Two quotes from BB’s ADA Online:

 

4.24Raven: [  ] 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.   (Brian Boyd, Ada Online)

 

Jansy Mello: In his annotations, Brian Boyd connects E.A.Poe’s Raven and the refrain “Nevermore,” to Demon (Raven) Veen. 

If this should be true, then Demon could also be included among the incestuous characters (there are insinuations of his special affection for Ada in the novel - but very slight. The same is the case between Dan Veen and Lucette).

If I understand the associative field of the “ Nevermore” injunction, it indicates that something that actually took place once mustn’t ever be repeated.
Why focus only on Van and Ada? Why not consider Demon? Probing even further, why not check Demon’s or Marina’s ancestors (she recollects also some of the goings on between her brother Ivan and she, while suspecting the same for her two older children), i.e., one of the founding fathers of a clan?

A family tree based on documentation and not on actual facts, those related to incest and adultery, is a mockery, no? (There’s also an “antlered” ancestor clearly mentioned)

 

4.22Demon: [  ] 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)

 

Jansy Mello: Should we be speaking of the Veen father-son relationship (Demon and Van) I think the parallel I had been avoiding (about the Durmanov parents) needs to be brought up again in relation to demons and hell. Cf.below:
3.07-13: Tolstoy . . . Van’s maternal grandmother Daria (“Dolly”) Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of . . .  an American province . . . who had married, in 1824, Mary O’Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion: In view of the conjunction of the names “Tolstoy,” “Daria (‘Dolly’),” “Durmanov,” “Zemski” [  ] and the American theme, it seems worth noting, as Alexey Sklyarenko proposes (Nabokv-L, December 11, 2012), the connections between these names in Pushkin’s time [  ].Sklyarenko writes: “In his poem Tolstomu (1818) addressed to Count Tolstoy Amerikanets Vyazemski mentions myatezhnykh sklonnostey durman (the drug of rebellious inclinations) hurling Tolstoy iz raya v ad, iz ada v ray (from paradise to hell, from hell to paradise):” [  ]

 

 

 


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