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Vladimir Nabokov et la France

 | 
Yannicke Chupin
, 
Agnès Edel-Roy
, 
Monica Manolescu
, 
et al.

II. Intertextes français

Nabokov, Perrault, and Tales of Long Ago

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Testo integrale

  • 1 In his Lectures on Literature (5), Nabokov describes a writer’s functions as entertaining, teaching (...)
  • 2 Nabokov sometimes called such stories “nursery tales”: a convenient term, because it not only ackno (...)
  • 3 The play’s structure and chronology correlate not only with Old Perrault’s death, but also with the (...)

1The Waltz Invention, a play that Nabokov wrote in Paris in 1938, includes a figure named “Old Perrault” whom others recall “reciting his wonderful fairy-tales.” Old Perrault is not a character, exactly: he fails to appear among the Dramatis Personae (Waltz Invention, 3), does not participate in the action, and is mentioned only in passing. Even so, he seems integral to the play’s structure and chronology. He dies the night before it begins (18-19); his funeral takes place offstage during the second act (59); and he is probably the unnamed person who is described, in the first act’s final lines, as “an old enchanter”—Nabokov’s term for masters of literary craft—“who lived” on a nearby mountain “once upon a time” (37).1 “Old Perrault” clearly refers to Charles Perrault, who popularized the fairy tale by adapting stories from the French oral tradition.2 Nabokov often invokes folklore, fairy tales, and fantasies in his fiction; he appropriates the names of authors of such tales, too, from “Hoffman Street” (“A Nursery Tale,” 169) to “Grimm Road” (Lolita, 202). In this case, however, Nabokov not only mentions Perrault by name but also portrays him as an ancient storyteller, gone but not forgotten, who is mysteriously connected to a work’s overall design.3

  • 4 For the first English translation by Robert Samber, see Opie et al.
  • 5 One indication of Perrault’s influence: when the Grimms gathered German folktales for their book Ki (...)

2Why was Charles Perrault, in particular, so significant to Nabokov? Besides depicting the author himself in The Waltz Invention, Nabokov alludes in other works to the tales that Perrault published in 1697 as Histoires ou Contes du temps passé: Avec des Moralités. Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, which later became known in English, more simply, as The Tales of Mother Goose.4 Nabokov focuses on four of the eight stories: “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (or “Little Red Riding Hood”), “La Belle au bois dormant” (“Sleeping Beauty”), “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”), and “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella”).5 Despite the innumerable variants, versions, and revisions of these tales, Nabokov usually cites them as told by Perrault. Indeed, he addresses specific aspects—their French origin, their translation from French into English, their French titles, the characters’ French names, and their later illustration by French artist Gustave Doré—that reflect the tales’ appearance in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé.

3There are several possible reasons for Nabokov’s fascination. Perrault is an important figure, of course, due to his influence in seventeenth-century French literary circles—he initiated the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, advocating the superiority of modern culture—as well as his role in establishing the fairy-tale genre. Besides, compared to other authors who adapted or imitated folktales, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault offers a playfully elegant, ironic sensibility close to Nabokov’s own. Nabokov would have been familiar with Perrault, too, from his studies in Medieval and Modern French at Cambridge. He wrote more than one final examination essay set during Perrault’s heyday, and once told a girlfriend that he was working hard reading volumes of seventeenth-century French literature (Boyd, 1990, 183, 186, 194). I believe, however, that neither Perrault nor his tales were essential to Nabokov for their own sake. Instead, they were deeply woven into the innermost fibers of his imagination because he encountered them as a child.

I. Hearing the Tales of Perrault

4It is not clear just when in his multilingual childhood Nabokov became aware of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. In his autobiography, he explains that he initially associated such tales with the English language. He recounts how his mother read to him after dinner from picture books, nursery tales, and adventure stories in English (Speak, Memory, 81). He also remembers trailing along a beach after Miss Norcott, the third in a “bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses,” at age five while repeating to himself, “in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word ‘childhood,’ which sound[ed] mysterious and new, and bec[ame] stranger and stranger as it g [ot] mixed up in [his] small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunchbacked fairies” (Speak, Memory, 26). Obsessively chanting a word that evoked the stories he had been told suggests that such tales resonated, for him, with the power of spoken language.

