Гурко с просьбой сообщить все данные о деле. Гурко
высказался, что, по его мнению, арест Рубинштейна
не имеет достаточно оснований.
Like all Russian muzhiks, Grigoriy Rasputin had a beard
(not as broad and thick as, say, Tolstoy's). On December 30, 1916 (NS), Rasputin
was assassinated in the Yusupov Moika palace, some 500 m west of the Nabokov
house in the Morskaya Street. Rasputin is a namesake of Grigoriy Otrepiev (False
Dmitriy I), a character in Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1825). Vadim's
crossing the Russian frontier westward (1.2) brings to mind the famous
scene at the Lithuanian frontier in Boris Godunov.
On the other hand, Gurko seems to hint at Krug, the main
character in VN's Bend Sinister (1947). Krug (The
Circle, 1936) is a story by VN, "a small satellite [that] separated itself
from the main body of the novel [The Gift] and started to revolve
around it." The main character and part-time narrator of Dar (The
Gift, 1952) is Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev. The novel's
characters include Boris Shchyogolev ("Boris the Brisk").
Alexey Sklyarenko