Anyone interested in Ada
is urged to visit Ada Online: it includes the text of the novel and professor Boyd's annotations. The site is accurate, beautifully organized, rich with insight and information, and is in every regard everything this particular page is not--which is to say that Ada Online is not
A monstrous, incomplete, and (most likely) inaccurate log of the literature found in Nabokov’s glorious
Ada. For the serious footwork you have Professor Brian Boyd to thank -- I’ve used his endnotes from the Library of America edition of Ada (as well as Nabokov’s Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to Ada). All mistakes are, of course, mine. Corrections and comments and clues are
welcome.
I eventually hope to have hypertext links to all the works and authors on the table. ADA doesn't need this kind of context, by the way, but it comes in handy for a second or third reading. Page numbers refer to the Library of America edition. Asterisks point to double or triple puns or jokes made by Nabokov. I'll select a brief quote from the novel to illustrate the reference, but that won't happen for a while. Also, I've excluded multiple allusions to a poem or novel, limiting myself to one for illustration purposes (for more, look to Brian Boyd's notes for the Library of America edition or buy his excellent
Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness).
Allusions to paintings, magazine articles, and songs are not listed.
Bracketed titles are either not yet in the Public Domain or they could not be found on-line, but they can be purchased from
Amazon.Com.
- Tolstoy
- T.S. Eliot
- Jules Verne
- Robert Lowell's translation of
- Mandelshtam's "No I won't hide behind the great nonsense"
- Housman
- Charles Dickens
- Jorge Guillen
- Descanso en Jardin
- El Otono: Isla)
- Tennyson
- "Guinevere"
- "Lady Clara Vere de Vere"
- Boris Pasternak
- Comtesse de Segur
- Marcel Proust
- Rimbaud
- Pascal
- Borges (as Osberg)
- Maupassant
- Turgenev
- Baudelaire
- Chautebriand
- Flaubert
- John Updike
- Henry Miller
- Sergey Aksakov
- Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson
- Marvell
- Pushkin
- Eugene Onegin
- The Stone Guest
- Bronze Horseman
- Mayn Reid
- Lermontov
- Chekhov
- H.G. Wells
- Edmond Rostand
- Kingsley Amis (as Sig Leymanski)
- Dostoevsky
- Shakespeare
- Eugene O'Neill
- Thomas Mann
- St. Augustine
- Henry James
- Lord Byron
- Ovid
- Verlaine
- "Clair de Lune"
- "Chanson d'automne"
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Nabokov
- Lolita
- "Spring in Fialta"
- "The Vane Sisters"
- Pale Fire
- Speak, Memory
- James Joyce
- Bourget
- Anatole-Henri-Philippe Segur
- Moliere
- Francois Coppee
- October Morning
- The Vigil
- Sir Richard Burton
- Robert Browning
- "Memorabilia"
- "My Last Duchess"
- Abbe Jacques Delille
- The Three Natural Kingdoms
- Maeterlinck
- Pierre Louys
- Giovanni Casanova
- Alexander Pope
- Goethe
- The Sorrows of Young Werther
- James Gould Cozzens
- Saul Bellow
- Herman Melville
- Seneca
- Omnia tempus edax depascitur; omnia carpit
- John William Dunne
- Swinburne
- "Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs"
- Immanuel Kant
- Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
- Andre Malraux
- Man's Fate or Man's Estate
- William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick
- Herondas (or Herodas, Herodes)
- Madelaine de Scudery
- Carte de Tendre -- Clelie
- Spenser
- Victor Hugo
- Glinka
- John Collins Bossidy
- "On the Aristocracy of Harvard"
- Comte de Lautreamont
- Henry Moore
- Virgil
- Samuel Alexander
- William James
- The Principles of Psychology
- Jean Guyeau
- La Genese de l'Idee de Temps
- G.J. Whitrow
- The Natural Philosophy of Time
- John Locke
- Paul Langevin
- "L'Evolution de l'espace et du temps"
- Alfred North Whitead
- Jonathan Swift
- Stephane Mallarme
- "L'Apres-Midi d'un faune"
- Apollon Grigoriev