5In a 1981 interview, Nabokov’s wife and son cited this passage when paraphrasing his notes on how he discovered literature: “he says that the first stories he remembers were English fairy tales,” and “that he mentions those tales in Speak, Memory” (Véra and Dmitri Nabokov, 78). Two of the tales he mentions—“Robin Hood” and “Little Red Riding Hood”—can be identified by their title characters. One is indeed a famous English folk hero, but the other is the equally famous protagonist of Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” which Nabokov must have heard in translation. It is harder to trace the “brown hoods of old hunchbacked fairies” to a specific source. Even so, another of Perrault’s tales features just such a character: the wizened, misshapen fairy whom the king and queen forget to invite to their daughter’s christening in “La Belle au bois dormant.” Nabokov’s autobiography later alludes to this tale, using its English title, when he compares hidden places among “the winding paths” of his memory to the uncharted areas on old maps known as “sleeping beauties” (Speak, Memory, 136).

  • 6 In response to an interviewer’s query about which language he found most beautiful, Nabokov answere (...)

6Although Nabokov may have first heard Perrault’s tales in English, at some point he encountered them in their original language. It seems most likely that they were recited in French by Cécile Miauton—the Nabokovs’ Swiss governess, dubbed “Mademoiselle” in Speak, Memory, who arrived when he was six. Mademoiselle would read classic French texts aloud to her charges for hours each afternoon once the day’s lessons were over. Indeed, Nabokov’s affectionate portrait of her in Speak, Memory— which includes her obesity, her deafness, her loneliness, her self-pity, and her tendency to exaggerate—focuses on how beautifully she read aloud. In a series of sonorous English phrases that imitate the trill of a French r, Nabokov praises “the rare purity of her rhythmic voice” (Speak, Memory, 106), remembers how “that pearly language of hers purled and scintillated,” and notes that the sounds of words she recited in French still influence him: “something of her tongue’s limpidity and luster has had a singularly bracing effect upon me, like those sparkling salts that are used to purify the blood” (Speak, Memory, 113).6 Although he doesn’t specifically mention Mademoiselle reading from Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, he remarks of the French literature to which she introduced him and his siblings: “We got it all” (Speak, Memory, 105). She would have certainly included Perrault’s tales when introducing French classics to children, especially because his literary period—the seventeenth century—was her favorite (Hamrit).

  • 7 The family probably also owned a copy of Perrault’s tales in translation, but the catalogue does no (...)
  • 8 See, for example, two editions currently available in English: Perrault’s Popular Tales and Perraul (...)

7It is impossible to know which edition of the tales Mademoiselle would have used, since Nabokov’s family possessed at least two copies of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, according to a catalogue of his father’s library (Vladimir Dmitrievič Nabokov, 19).7 Circumstantial evidence suggests, however, that it was Les Contes de Perrault, illustrated by Gustave Doré and first published in 1862. This book was continually reprinted after its initial publication, and even today collections of Perrault’s tales are often accompanied by Doré’s engravings.8 The family owned a copy of Les Contes de Perrault published in 1893 (Vladimir Dmitrievič Nabokov, 19). Indeed, Nabokov’s allusions to the tales indicate that he knew Doré’s images and identified them with Perrault’s text.

  • 9 Here Nabokov recalls another children’s book that Mademoiselle read aloud: Les Malheurs de Sophie, (...)

