168: February 15th: an unlucky day for Pnin, the protagonist in Nabokov’s novel, Pnin; incidentally February 15th is also his birthday. Pnin’s parallel is Dr. Olga Repnin in LATH, which is renowned as V.V.’s worst novel.
168: “She has changed…perceptual present”: V.V. is describing how his memory lags behind time, for though he had not seen Bel for five and a half years, he has a nymphetic image preserved in his memory. This sentence is also apparently a riff on the Texture of Time, which appears in Ada as Van’s most ambitious, though somewhat intentionally incomprehensible grand work.
168: 1953-1955: The years that are specially preserved in Vadim’s memory– that puts Bel between 11-13. Lolita was finished in 1953 and published in English in 1955. Lolita, when Humbert first meets her, is 12, the average of 11 and 13. Additionally, Van’s most extended and detailed accounts of Ada are of when she was between 11 and 13. This is but another example of self-reference and intertextuality.
168: “Contrast…kohl”: Bel reminds Vadim of his cousin Ada Bredow, with whom he spent one summer with as a youth. The key distinction between the lust in LATH and in Lolita is that Vadim is Bel’s biological father as opposed to Humbert. who is only a step-father. Vadim and Humbert, with their similarly double initials, and roles of father fall in line with the motif of doubles.
169: Serov’s Five-Petaled Lilac: Though no painting of that name exists Serov exists, the description put forth by V.V. corresponds directly to Serov’s Girl With Peaches, which resides in Moscow.
169: Hermitage Museum Leningrad: reference to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
169: “recurrent dream…guest room”: direct allusion to Lolita, specifically the scene where Humbert rapes Lolita. This hints that V.V. transcribes dreams and fantasy into novels, not that his novels are based on actual happenings.
170: “Annette’s terrible death”: a reference to Lolita; Charlotte Hayes dies tragically; Lolita and Bel are both apparently indifferent.
170: Quirn
170: Quirn’s best private school for young ladies: directly parallels Lolita’s all-girls’ school in a college town.
170: “…roaming all over the United States”: this mirrors the road trip that Humbert and Lolita take. It should be noted that Vadim does not, according to what we are told, have sex with Bel; his lust for her, however, is incessant. As is a theme in the book, Nabokov creates doppelgängers with only slight differences in behavioral tendencies or appearance.
170: Estes Park: unlike most of Humbert’s destinations with Lolita, is a real park within Rocky National Park.
170: violet ink: the medium for Bel’s poem on the back of a photo; a quote from Lolita: “She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past.” Vadim evokes Lolita with the color violet.
171: “what’s ‘artistic?'”: To which V.V. replies, “your poem, you, your way with words.” In Lolita Nabokov describes sex as the ancilla of art.
171:“so as to ward off “pneumonia””: a direct reference to the scene in Lolita in which H.H. has sex with a terribly sick Lolita; here Vadim puts his hands up Bel’s skirt in order to do away with illness–equally disgusting.
172: “It turned out to be only/ Médor, a dead dog”: Bel reads a poem to V.V. in bed which ends as such; this is a direct reference to A Dog’s Tale, a 1903 Mark Twain short story. I posit that this serves to speak to what a precocious child Bel is.