Didier Machu: "I suppose that Opal Wheeler's illustration was based on Margaret Isabel Dicksee's painting of the young Handel discovered in the attic of his family's house playing the cembalo. The painting was made in 1893 and gravures based on it were soon circulated rather widely..."

 

JM: Thank you, Didier, for the very precise indication of M.I.Dicksee's painting (which I could finally visualize in color). Now it seems possible that Nabokov might have alluded to Haendel, and to his flight from Halle to London - only to find the Hanoverian Elector crowned King George I of England - living in the era when Parliament began to grow in power.

In Nabokov's "The Defense" predominates the feeling, in me, that Russia escaped one kind of absolutist rule only to fall prey to another, totalitarian, rule. However, didn't his father's ideals and political stand arise in a rich, although brief, interstice between one extreme and the other?  (this is obviously a subject that I'm unable to explore since my knowledge of European history is very restricted).