8Ellen Handler Spitz explains, in the opening chapter of Inside Picture Books, that good children’s literature is more meaningful when read aloud by an attentive reader and accompanied by richly evocative images. Children’s minds are so receptive that words and sounds and pictures become saturated with significance, and can be recalled in incredible detail half a century later. Spitz herself still remembers “the cadences and inflections, the lilt and verve, of [her mother’s] special reading voice. Nuanced and expressive, it pronounced each word slowly and distinctly and lingered lovingly over syllables and phrases” (Spitz, 1). She also remembers the vividness and emotional intensity of certain illustrations (Spitz, 15). Listening to nursery tales must have had a similar effect on Nabokov, given his account of blissfully intoning a single word as if, by repeating it, he could recreate the feeling of being told such a story. Hearing a familiar tale read, in another language, by a gifted storyteller like Mademoiselle must have been a powerful experience. Viewing Doré’s illustrations at the same time would have further heightened the tale’s impact, considering that artist’s ability to encapsulate verbal narratives within visual images, using a pivotal moment—such as Bluebeard offering his wife the key to his forbidden chamber—to evoke the characters, action, structure, and theme of an entire tale (Le Men, 17-39). The combined effect of such verbal, visual, and aural information would be especially intense for a child whose synesthesia allowed him to perceive connections between sounds and colors; whose multilingual “extraterritoriality,” in George Steiner’s sense, gave him a rich understanding of relationships between words and meanings (Steiner, 119-127); and whose memory was unusually keen. Indeed, the recollection of Mademoiselle reading aloud became more poignant in retrospect, after Nabokov’s subsequent experiences of loss and displacement, because it evoked a long-ago time when it seemed that “Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die” (Speak, Memory, 77).9

II. Overhearing Perrault in Nabokov’s Tales

  • 10 Vladimir Nabokov, “Mademoiselle O” (1936), in Stories, 480-93. Nabokov first wrote about Mademoisel (...)

9Nabokov alluded to nursery tales in his fiction from the beginning, especially in early works like “A Nursery Tale” (1926) and Glory (1932). After writing The Waltz Invention in 1938, however, he began to cite Perrault’s tales more frequently. Perhaps reading them aloud to his son, who was born in 1934, prompted him to ponder their significance and explore it in his writing; the experience of raising Dmitri often left such traces in his stories and novels. Perhaps he was contemplating his own childhood, too, in preparation for what would become his 1951 memoir, Conclusive Evidence (which eventually metamorphosed into Speak, Memory). By this point, in fact, Nabokov had already composed the first installment of that memoir: a tribute to “Mademoiselle O,” written in French and published in Paris in 1936.10 No doubt living in France had rekindled his memories of Mademoiselle and the French stories of his childhood. Perhaps his efforts to establish a literary career in English, in order to leave wartime Paris for England or the United States, also led him to draw on works of children’s literature that English readers were likely to know as well. After all, his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight—which he composed in 1938, after translating Kamera Obscura into English—not only features a Swiss governess like Mademoiselle, who urges the narrator to make his book “a fairy-tale with Sebastian for prince” (23), but also mentions an English nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (72), and a British mythical creature, the brownie (86). For whatever reason, it is clear that in the late 1930s Nabokov began to allude to Perrault’s tales more often, even as he was leaving behind the name “Sirin” and its associations with Russian, not French or English, folklore.

10Nabokov’s fiction evokes “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” “La Belle au bois dormant,” “La Barbe bleue,” and “Cendrillon,” in particular. Critics have already glossed some of these individual references, but no one has noticed that they form a recurrent pattern alluding to Perrault’s tales, to their origin in the French oral tradition, and to Doré’s illustrations. Nabokov represents each tale by focusing on a single climactic episode, often exactly as depicted in Doré’s engravings: the Wolf in bed with Little Red Riding Hood; the prince approaching the bed where the sleeping princess lies; Bluebeard being slaughtered by his wife’s brothers; Cinderella’s lost slipper. At the same time, he uses multilingual puns, Gallicisms, onomastics, and other wordplay to incorporate the sound of spoken French into nearly every allusion. Indeed, the mere thought of these tales seems connected, in Nabokov’s imagination, with the French language.

  • 11 See Dmitri Nabokov, 100, 116; Gennady Barabtarlo, 1991, 94; and my essay, 2003, 33-34.

11This pattern becomes clear if one examines allusions to each tale, in turn, in fictions that came after The Waltz Invention. One of Nabokov’s last Russian works, “The Enchanter”—a novella set in France and composed in Paris in 1939, but published only after his death—evokes nursery tales in general and “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” in particular. As several readers have shown, Perrault’s tale plays a central role in the protagonist’s fantasies about his orphaned stepdaughter.11 The Enchanter pictures himself as a “lone wolf” who will “don Granny’s nightcap” and lure the child into bed (The Enchanter, 67); later, he “lick[s] his chops” while entering their hotel room (85). His reference to “Granny’s nightcap,” in particular, recalls Doré’s illustration of this tale [Figure 1], where the Wolf, wearing the grandmother’s beribboned white sleeping cap—which appears nowhere in Perrault’s text—nestles in bed beside the apprehensive little girl (Doré, 1862, xv). When the Enchanter tries to enact this fantasy by fondling his sleeping stepdaughter, however, she screams. Panicking, he knocks over a bedside lamp with a “reddish” shade, scarcely noticing as it “scamper[s] off with its red cowl” (The Enchanter, 87, 92). He then rushes into the hotel corridor where he hears, behind a nearby door, “a melodious voice [that seems] to be finishing a nursery tale (Mr. White-Tooth in the bed, the hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles)” (93).

