Jansy Mello: Nabokovian links never cease to astound me.  While reading Sklyarenko’s informations related to “Eve” and the writer V.de l’Isle-Adam, a vague recollection made me pick up and pore over the detestable “The Original of Laura” once again.

I thought l’Isle-Adam’s name would be among the French authors copied on Flora’s hand with the intent to cheat on her exams and I wanted to add this information to A.Sklyarenko’s valuable fabric.

But I was wrong and my search proved to be futile: there’s no direct reference to L’Isle Adam in TOoL…

Then I decided to follow the easiest paths.

Wikipedia informs that “ Axël was the work Villiers considered his masterpiece, although critical opinion has often been reluctant to agree with him, placing far higher value on his fiction.{  } The play's most famous line is Axël's "Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous" ("Living? Our servants will do that for us"). Edmund Wilson used the title Axel's Castle for his study of early Modernist literature.

Google led me to an article found on Nabokov Online, related to Laura (TOoL) and where Villiers L’Isle Adam is mentioned, along with Flora’s ancestors Adam and Eve Linde. A miracle!

Excerpts:  "Love, Death, Nabokov: Looking for The Original of Laura," Marijeta Bozovic

Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. V (2011)

"And yet another discernable pattern in Laura is a web of allusions to the great and notorious homosexual writers of the last century. Wild’s very name, on at least one card Wilder, plus that of Thornton (193)suggest the American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Was his The Bridge of San Luis Rey – see The Old Bridge, a painting by Flora’s grandfather  – to have been another intertext, or dismembered source text, for Laura ? Edmund Wilson wrote letters to both Wilder and Nabokov; one hardly imagines the latter would have loved the work of the former." *

"The slippage between truth and fiction is made even more bewildering by the genuine, as well as literary, gaps in the material. [  ] The title of that story cameos as a painting by Flora’s grandfather; Linde, the original émigré, moved to the wrong country for realist painters, bringing along his son Adam and wife Eve. With such ancestors, nothing good can ensue. Do Ivan and Flora share anything besides three languages and original sin?”

" The most novel conceit in The Original of Laura is Wild’s fantastic ability to auto-obliterate and come back to tell the tale [  ] Suicide made a pleasure” (sic, 127) [  ]  the claim that “the process of dying by auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man” (171); [  ] Ivan Vaughan (whom I will posit as the author of  My Laura , a double of Vladimir Vladimirovich, Van Veen, and all the other V.V.’s of Nabokov’s fiction) murders his mistress via the written word. I intuit a strange echo here not only of E.T.A. Hoffman, but of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s " Eve of the Future Eden"**. In this decadent novel, an aristocrat hires Thomas Edison to create an improved woman, based in form on the 

beautiful but vulgar creature with whom he has fallen irrevocably in love.  "L’Eve future" was first published in 1886, and is the little-known source text for the term “android.”

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* - BTW  In RLSK Victor finds, among the book in Sebastian Knight’s shelf, a copy of Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luiz Rey.” Here we have this other item to consider: was the reference to Wilder a sign of negative or positive appreciation on VN’s part? (JM) 

** Cf. Edmund Wilson’s 1931 Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870 – 1930  it seems reasonable to assume that Nabokov was at least somewhat familiar with the French symbolist. (MB)

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In brief: where does all this lead me? Nowhere, actually. I belong  to those lovingly preserved preys that are stuck to VN’s ominous web.