By that last smiley, I was suggesting that Tolstoy was unmistakably alluding to the scene early in Mansfield Park in which Sir Thomas Bertram discuss with the odious Mrs. Norris the danger of Sir Thomas's son Edmund one day falling in love with his mousy niece Fanny Price:

"....He thought of his own four children, of his two sons, of cousins in love, etc.;—but no sooner had he deliberately begun to state his objections, than Mrs. Norris interrupted him with a reply to them all, whether stated or not.  "My dear Sir Thomas, I perfectly comprehend you, and do justice to the generosity and delicacy of your notions, which indeed are quite of a piece with your general conduct; and I entirely agree with you in the main as to the propriety of doing everything one could by way of providing for a child one had in a manner taken into one's own hands; and I am sure I should be the last person in the world to withhold my mite upon such an occasion. Having no children of my own, who should I look to in any little matter I may ever have to bestow, but the children of my sisters?—and I am sure Mr. Norris is too just—but you know I am a woman of few words and professions. Do not let us be frightened from a good deed by a trifle. Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody. A niece of ours, Sir Thomas, I may say, or at least of yours, would not grow up in this neighbourhood without many advantages. I don't say she would be so handsome as her cousins. I dare say she would not; but she would be introduced into the society of this country under such very favourable circumstances as, in all human probability, would get her a creditable establishment. You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that, of all things upon earth, that is the least likely to happen, brought up as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters? It is morally impossible. I never knew an instance of it. It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connexion. Suppose her a pretty girl, and seen by Tom or Edmund for the first time seven years hence, and I dare say there would be mischief. The very idea of her having been suffered to grow up at a distance from us all in poverty and neglect, would be enough to make either of the dear, sweet-tempered boys in love with her. But breed her up with them from this time, and suppose her even to have the beauty of an angel, and she will never be more to either than a sister."

  After sending that post, I was curious to see whether I had overlooked any other scholar who might have noted that allusion to Mansfield Park by Tolstoy ---and guess what? I found out (ironically from Google leading me to an exchange a few years back here in the archives of Nabokov-L that I was involved in, but that I had entirely forgotten!) that there WAS a scholar who saw it first, and that scholar's name was............Vladimir Nabokov!: 

"In his notes to Ada, Brian Boyd identifies a series of references to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). Some of these references are direct (...);some less direct(...); and some quite covert: Marina's warning to Van that "cousinage dangereux voisinage" (232) echoes Sir Thomas Bertram's concern early in Mansfield Park (...) Nabokov, who taught Manfield Park in his European literature course at Cornell, clearly treats the love of Fanny Price for her cousin Edmund as a precedent for Ada's story of a love between cousin/siblings. But what kind of a precedent is it?"

So, now, today, putting all the pieces together, I know not only that Tolstoy alluded to the incest theme in Mansfield Park, but I also now know that Nabokov knew it, too, but chose to show that he knew it by his allusion in Ada! And as I will post within the next few weeks, I recently found ANOTHER covert allusion by Nabokov to War & Peace in ANOTHER work of fiction by Nabokov---Laughing in the Dark!

Cheers, ARNIE

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