Figure 1: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (“Oh, Granny, your teeth are tremendous in size!'/'They're to eat you!'—and he ate her!”), 1865, wood engravings, 23.5 x 26.5 cm., published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).

  • 12 Cf. “The Little Red Riding Hood” (Opie et al., 97).

12Nabokov thus juxtaposes the protagonist’s grotesque reenactment of “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” with the ending of this very tale, recited to another child in another room. That the Enchanter overhears the tale emphasizes its source in the French oral tradition. Indeed, the phrase “Mr. White-Tooth in the bed” refers to the climactic moment when the Wolf reveals his true nature to the little girl, not only saying that he will consume her with his large teeth but also conveying this information in a calland-response structure typical of oral tales: “Ma mère-grand que vous avez de grandes dents; c’est pour te manger” (Perrault, 1888, 22).12 Meanwhile, the invisible storyteller’s “melodious voice,” as the Enchanter perceives it, recalls Mademoiselle’s sparkling delivery and rhythmic intonation when reading aloud, as described in Speak, Memory. The tale is even being recited in French, because the Enchanter notices the repeated phrase “chaperon rouge.” In a remarkable feat of narration, however, Nabokov suggests that the Enchanter hears those French syllables as Russian words, which in his fear and shame he misconstrues as referring not to the little girl but to hunters pursuing the Wolf: “brat’ja s šapron-ruž’jami” (“Volšebnik,” 41). Dmitri Nabokov’s skillful translation approximates the sense of the Russian text while punning, in turn, on the English title of Perrault’s tale: “hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles” (The Enchanter, 93; my emphasis). In several ways, then, Nabokov’s allusions to “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” accentuate its origin as an oral folktale.

  • 13 On nursery tales in Lolita, see Appel, Jr., 345n-347n; Jones, 269-83; and Collins, 77-100.
  • 14 On this illustration, see my essay, 2008, 42, 48-49.

13Because The Enchanter was the “prototype” of Lolita, as Nabokov himself points out (“On a Book Entitled Lolita,” 311), it makes sense to turn now to that 1955 novel. Lolita alludes to comics and other narratives for children; to classic works of children’s literature like Treasure Island (Lolita, 184); and to well-known nursery tales, including “Beauty and the Beast” (Lolita, 59), “The Little Mermaid” (Lolita, 174), and at least two tales by Perrault.13 The novel frequently refers to “La Belle au bois dormant,” in particular (Sweeney, 1999, 111-26). Allusions to this tale appear throughout Humbert’s fantasies about nymphets—especially those about ogling or fondling drowsy little girls—and multiply as he takes his orphaned stepdaughter to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, tricks her into swallowing a sedative, and locks her in their room until she passes out. His vision of Dolores when he returns to the hotel room closely resembles one of Doré’s engravings for “La Belle au bois dormant,” in which the prince—in the foreground, with his back to the viewer—approaches the illuminated bed where the slumbering princess lies [Figure 2] (Doré, 1862, 17).14

  • 15 The title also suggests “La Belle Dormeuse,” attributed to Charles Rivière Dufresny and cited in th (...)

