EDITOR'S NOTE. Meredith Brosnan recently reported the item below on NABOKV-L. I have a bit of poking about and now pass on the results of my investigation. I append them to the Meredith's original report.

FROM MEREDITH BROSNAN:
 
Attached is a photograph I recently came across at Sovfoto/Eastfoto, a
New York-based photo archive where I work. It appears to shed some light
on the cryptic words spoken by Leo Tolstoy's ghost at a seance described
in Nabokov's short story "The Vane Sisters":

"Finally, with a great crash and all kinds of shudderings and jiglike
movements on the part of the table, Leo Tolstoy visited our little group
and, when asked to identify himself by specific traits of terrene
habitation, launched upon a complex description of what seemed to be
some Russian type of architectural woodwork ('figures on boards - man,
horse, cock, man, horse, cock'), all of which was difficult to take
down, hard to understand, and impossible to verify."

The picture shows Count Tolstoy with members of his family (wife Sonya,
far right) on the veranda of the main house of the Tolstoys' estate,
Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, Russia, c. 1895 .

THE ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH IS COPYRIGHT SOVFOTO / EASTFOTO AND MUST NOT BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT PERMISSION.

 
 In a later note, Meredith adds that the photo came to the archive from a Moscow-produced English-language magazine called "USSR" (now defunct!), some time in the 60s or 70s.

 


Meredith Brosnan’s photo and relevant VS quote.

 

 

 

 

EDITOR's NOTE. There can be no reasonable doubt that  Nabokov is alluding to the “man, horse, cock, man, horse, cock” architectural detail on the balustrade boards on the porch of Tolstoy’s home Yasnnaia Poliana. “The Vane Sisters” is, in fact, about messages from the dead to the living, most specifically from the deceased sisters to the skeptical narratator who fails to notice even the famous  logogriph in the story’s last line. Indeed, the “man,  horse, cock” image is adduced in response to the narrator’s challenge to the putative Tolstoy “to identify himself  by specific traits of terrene habitat.”  The narrator who is transcribing the ghostly words at  Cynthia’s séance remains unpersuaded, remarking that   the terrene traits were “difficult to take down, hard to understand, and impossible to verify.”   The photo supplied by Meredith Brosnan shows that those "terrene traits" are verifiable.  

We know that Nabokov never visited Yasnaia Polyana, although he and his father briefly encountered Tolstoy on Sankt-Peterburg  street circa 1909. Nabokov  must have seen a photograph of the figured carvings,  perhaps not long before writing “The Vane Sisters” in 1951. According to Sovfoto, their copy of the picture is from a Moscow-produced defunct  English-language Soviet propaganda magazine called “U.S.S.R” which was distributed here in the 50s and 60s.  Apparently the original is at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow  and/or at the Museum Estate. Patricia Chute in her _Tolstoy at  Yasnaia Polyana_ reproduces the photo in question (p. 113) with the information that it was taken in 1892. The bilingual _Lev Tolstoy and Yasnaya Polyana . A Photographic and Literary Essay_ by E. Kassin, G. Rastorguyev, & V. Yankov provides several other photographs that include the porch’s carved balustrade and notes that the cut-out figures were executed from a sketch  by the artist  N. Filosofov. Still other views of the carvings may be seen in the handsome album _Yasnaia Polyana_ (Moscow, 1978). In sum, there are many published pictures that Nabokov could have seen and no pressing reason to assume  it is  or is not the 1892 image. 

Gennady Barabtarlo offers another possibility. Some two years after writing “The Vane Sisters,” Nabokov started on _Pnin_.  Chapter III contains a motif  involving a recalled library book—volume 18 of the series _Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literatury (Soviet Gold Fund of Literature), Moskva-Leningrad, 1940, one chiefly dealing with Tolstoyana. Barabtarlo identifies the series as a fictional counterpart of the _Literaturnoe nasledstvo_ series and remarks that Nabokov  utilized volumes 37-38 for his class commentaries  to _Anna Karenin_ (Lectures in Russian Literature, p. 224). Pnin also consults these volumes as shown by  allusion  to them in chapters IV & V. LRL’s reference to the Literary Heritage volume proves to be quite trivial---a note by Tolstoy’s son Sergey  explaining the mazurka. Far more intriguing  is note #66 on the same page about “Spiritualism,” arising from a discussion  and an attempt at “table turning” at the Shcherbatskis (chapter 14). In _Pnin_, Nabokov provides a brief history of  the history of XIXth century spiritualism including much of the detail he (re-) uses in “The Vane Sisters.”     

 In the course on returning the recalled book, Pnin slips on the icy walk and drops  the volume. As he picks it up he sees that it is “open to  a snapshot of a Russian pasture  with Lyov Tolstoy trudging across it toward the camera and some long-maned horses behind him, their innocent heads turned toward the photographer too” (73).  Alas, a browse through the three volumes of  Tolstoyana shows several pictures of Yasnaia Polyana, but  I found none that clearly showed the figured balustrade. Pictures on pages 315 and 397 may contain the porch but at least in the facsimile copies of the Literaturnoe nasledstvo held by the UCSB library the quality of the reproductions  are too poor to make out any “man, horse, cock” image.