Another example of Hell as the place where the sensual meeting with the attractive woman takes place is Invitation to a Beheading. When Cincinnatus finally obtains a visit from in wife, instead of the romantic, if tormenting, tête-à-tête he expected and even thirsted for, she comes with her whole nightmarish family and even the furniture!, stark deprivation of privacy being here too a feature of Hell.

However Hell, in Nabokov's fictional device must not be construed as moral punishment, as God's retribution for the sin of Lust. It is merely that it is the natural element in which Marthe and her likes dwell and this world in which she moves naturally is just nightmarish for a man with Cincinnatus' personality and disposition; and it is just impossible to avoid being contaminated by this nightmarish (a word Nabokov uses repeatedly) atmosphere of meaninglessness if one craves for a relationship with that kind of intensely seductive woman.

Also, note the presence of damaged children here too

In Spring in Fialta, underneath its seemingly charming, carefree, superficial feel, Nina's world smacks of despair and Hell too.

At first, Fialta is intensely seducing, intoxicating as carnal closeness with an adored body. To say it bluntly, you feel in Fialta as in hot rumpled sheets after love:

"I'm fond of Fialta; I'm fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one's soul"

The evocation of the violet colour and flower, of the violin shape, the humidity, the somnolence, the alliterations of the first part of the sentence, like the murmur of half-articulated words of endearment... this is typical Nabokovian poerotics, to use a term coined by Maurice Couturier.

But soon, elements of cheapness and decay lend to the place a disturbing feel. Soon, the whole world surrounding Nina turns nightmarish, even literally hellish when the narrator, meeting Nina's husband Ferdinand for the first time, witnesses an excrutiating parody of the Last Supper:

"... Ferdinand was presiding; and for a moment his whole attitude, the position of his parted hands, and the faces of his table companions all turned toward him reminded me in a grotesque, nightmarish way of something I did not quite grasp. But when I did so in retrospect,the suggested comparison struck me as hardly les sacrilegious than the nature of his art itself"

And as a real Antichrist,instead of instructing his disciples in love and charity, Ferdinand shows them how to make horrible fun of the weakest.

But back to Signs and Symbols and the particular Hell of the old couple linked to the presence of Elsa and her likes. Even if Elsa belongs to the past, her representative still lives next door to the old couple: the old flirt Mrs Sol that Nabokov, I think, intends as the embodiement of Elsa's Future, just as in Laughter in the Dark, a decayed overpainted old flirt lives next door to Margot and reminisces about the past, when men were after her, she says. Here too, Nabokov prefers the device of juxtaposition without comment, instead of the classical and more explicit 'as if' of a metaphor.

To finish, I'd like to propose a riddle to interested list-members: I said that in Pale Fire (the poem) too, but in a subdued key, the same 'constellation' of damaged child and disharmonious couple occurs; did anyone notice it?

Laurence Hochard