Short Horror story Review Vladimir Nabokov A Visit To The Museum

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1939 – Spoiler alerts An unusual often very surreal fantasy-horror work by the author of Lolita, that inspires many different interpretations. It I often included in ghost story collections and inspired the Night At The Museum movies though it is a very different tale than the Ben Stiller comedies. A Russian exile living in Paris in the 1930’s tells a Friend that he is visiting a mall French town soon. His friend excitedly tells him that the museum has a family portrait of one of the friend’s ancestors, and tells his friend to negotiate buying it for him, at any price. The traveller dislikes museums as they seem to keep random relics of a series of pasts trapped in time. He goes in anyway, sees the painting, and then looks for the museum curator to negotiate a price. At first the curator tells him there is no such painting in the museum, but the traveller takes him to it, though the museum seems to have expanded. He sees many artefacts he never spotted before. He is invited to go to the curator’s home to negotiate a price as the portrait is not officially there in the museum anyway. As he goes, the traveller finds himself shifted around by the ever changing exhibit before stepping out of the museum into modern Stalinist Russia, the very World he fled to France to escape. He strips away all his clothes to hide his identity but then he is arrested anyway. Somehow, he gets away to write his story, but his escape is never described. At one point, outside the museum, he is nearly run over by a bus and some commentators believe he was killed by the bus and might be the ghost but the ending suggests he is alive. A strange fable of inescapable pasts catching us up - the museum relics come to influence the future, like trace memories, hindering progress, dragging us back to what we hope to escape and progress from. A creepy story, but not a ghost story unless it is literally the whole past human history that haunts us. Arthur Chappell