Alexey Sklyarenko [to JMhe is
mentioned as "Charles" Chateaubriand - and I wonder
why ] points out that as"Darkbloom comments on it in his
"Notes": "she [Ada who liked crossing orchids] crosses here two French
authors, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand".
JM:
Thank you for the clarification about the crossing of Baudelaire and
Chateaubriand.
In the internet I found an article
on Baudelaire et la tradition de
l'allégorie (Patrick
Labarthe, 1999) and, through it, the mixture in "Charles
Chateaubriand" can be better understood when we
follow its description aboaut Baudelaire's profound admiration
of Chateaubriand's "great school of melancholy" and "love of death".
One sentence (from the
internet extract) caught my attention: Baudelaire had to fight
"against a Chateaubriand he carried in his heart," in much the same
vein in which I often find Nabokov fighting, in his
heart, against great romantics, revolutionaries and religious
authors.
Chateaubriand's works "Les Aventures du dernier
Abencerage" and "Atala" are distortedly mentioned, by name, in
"Ada."
In "RLSK" we find V.'s insistent reference to
Sebastian Knight's "dandyism" (similar to Chateaubriand's); in "Pale Fire,"
Hazel's notes about the wandering light may not only indicate the
"Atalanta" butterfly (and myth), but also Chateaubriand's "Atala." (Nabokov
set Hazel's words differently in French, didn't he? )
There is a treasure of discoveries for those who
are familiar with French literature. And yet, I doubt it that Nabokov would have
excluded important clues from his readers in English by offering them
exclusively to those familiar with French culture. Their
"overlapping," though, may still hold some thrilling surprises (if
they've not already been explored by the French Nabokovians...)