JM: Because I remembered Argentinian Borges (once dscribed by VN somewhat loosely in relation to "miniature minotaurs"), and his exceptional collection of Essays on Dante, this is where I set my focus. In his prologue to these essays Borges describes a magic tapestry in which everything, past present and future, is represented.Next he compares this "microcosm" to Dante's Divina Commedia, clearly bounded by Roman Catholicism and Ptolemaic astronomy. The Arcadian hypothesis ( as a recovered place, similar to a paradise with its apple and serpent, where one can mourn for forever-lost love) is mentioned in relation to Dante. * Borges' s chief emphasis, though, is on Dante's exceptional rendering of "details" and in his lectures we often can find views that are very closely related to Nabokov's own.

In another site (pangrammaticon.blogspot.com/2005/12/dantesque-simile-notes.html ) I gleaned this: "I've been putting together a list of what I think are synonyms for the literary correlate of this aesthetic moment.Pound's "luminous ideograms" and Wittgenstein’s "perspicuous presentations" are the ones I feel closest to.But their sense of detail is certainly matched in Nabokov’s "rain-sparkling crystograms" and Borges' "Dantesque essays".It is the imagined detail that is important[...] All of them talk about the importance of "detail" in the Divine Comedy (all of them also use Milton for contrast) [...].I picked up J. H. Whitfield's Dante and Virgil the other day...The dantesque simile," says Whitfield, "is in the main something which establishes identity, not something which enhances it" (p. 86)."( Thomas Basbøll). So, it seems that, independently of specific articles in English that find similarities bt. VN's art and Dante's Commedia, its seems that many critics and non-Nabokovian academics have dwelt on this issue.

In his annotations to Ada On-line we find B. Boyd's comments: 77.02-05: her lolita ( . . . little Andalusian gipsy . . . in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish “t,” not a thick English one): Darkbloom: “Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).”
The fiction of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) had been somewhat belatedly discovered in the English-speaking world in the 1960s, and during that decade and the next Nabokov and Borges, despite all their differences, were often compared on the basis of their ludically allusive metaphysical metafiction (see, for instance, J.D. O’Hara, “Shadows of a Shadow,” Texas Quarterly, Spring 1966, 19-21; cf. also 27.33-28.03n.). Asked in 1969 about critics who linked his work with Borges, Nabokov replied “They would do better to link . . . Borges with Anatole France” (SO 155). Since Nabokov found Borges rather limited (“At first Véra and I were delighted by reading him. We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house,” Time, May 23, 1969, p. 83), perhaps “Osberg” suggests cold (iceberg) or aridity (a mountain, German Berg, of bones, Latin os), or may allude to the so-called Oseberg ship--a Viking ship rediscovered in 1904 at a Norwegian farm of that name—and so evoke its role as a burial ship (see Rivers and Walker 271). For Osberg as the author of The Gitanilla, the Antiterran Lolita, see 27.33-28.03n. For a judgment on Borges via Osberg, see 344.09-11: “Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy-tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists).”

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*- Nathaniel Tharne: "Above all I found greatly moving Borge's attention to Dante's incurable sadness in relation to Beatrice. He thinks of her when seeing Paolo & Francesca together as he and Beatrice had never been. He recognizes that he loved her more than she loved him - if indeed she ever did - in the dream encounter of Purgatorio XXXII (indeed he may have dreamed the whole poem, Borges suggests, in order to engineer a re-encounter). He receives her smile at the end of Paradiso only to see her turn away from him forever. But Dante has gained the poem... " ( jacketmagazine.com/09/tarn-r-wein-borg.html ) Review of Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges; Eliot Weinberger (editor and translator),
Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine (translators), 1999, Viking Pr; ISBN: 0670849472

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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