Brian Boyd, in The Nabokovian, 72 (2014) compares the lines describing "black hot humid night" in ADA and compares them to two lines in "Lolita"...and one in "Pale Fire"(90) by CK "It was a hot, black, blustery night."He quotes: 250.03-05 "It was - to continue the novelistic structure - a long, joyful, delicious dinner [...]out of the black hot humid night.";250.27 It was a black hot humid night in mid-July, 1888... My attention was drawn by Brian's reference to "to continue the novelistic structure" related to this dramatic nightly setting. I remembered Charles Schulz's Snoopy satirical variations for a similar "purple" sentence in a novel ("It was a dark and stormy night") [...] an often-mocked and parodied phrase written by English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. The phrase is considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing," also known as purple prose.
Probably there's another reference related to Note 250.27. [The missing quotes in the former L-message are: SoVn376: “On a hot day in mid-June”; Lolita: “in the monstrously hot and humid night”(148);“It was a black warm night…” (283)]
in Note 258.01-05: “Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night-:”
BB’s commentary: “Parody of nineteenth-century novelistic narration.”
How would the month of July, concerning novelistic parodies, be significant, as indicated in “Ada” and in “Pale Fire” (Summer being less clearly in the other quotes) ?
In Brian’s “Afternote” he takes up a commentary by Bozovic (“Demon experiences ‘that complete collapse of the past,’ when ‘the human part of one’s affection’ for an old lover vanishes with ‘the dust of inhuman passion” . How similarly Marcel mourns the collapse of memories, his past selves, and the vanished house of Combray; how exaggeratedly Proustian too is Demon’s ardor…”(96) and adds: “Demon’s sense of ‘the complete collapse of the past’(251) in I.38 almost prefigures the sense of physical and emotional distance from Ada that Van intends to maintain after he flees from her infidelities and Ardis.”
I would like to relate Brian’s comment to another one he made before(82), concerning 261.32:Partir c’est mourir un peu… Brian situates the quote “in the opening line of ‘Rondel de l’adieu’ (1890), by French poet and song-writer Edmond Haraucourt [ ] The next line in the poem is “C’est mourir à ce qu”on aime” (“It is to die to what one loves”)”.
And also to a future event, already mentioned in 244.23. Namely, “this created a vacuum into which rushed a multitude of trivial reflections.”(294.16-18)
Proust’s collapse of memories or, who knows, Nabokov’s own concerning his feelings for Irina Guadagnini. I won’t even try to find where I read it (it must have been in VN’s collected letters)but V.Nabokov showed a particular insensitivity to the pecuniary hardships his former love was enduring when he refused to comply to a friend’s suggestion that he should help her out of her troubles. He must have had to cope with a lot of financial proposals and I’m not wondering about his refusal but his harsh reply.