On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857) is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:
Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula). (1.20)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Floeberg: Flaubert’s style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.
Floeberg is a mass of ice floes resembling an icebrg. In the Tobakoff cinema hall Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) mentions the final iceberg:
‘Hey, look!’ he cried, pointing to a poster. ‘They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!’
‘It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,’ said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.
They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills.
‘Want one? One a day keeps "no shah" away. Pun. You can chew it, it’s sweet.’
‘Jolly good name. No, thank you, my sweet. Besides you have only five left.’
‘Don’t worry, I have it all planned out. There may be less than five days.’
‘More in fact, but no matter. Our measurements of time are meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke; you’ll read all about it someday, you just wait.’
‘Perhaps, not. I mean, perhaps I shan’t have the patience. I mean, his charwoman could never finish reading Leonardo’s palm. I may fall asleep before I get through your next book.’
‘An art-class legend,’ said Van.
‘That’s the final iceberg, I know by the music. Let’s go, Van! Or you want to see Hoole as Hooan?’
She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight. (3.5)
In his poem Intrigi birzh, potugi natsiy (“The intrigues of stock exchanges, the efforts of nations,” 1924) Vladislav Hodasevich mentions neomrachimaya Ursula (unclouded Ursula, a reproduction of Carpaccio’s “Dream of Saint Ursula”) who quietly fell asleep having neatly placed her tufel’ki (slippers) beside her bed:
Интриги бирж, потуги наций.
Лавина движется вперёд.
А всё под сводом Прокураций
Дух беззаботности живёт.
И беззаботно так уснула,
Поставив туфельки рядком,
Неомрачимая Урсула
У Алинари за стеклом.
И не без горечи сокрытой
Хожу и мыслю иногда,
Что Некто, мудрый и сердитый,
Однажды поглядит сюда,
Нечаянно развеселится,
Весь мир улыбкой озаря,
На шаль красотки заглядится,
Забудется, как нынче я, –
И всё исчезнет невозвратно
Не в очистительном огне,
А просто – в легкой и приятной
Венецианской болтовне.
In Madame Bovary Flaubert (the author of “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier” and "The Temptation of Saint Anthony") compares Emma’s heart to her satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor:
The next day was a long one. She walked about her little garden, up and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier, before the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things of once-on-a-time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed already! What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices that a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.
The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma. (Part I, chapter 8)
In Vincente Minnelli's film adaptation of Madame Bovary (1949), James Mason (who played Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s film version of VN’s Lolita) plays Flaubert on trial for his novel’s supposed obscenity. In a sympathetic voice-over he attempts to defend Emma’s tragic choices by remarking: “We had taught her—what? To believe in Cinderella.”
In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Blanche (the French maid at Ardis who is associated with Cinderella and who manages to get invitations to the most exclusive bals masqués in Ladore) loses her miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase:
A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?
No, she was fast ablaze — I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.
Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French — it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version. (1.19)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Mlle Stopchin: a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann).
au feu!: fire!
flambait: was in flames.
Ashette: ‘Cendrillon’ in the French original.
Before joining Van on the library divan, Ada drops the found shoe in a wastepaper basket:
As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan. (1.19)
On the next morning Ada tells Blanche that she saw her slipper in a wastepaper basket:
Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, ‘Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque’ — presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid. There was a ‘bannister pause,’ as photographers say, and after the maid’s distant glad cry had come from the library Ada’s voice added: ‘Je me demande, I wonder qui l’a mis là, who put it there.’ Aussitôt après she entered the dining room. (1.20)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): je l’ai vu etc.: ‘I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library.’
aussitôt après: immediately after.
At the end of Flaubert’s novel poor Emma commits suicide by taking poison. Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess who is "fast ablaze" in the Night of the Burning Barn, has the same surname as Dr Larivière, a better doctor than Charles Bovary (Emma's husband) who comes too late and fails to save Emma's life.
Describing the suicide of his and Ada’s half-sister Lucette (who jumps into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff), Van mentions a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte (Lucette’s maid) had forgotten to pack:
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath. (3.5)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his childhood games with Yuri Rausch and mentions Louise Pointdexter's lorgnette that he found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary and Chekhov's Lady with the Lapdog (the Nabokovs' dachshund Box II was a grandson of Chekhov's Quina and Brom) who lost it on the pier at Yalta (to Marina's poor mad twin sister Aqua the place names Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive, 1.3):
With still more excitement did I read of Louise Pointdexter, Calhoun’s fair cousin, daughter of a sugar planter, “the highest and haughtiest of his class” (though why an old man who planted sugar should be high and haughty was a mystery to me). She is revealed in the throes of jealousy (which I used to feel so keenly at miserable parties when Mara Rzhevuski, a pale child with a white silk bow in her black hair, suddenly and inexplicably stopped noticing me) standing upon the edge of her azotea, her white hand resting upon the copestone of the parapet which is “still wet with the dews of night,” her twin breasts sinking and swelling in quick, spasmodic breathing, her twin breasts, let me reread, sinking and swelling, her lorgnette directed …
That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta. When Louise held it, it was directed toward the speckled shadows under the mesquites, where the horseman of her choice was having an innocent conversation with the daughter of a wealthy haciendado, Doña Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos (whose “head of hair in luxuriance rivalled the tail of a wild steed”). (Chapter Ten, 2)
VN and his cousin enact a scene (Maurice Gerald's duel with Cassius Calhoun) from Captain Mayn Reid's "Headless Horseman." On Demonia The Headless Horseman is a poem by Pushkin:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad (a Caucasian chieftain), is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
Napoleon is a character in Tolstoy's novel Voina i mir ("War and Peace," 1869). The Night of the Burning Barn evokes the Great Moscow Fire of 1812 (described by Tolstoy in his novel). Napoleon's first wife, Josephine Beauharnais brings to mind Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Van blinds with an alpenstock for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada (2.11). But Van does not realize that Ada (who wanted to spend the night with Van) has bribed Kim (a child or dwarf whom Van and Ada see from the library window) to set the barn on fire.