14Soon afterwards, Humbert muses, “She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule” (Lolita, 129). Alfred Appel Jr. claims that Humbert is comparing the scene to a fictitious eighteenth-century engraving (Appel, 381n). I argue, however, that Nabokov has Doré’s actual nineteenth-century engraving in mind. Indeed, Humbert’s imaginary French title—like the Enchanter’s earlier misreading of the words “chaperon rouge”—both alludes to Perrault’s tale and misconstrues it, in keeping with a protagonist’s distorted perceptions and projections. In this case, “La Petite Dormeuse,” or the sleeping little girl, recalls the heroine of “La Belle au bois dormant,” but Humbert’s designation focuses on her youth rather than her beauty.15 Similarly, the phrase “l’Amant Ridicule,” or the ridiculous lover, echoes Humbert’s earlier description of himself as “a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming” (Lolita, 109)—a stock name for storybook heroes that originated in seventeenth-century French fairy tales by Perrault and others. Nabokov’s allusions to both “La Belle au bois dormant” and Doré’s illustration of the tale, thus, cunningly incorporate alternative titles, in French, that redefine the roles played by prince and princess.

Figure 2: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “La Belle au bois dormant” (“Sleeping Beauty”), 1865, wood engravings, 19 x 24cm, published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).

  • 16 One explanation fot the novel's “Bearded Woman” theme may be that “beard” has a feminine gender in (...)

15Lolita also cites another of Perrault’s tales: “La Barbe bleue.” At first, references to this tale appear only in passing: a woman named “Miss Beard” (126), a “Bearded Woman” in an advertisement for Burma Shave shaving cream (158), “Beardsley College for women” (173),16 an Assyrian man with a “blue-black beard” (169). Such intimations become more explicit, however, when Humbert, visiting Dolores in the hospital, is caught by a nurse reaching for an envelope on her breakfast tray. (This incident recalls the earlier scene where Dolores’s mother discovers an incriminating diary that Humbert keeps locked in a drawer, with the key hidden beneath his safety razor—just as Bluebeard’s wife, in Perrault’s story, finds evidence of his sinister proclivities in another locked compartment.)

Figure 3: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “La Barbe-Bleue” (“Blaubart”), 1865, wood engravings, 21 x 24cm, published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).

  • 17 Cf. “The Blue Beard” (Opie et al., 109).
  • 18 There is a Basque version of “Bluebeard,” but no evidence that it predates Perrault; see “The Cobbl (...)

16Nurse Lore—whose title and surname neatly allude to the genre of nursery tales (Lolita, 245)—tells Humbert that the letter is hers, and that her “sister Ann” works at the hotel whose crest appears on the envelope. “Those brutal brothers. Poor Bluebeard,” Humbert thinks (Lolita, 243), apparently recalling a call-and-response sequence in “La Barbe bleue” in which Bluebeard’s wife repeatedly asks her sister to seek help from their brothers: “Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?” (Perrault, 1888, 27-28).17 After several negative replies, Anne finally reports that she sees horsemen in the distance; they turn out to be the brothers, who arrive in time to slay Bluebeard before he murders his wife. Indeed, Doré’s final illustration for “La Barbe bleue” [Figure 3] depicts them savagely running the ogre through with their swords (Doré, 1862, 65). Apparently, Humbert pities Bluebeard for his death at the brothers’ hands—just as the protagonist of The Enchanter, perhaps conflating this tale with “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” worries about the Wolf being killed by another set of brothers. Although Nabokov never identifies “La Barbe bleue” by its French title in Lolita, he embeds the allusion to Bluebeard’s ultimate fate amid so many Gallicisms on Humbert’s part—such as calling the letter “a bill, not a billet-doux”—that Dolores says, “Do you mind very much cutting out all the French? It annoys everybody” (Lolita, 243). It certainly annoys Nurse Lore, who is not French but Basque.18 In addition, Nabokov stresses the tale’s origins as a French folktale through the names of minor characters, from “Miss Beard” and “Nurse Lore” to “Ann.”

  • 19 See Adam Oberfrank, Jr., 38-54. Oberfrank argues that Nabokov’s works reveal “a Cinderella motif, b (...)

17Lolita alludes indirectly to “Cendrillon,” too, when Dolores loses her slipper—as Perrault’s heroine does—during an encounter with Humbert early in the novel (59). The same motif appears in Pale Fire (1962), when Kinbote refers to a Zemblan sculptor who used “Cinderella’s slipper” to help him find the perfect model (108). Indeed, Nabokov mentions “Cendrillon” in most of his English novels, up to and including Ada.19 He may have felt that this tale offered an unusually rich and accessible subtext for American readers, especially after Disney’s popular 1950 film adaptation, which appeared as he was writing Lolita. At any rate, he began alluding to “Cendrillon” in his fiction soon after arriving in the United States.

