JM: Without modern search-machines I'd never go after most hidden references, now easily explored through only a couple of clicks. It's an indirect way to have fun, explore authorial intentions and, in between, learn about world history, literature, geography, archeology, language, entomology ...aso (you can find routes into all these fields in Nabokov and, inspite of his playfulness, most are very consistent references).

There are puzzling moments, though. For example, after I searched through various "browns," I began to wonder about a certain "Eberthella Brown" found in "Ada" in the sentence: "From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van — who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers."

I could not get the spacial arrangement straight, innuendoes, connections.* I was sure I had already met this Eberthella in "Pale Fire" in relation to the sentence ("Even in Arcady am I," says Dementia, chained to her gray column)**: Indeed. It's the name of Mrs. Hurley, Eberthella H., or so it seems to me.

In "Lolita," an inserted "Bert" relates to H.Humbert's fantasy to disguise himself as a certain Mlle Humbert: "Let us adopt that deep-voiced D.P.," and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!"

* -In biology, there is the "Eberthella typhosa" ( bacteria described by German pathologist Karl Joseph Eberth).
In a report from the Smithsonian Institution, dated of 1944, linked to the announcement of a "universal microscope" and Rife's discovery, the following analogy is offered in relation to "bacteria": "They change, passing usually through several stages of growth, emerging finally as some entirely new entity - as different morphologically as are the caterpillar and the butterfly."

** - In the shoe-box with rejected note-cards for "Pale Fire" (recently brought up here) we find: "Not I, too, lived in Arcadia,' but 'I,' says Death, even am in Arcadia'-- Legend on a shepherd's tomb (Notes and Queries, June 13, 1868, p. 561)."
Death and Dementia are brought together after we read Kinbote's assertion that: "The ultimate destiny of madmen’s souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survives death and suddenly expands, bursts out as it were, in peals of healthy and triumphant laughter ..." (this must have happened to Hazel and also to various 'mad' poets...).
There's an interesting exchange about the legend (meaning and translation) in the correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson: it's worth recovering!

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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