In VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Other Books by the Narrator include A Kingdom by the Sea (1962), Vadim's novel that corresponds to VN's Lolita (1955). At the Orly airport on his way back from Leningrad Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in LATH) finds a copy of his novel:
I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of her leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf 12 1/2, creamy thigh 19 1/2, and Louise was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes. I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from the American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet--and preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book's art, the blurb on the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual plot of my Kingdom.
Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum for the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny to the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with the beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A state of affairs that looks at first blush--and "blush" is the right word--like a case of irresponsible perversion (described in brilliant detail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into a genuine dialogue of tender love. Garden's feelings are reciprocated by Ginny, the initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!] in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most rigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaotic course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken, the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliver and [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents from tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice. (5.3)
The title of Vadim's novel was borrowed from Annabel Lee (1849), E. A. Poe's last poem (alluded to in Lolita):
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
While Ginny (Bertram's ten-year-old sister) seems to hint at Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (1822-47), E. A. Poe's wife, Al Garden (the main character of Vadim's novel) makes one think of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).
Al Garden + paleo = Edgar Allan Poe
In VN's Lolita one of Humbert Humbert's great-grandfathers, a Dorset parson, was an expert in paleopedology (the discipline that studies soils of past geological eras, from quite recent, Quaternary, to the earliest periods of the Earth's history):
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)
In his story Eleonora (1842) E. A. Poe mentions the wind-harp of Æolus:
Thus far I have faithfully said. But as I pass the barrier in Time's path, formed by the death of my beloved, and proceed with the second era of my existence, I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mistrust the perfect sanity of the record. But let me on. — Years dragged themselves along heavily, and still I dwelled within the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass; but a second change had come upon all things. The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared no more. The tints of the green carpet faded; and, one by one, the ruby-red asphodels withered away; and there sprang up, in place of them, ten by ten, dark, eye-like violets, that writhed uneasily and were ever encumbered with dew. And Life departed from our paths; for the tall flamingo flaunted no longer his scarlet plumage before us, but flew sadly from the vale into the hills, with all the gay glowing birds that had arrived in his company. And the golden and silver fish swam down through the gorge at the lower end of our domain and bedecked the sweet river never again. And the lulling melody that had been softer than the wind-harp of Æolus, and more divine than all save the voice of Eleonora, it died little by little away, in murmurs growing lower and lower, until the stream returned, at length, utterly, into the solemnity of its original silence. And then, lastly, the voluminous cloud uprose, and, abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into the regions of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.
Btw., Pushkin called Karolina Sobańska (the elder sister of Ewelina Hańska, Balzac's wife) "Ellénore" (after a character in Benjamin Constant's novel Adolphe, 1816):
Chère Ellénore, permettez moi de vous donner ce nom qui me rappellent et [vos] [v] [et] [les charmes idéale] [une des femmes] et [mes] les lectures brulantes de mes jeunes années [et] [le phantome] [le p] et le doux phantome qui [n] me seduisoit alors, et [votre] [l’] [m] votre [e] propre éxistence si violente si [bouleversée par les passions] orageuse [si éloignée] [de votre des] [si éloignée de ce qu’] [si] [loin] si [elo] différente de ce qu’elle devoit être —
Chère Ellenore, [il fut un tems] [où votre voix votre regard] [m’enivroit] vous le savez [que] où j’ai subi toute votre puissance. [Si j’ai connu] [l’ivresse] [tout] [l’ abbattement] [des] [toute] [la stupide ivresse du malheur, c’est à vous que je la dois] c’est à vous que je dois d’avoir connu toute [la stupide ivresse de l’amour] ce [que l’ivresse] [de] l’amour a de plus convulsifs et de plus doul<oureux> — [vous] [connu tout ce qu’elle a de plus st <upide> et de plus stupide [n’a] [de tous les] ces [sentiments] [si convulsifs] [si] [douloureux] [il ne] et de tout cela il <ne> m’est resté [à me consoler] qu’ [un] une faiblesse de convalescent attachement, [que] bien doux, bien vrai, [et] et qu’un peu de [cette] crainte, [que] [je ne puis ne pas ressentir en présence d’un être aussi supérieur et malfaisant] qu’il m’est impossible de surmonter — (draft of a letter of Feb. 2, 1830)
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) had a long relationship with Madame de Staël (1766-1817). VN completed Lolita in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. Mona Dahl (Lolita's friend at Beardsley College) asks Humbert to tell her about Ball Zack:
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that shcool year. In the meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I enteretain Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps - could I be mistaken? - a faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke - I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was -? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona’s cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrivedand slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position - a knight’s move from the top - always strangely disturbed me. (2.9)