More on Signs and Symbols (and apologies for my awkward English):

     The part played by lust in S&S is not obvious. It's difficult to imagine the husband , an old broken man (but is he really that old? he can't be more than 55 or 60) chasing girls or indulging in lustful fantasies.

     Yet, although adultery is not explicitely mentioned, unmistakable Nabokovian clues hint at it. In order to read these clues, one must decipher Nabokov's grammar , as Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, by observing the constellations of images and situations:

    This unpleasant German maid whose photo insistently pops up while the wife is examining pictures in a family album where she doesn't belong, it is literally the forced introduction of another woman in the family circle, another woman together with her own world (embodied by the bestial beau) which literally means Hell for this Jewish family.

    This call from the girl with a dull, toneless voice trying to get to 'Charlie' in the middle of the night, the heart of intimacy embodies the blind, stubborn obstinacy of sensual appeal any 'Charlie' is forever tempted to answer. 

   VN literalizes the metaphor and merely juxtaposes elements which have a cause-effect relationship (the presence of another woman and the vanishing of intimacy), thus avoiding being explicit, the very juxtaposition being the comment, and achieving a much more powerful emotional effect on the reader.

   This blandly nightmarish world of violated intimacy and estrangement of the loved ones must be understood as the consequence of the husband's (past?) infatuation with girls. As cave paintings rapidly pale and vanish when exposed to the daylight, the intimacy and family life of this couple has been emptied of its substance because of its constant exposition to alien intrusions. And the wife's unfailing tenderness is condemned to be 'either crushed or wasted'. 

   I'm well aware that my interpretation must seem flimsy and unconvincing, only gappily supported by the text and relying too much on an arbitrary interpretation. Yet if we look at otherVN stories we can't fail to notice similar constellations of juxtaposed images and situations: oppressive or downright nightmarish atmosphere, estranged or dead wife and / or children, sensually attractive girl / woman. The different elements are diversely developped but this pattern is meaningful because of its reccurence.

    The closest example occurs in Bend Sinister, where David is torn away from his father Krug (and 'entrusted' to a very similar team of nurses and doctors) as soon as he lays hands on Mariette, a girl whose lusterless eyes are a visual equivalent of the anonymous girl's dull toneless voice of S&S, and a maid with a bestial beau too.

    This constellation has spawned numerous fictional variations in VN's imagination. Another one of them occurs in Spring in Fialta, although very different in tone and imagery: The narrator's wife and daughters "are always present in the clear north of [his] being ... but yet keeping on the outside of [him] most of the time", in other words: exiled while he finds himself in the humid, warm, misty, cloudy, intensely sensual world where the woman he is attracted to dwells.

    Vadim's daughter Bel, in Look at The Harlequins, is abruptly taken away from him (and afterwards exposed to a noxious influence) just after an adulterous tryst with a young woman (I forget her name) who draws him into her nightmarish world.

   Albinus's daughter, in Laughter in the Dark, literally dies of her father's affair with Margot.

   Even in Pale Fire, the theme of the damaged child as a consequence of disharmony in the couple of the parents still lingers, although only brushed past ...

Laurence Hochard