I hope I can paste from BB’s Ada Online directly at the VN-L because it helps to reach more readily the motifs and other connections to what is being discussed.

Here I’m interested in exploring “demon’s blood” (not hereditary, it seems, but resulting from a blood transfusion and expressing a parody of Romanticism too). The “Durman” mentioned in another note (Cf. 3.07-13: ) echoes Satan’s “rebellious passions” and suggests “individualism,” but the context here is, perhaps, unrelated to the drug described by A.Sklyarenko in BB’s notes.

Jansy Mello

4.22: Demon: From the Greek, daimon, "a divinity," and Latin demon, "an evil spirit, a devil," a contrast in senses characteristic of Ada. His name derives principally from the hero of the long narrative poem Demon (begun 1828, last version completed 1841, pub. 1856) by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), and its derivatives in Russian culture, such as the three-act opera Demon (1871) by Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) (libretto by Pavel Viskovatov, 1842-1905), the series of paintings by Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) and the long poem Vozmezdie ("Retribution," 1911), by Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) (see Levinton 1997: 333-34 and Kurganov 2001: 92-95).[   ] Levinton also comments that in Blok's poem, "(also a 'family chronicle' in its own way) the nickname 'Demon' is constantly applied to the father of the Hero, right from the 'Foreword': 'In this family there is a certain "demon," the harbinger of "individualism." . . . The second chapter must be dedicated to the son of this "demon," the inheritor of his rebellious passions and painful falls, the unfeeling son of our age. . . . In the third chapter describes the death of the father, what happened to the formerly dazzling "demon," into what an abyss this < . . . > man fell' " (Levinton's italics). Kurganov 2001 makes a long but unconvincing case for the centrality of the demonology of the Hebrew apocrypha to Ada(and Lolita). MOTIF: demon.

4.23: Demian or Dementius: Cf. this exchange from The Waltz Invention, written 1938: "COLONEL: I beg your pardon, Your Demency, but I am only performing my plain duty. WALTZ: A sonorous title. From 'demon' or 'dementia'? You're rather a grim wit" (WI 74). Nabokov added Waltz's second sentence in the English translation in late 1965. MOTIF: insanity.

4.24: Raven: In allusion to his dark coloring, but also to "The Raven" (pub. 1845), the best-known poem of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the author most frequently alluded to in Lolita. Ll. 103-105 read: "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; / And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming." The famous refrain "Nevermore" may be applied to Demon's injunction to his children in Pt.2 Ch.11.

20.18: a strain of his father's demon blood: This "demon blood" is a commonplace of the Romantic era that Nabokov here gently parodies. Cf. EO, II, 152: "Byron endowed [the spleen] with a new thrill; [Chateaubriand's] René, [Constant's] Adolphe, [Senancour's] Oberman, and their cosufferers received a transfusion of daemon blood." MOTIF: demon.

20.19-20: not quite twenty . . . morbid trend: her fixation on Terra, in which her morbidity of mind first manifests itself, antedates her 1869 marriage to Demon by six years or so, though it is the marriage that tips her over into full-blown madness. 

I haven’t followd the other lead ( insanity, dementia or, as in Van and Ada Veen, perversions).