Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
*St.
*Russia. St. Petersburg also introduces the idea of being Russian. V., who is half English, sees Sebastian as fully Russian. Goodman, Sebastian’s spurious biographer, sees Sebastian as repudiating his Russian heritage. Since the novel itself is, in a sense, Nabokov’s working out of his own emotions over abandoning his rich Russian language for what he initially thought was the poor substitute of English, the reader cannot be sure how correct V. is. At any rate, Russia remains a “dreamland” for both brothers, more overtly so for V. This becomes more apparent later in the novel when V. learns the identity of the girl whom Sebastian loved in his youth, Natasha Rosanov. Admitting that by now his quest for the secrets of his brother’s identity had grown into a “dream,” V. constructs out of his imagination (there is no evidence he witnesses any of this) a scene between Sebastian and this girl in a “Russian summer landscape.” The first scene includes the obligatory river, aspen and fir trees, flowers, and grass. The deflationary transformation of what at first seems to be a naked girl emerging from the river into a Russian priest blowing his nose after a swim is a clue to the thumbprint of the ultimate author, Nabokov himself, as is the presence in the second scene of a Camberwell beauty butterfly as Sebastian and Natasha meet for the last time. Russia remains only attainable by art.
Roquebrune (ROHK-brewn). French village near the Riviera where Sebastian’s mother supposedly has died. Sebastian seeks it out, finds the pension in which she died, symbolically named “Les Violettes” (symbolically because she had given him a pack of violet sweets at their last meeting), and meditates on the surroundings so intently that he has a vision of her. Later he learns that the village he visited was the wrong Roquebrune–another case of imagination triumphing over reality. The appearance of a naked old man on a balcony of “Les Violettes” (similar to the later appearance of the naked priest) alerts sensitive readers to the fact that Sebastian’s vision emerges not from the landscape around, but from the mind, as does V.’s vision of Sebastian and his young sweetheart.
*Cambridge and *London. English cities that, for the most part, are described in stereotypical terms of fog and rain. Sebastian writes about an exile’s vision of a landscape “with its unofficial rose,” a phrase from English poet Rupert Brooke’s poem of a nostalgic expatriate, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912), and V. talks about his own “Rupert Brooke moods.” However, several details indicate a deeper pattern, including Sebastian’s address in London, 36 Oak Park Gardens–a number and location that reappear throughout the work.
Blauberg (BLAW-berg). Small French town in Alsace, where Sebastian goes to recuperate for his heart ailment. There, at the Beaumont Hotel, he meets the last love of his life, whose identity V. is so anxious to learn. The hotel is minimally described, but its grounds mark a garden motif that begins in the account of Sebastian’s vision at “Les Violettes” and concludes with V.’s realization in Madame Lecerf’s garden. That this repetition is intentional is shown when V. elsewhere mentions Sebastian’s liking for an otherwise mediocre film, The Enchanted Garden, which he sees three times.
*Lescaux (LEHZ-coh). French town in which Madame Lecerf lives. V. eventually comes to believe that Madame Lecerf is Sebastian’s last, and unwisely chosen, lover. Although her house seems run down and old, it has been built relatively recently; its garden, in which V. has an epiphany about her identity, is a mixture of signs of life–green leaves on black branches–and death–a pile of earth that reminds V. of a grave.
St. Damier (sahn DAH-mee-ay). French town in whose hospital Sebastian dies. Guided to Sebastian’s supposed location in the significantly numbered Room 36, V. feels that before his brother dies he will impart to him the ultimate secret of life and death. However, V. finds himself in the wrong room, and Sebastian has died the day before. Nevertheless, V. feels that he has learned from his erratic, often mistaken quest. His biography is written partly to counter Goodman’s erroneous life–erroneous because it reduces Sebastian’s life to the mere product of his environment and times, against which his achievement is weighed and often found wanting.
V.’s search, although perhaps equally doomed to viewing Sebastian from the outside, at least recognizes and acknowledges the patterns and symbols of another’s life, which, in Sebastian’s butterfly image, “unfurl eyed wings.” Indeed, the nature of the secret that V. is so close to attaining is described by Sebastian in one of his novels as the realization that “the wild country” around a traveler is not really a landscape but “a page in a book.” Certainly, this is what Sebastian and V. ultimately are, creations in the pages of Nabokov’s book, but what echoes beyond the covers of this novel is the possibility that perhaps everyone is.