18In Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel he wrote in America, Nabokov describes Adam Krug’s servant, Mariette, as “Cinderella, the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream, always ivory pale and tired after last night’s ball” (138). Although this novel doesn’t identify “Cendrillon” as French, it assigns a French name to the character associated with the tale. More important, in keeping with the novel’s extended meditation on the difficulties of literary translation, Bend Sinister refers to the theory that when Perrault adapted “Cendrillon” from an oral source, he mistakenly rendered the heroine’s slippers as being made of verre, glass, instead of vair, fur. When Krug is invited to choose among an assortment of footgear, for example, he discovers “a girl’s tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur” (140); whenever Mariette does housework, she wears “old bedroom slippers trimmed with dirty fur” (158); and the narrator associates other items of her apparel—a pair of slippers and a fur coat—with the revelation of “Cin,” her secret nickname (205, 207).

19The mysterious connection that links together the disparate Cinderella, glass, slipper, squirrel, and fur themes in Bend Sinister is elucidated in a subsequent novel, Pnin (1957).

  • 20 On the novel’s Cinderella and squirrel motifs, see Gennady Barabtarlo, 1989.

20Nabokov’s title character, a professor conducting research on this very topic, observes that “Cendrillon’s shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur—vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïly, columbine, shade” (Pnin, 158).20 Perrault’s original mistake, in wrongly transcribing a single word of spoken French, thus becomes a poignant metaphor for what Pnin left behind in migrating from one country, culture, and language to another. Pnin’s losses are somewhat redeemed, however, by a marvelous gift from his ex-wife’s son: a crystal bowl, both delicate and resilient, whose “greenish-blue tint” evokes “Cinderella’s glass shoes” (Pnin, 158).

  • 21 Oberfrank, “New Worlds,” argues that each female character in Ada takes her turn as Cinderella. See (...)
  • 22 As Boyd points out at ADAonline, the word “miniver”—denoting white or grayish fur trim—provides a m (...)
  • 23 Doré also depicts the slipper being placed on Cinderella’s foot (1862, 28).

21Nabokov further develops this theme in Ada (1969). Several critics have already traced the novel’s allusions to “Cendrillon,” which often address the tale’s French origins.21 Many of these allusions focus, again, on the ambiguous rendering of Cinderella’s footgear, ranging from Ada’s “glossy black Glass slippers” (Ada, 391) to a “pair of new vair-furred slippers” that Lucette pictures as she drowns (494). The most explicit references to “Cendrillon” involve Blanche, another maidservant with a French name, like Mariette in Bend Sinister. In one instance, while recounting the unforgettable night during his childhood when the barn caught fire, Van reports that Blanche had lost “a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version” (114).22 “Ashette,” of course, is the Antiterran equivalent of “Cinderella”; and identifying this name for the heroine with the tale’s “English version” inevitably emphasizes its translation from French, as Nabokov himself points out (“Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom,” 595n). Here, as in Bend Sinister (138, 205), Nabokov specifically associates Cinderella’s lost slipper with a staircase. But there are no stairs in Perrault’s story. Instead, the image of Blanche losing her slipper on the grand staircase, en route to the fire, recalls Doré’s illustration for another of Perrault’s tales, “Peau d’Âne” (or “Donkeyskin”), a variant of “Cendrillon” — in which the heroine runs down a wide, curving outdoor stone staircase, complete with balustrades (as in Ada), while behind her a castle blazes with light against a dark sky (Doré, 1862, 46).23

22In Ada, as in Bend Sinister and Pnin, Nabokov focuses not only on permutations of the title character in “Cendrillon,” but also on imagery and wordplay that underscore her slipper’s similar transformations following the inaccurate transcription of the oral folktale. Rather than trace each allusion to Perrault’s tale in Ada, however, I want to point out that Blanche is first christened “Cendrillon” by Mlle Larivière (49), the children’s governess, who is not only a storyteller but also a successful writer. That it is she who identifies Blanche with Perrault’s heroine reinforces the pervasive connections between Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé and Nabokov's memories of his own governess, the original Mademoiselle. This association, in turn, confirms their shared influence upon Nabokov’s imagination and upon the stories he himself later wrote.

