While I was searching for references to Nemo and Nobody (thinking about the Odyssey, particularly after hearing two words in Greek, “nostalgia” and something sounding like the German “Niemand”, in a movie about photography, cinematography and memory called  ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ - To Vlemma tou Odyssea -  by Theo Angelopoulos), and considering Kinbote and a trail of discussions in the VN-L related to Nitko(b), I came to the “fictional double Mr. Nikerbroker” in an article by Maria Lobytsyna.  Curiously, I cannot remember reading this part in Speak,Memory: one must always return to VN’s texts, over and over and still the story continues over the slabs of pieces I’ve forgotten.

Here is the quote:

“The Nabokovian protagonist in most of  his American Works is mythopoetic, forcing his imagination to conjure the smallest details of those places of his youth – St. Petersburg and the Nabokov’s estate, for example – destroyed during the revolution and the Civil Was of 1917-1921.  Nabokov invented the fictional double Mr.Nikerbroker – Mr. Nobody – to emphasise his obsessive search for “nothing” and to reflect the indifference of cruelty of an abstract history that moves people about like the chess-figures.  Indeed, the leitmotif of the chess-game becomes at once a crucial narrative device and a symbol of human homelessness.”  https://www.academia.edu/9307302/HE_OTHER_SHORES_OF_VLADIMIR_NABOKOV

The ‘Other Shores” of Vladímir Nabokov, Maria Lobytsyna

A review of the Angelopoulos movie reproduced the words said by Harvey Keitel/ Ulysses in the end and informed me that it derives from Homer’s epic: “After I return I shall arrive in another man’s clothes, under a different name and with different facts. I’ll be back. This is the story of humanity. A story that never ends. ”

I was reminded of Kinbote’s words concerning the assassin Gradus but, when I checked it in VN’s text, I realized that I was, once again, under the influence of Nabokov’s “referential mania”: nothing warranted any connections between the nostalgic Kinbote/Botkin(Nitko?) and the Greek hero, nor the fact that Jakob Gradus “also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone and d’Argus” (Ulysses’ dog, the first to recognize him under a different guise, something that the initial Gradus didn’t manage to do…).  Although the lines I recollected bore no actual similarity to any Homeric allusion, my eerie feeling remained free-floating and unaltered:

“I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door — a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus.” (CK’s note on line 1000, the absent line which our commentator interprets as reproducing the first line of the poem…).