.A.S: "All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875... out of gratitude and curiousity 'Velvet' Veen traveled once - and only once - to the nearest floramor with his entire family - and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. (Ada, 2.3)
Maupassant's story La Maison Tellier (1881), set in a brothel, is dedicated to Ivan Turgenev... Bougival is the setting of Maupassant's Yvette (1884) and A. Dumas fils' novel La Dame aux Camélias (1848, adapted for the stage in 1852). "The lady of the camellias," Marguerite Gautier is a courtesan. Verdi's opera La traviata is based on Dumas's play.At the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday Marina ("poor old Traverdiata" who wants to go to Hollywood with her young lover, her children and Larivière-Monparnasse, Lucette's governess and novelist) sings the Green Grass aria...While Verdi comes from the Italian word for "green," trava is Russian for "grass."

Jansy Mello: I'm happy to learn about "Green grass" and a verdant "trava" in Russian. Until then I thought Nabokov's condensed wordplay (the name of the opera and the composer's name, all in one) was rather disappointing. "Via" means road,way, passage (Nabokov often refers to "viatic" in connection to these). The inserted "via" got doubly lost in "Traverdiata"...Now, I see that perhaps the emphasis lay in a courtesan's "trava...green grass."

Kevin Myer's "...And what saves sailors from those fell Lorelei, but the Stella Maris, the starlit sea-shell Venus? "- in connection to the Virgin birth in "Lolita", and my query about "Pale Fire's" conchologists, has an additional association.

Part of C.Kinbote's qualms results from his rejection of women and his inability to produce an heir (even fairy kings must have sexual intercourse with their queen to engender babies). However, we learn in HS that certain monocelular lives undergo "parthenogenesis" (another kind of "virgin birth"), as did the mythic giants and chtonic warriors who were sown on mother-earth from a dragon's teeth.

* T.S.Eliot Four Quartets: "Here the past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled,/Where action were otherwise movement/Of that which is only moved/And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic/Powers. And right action is freedom/From past and future also." ("The Dry Salvages",V)

John Shade Pale Fire: "Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:/ "Mother, what’s chtonic?" That, too, you’d explain,/ Appending: "Would you like a tangerine?"... You’d hesitate. And lustily I’d roar/ The answer from my desk through the closed door." (interesting: there's a trio, but the father's body lies behind a closed door)