III. Telling Tales of Mère l’Oye and Mademoiselle O

23In a number of works that he wrote after The Waltz Invention, then—a memoir, a novella, and several novels—Nabokov refers to the titles, characters, and incidents of Perrault’s most famous tales: “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” “La Belle au bois dormant,” “La Barbe bleue,” and “Cendrillon.” He focuses as much on the processes by which these tales developed from the French oral tradition—performance, transcription, adaptation, translation, and illustration—as on the tales themselves. He particularly emphasizes their recitation in French. Indeed, Nabokov tends to associate such tales not with any specific author but with French-speaking storytellers, including fictionalized versions of his long-ago governess (in The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Ada) or even Perrault himself (in The Waltz Invention).

24This attribution seems fitting, however, because Charles Perrault not only adapted his tales from the French oral tradition but also obscured his own authorship by signing them with his son’s name on the title page, offering them to “Mademoiselle” in a dedication, and crediting them to “Mère l’Oye” in a frontispiece illustration. No one knows why Perrault originally identified his youngest son, Pierre Darmancour, as the author of Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, but subsequent editions list only Perrault’s name. Perhaps, as Andrew Lang suggests, the tales were told by the child’s nurse, repeated by the child, and revised by his father (Lang, xxvi-xxxii). Perhaps Perrault decided to borrow his son’s name after presenting himself as a child in the book’s dedication to “Mademoiselle” (Perrault, 1888, 5-6), who was actually Élisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans, the king’s niece (Lang, xxviii n1). Or perhaps, as Nabokov himself would later do, Perrault associated hearing such nursery tales with long-ago memories of his own childhood.

25In any case, the subtitle of his book, “Contes de ma Mère l’Oye”—which appears in the frontispiece [Figure 4], on a plaque above an old woman telling stories by the fireside—implies that his tales were authored, or inspired, by still another figure. “Mère l’Oye,” or Mother Goose, that legendary source of all nursery tales, is based upon an actual person: Bertrada of Laon, the first queen of France, who was not only called “Berthe pied d’oie” (Goosefoot Bertha), “Berthe au grand pied” (Broadfoot Bertha), and “la Reine Pédauque” (the Goosefooted Queen) because of her large feet (or, in some accounts, her clubfoot), but was also celebrated for her storytelling (Thomas, 28).

  • 24 For example, Nabokov cites research on the transcription of “Cendrillon” (Pnin, 158) and on psychoa (...)
  • 25 Note that “O,” the vowel Nabokov chose to represent Mademoiselle’s name when he wrote about her in (...)
  • 26 In Speak, Memory, Nabokov identifies his last glimpse of Mademoiselle with the sight of “an aged sw (...)

26The allusions to “Mademoiselle” and “Mère l’Oye” may have particularly affected Nabokov’s imagination when he returned to Perrault’s stories in adulthood. Since Nabokov was familiar with medieval history, seventeenth-century French literature, and scholarship on Perrault’s tales,24 he probably knew the identities of the women invoked in the dedication and the frontispiece. Certainly, he would have understood that Élisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans was a princess, not a governess. Even so, the fact that the dedication repeatedly addresses her as “Mademoiselle,” in the voice of a small boy, may have resonated with his memories of Cécile Miauton reading such stories to him. Nabokov may have even identified his very own “Mademoiselle O”25—an awkward, elderly governess whom he also likens to a clumsy waterfowl, but who recited literature beautifully—with Perrault’s Mère l’Oye, who appears in the frontispiece as a plain old woman with a gift for storytelling.26

Figure 4: Frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé: Avec des Moralités. Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (or The Tales of Mother Goose), 1697, engraving.

27At any rate, the ingenious stratagems that Perrault uses to disguise his authorship are characteristic of Nabokov, too. He employs a similarly cross-gendered surrogate, Vivian Darkbloom, in Lolita, the screenplay of Lolita, and “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom.” His narrator in Lolita, Humbert Humbert, even conceives of such disguise in terms of nursery tales when he imagines himself, after first seeing Dolores, as “the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess” (Lolita, 39). The phrase “fairy-tale nurse”—like “Mississe Taille Lore” (a phonetic rendering of “Mrs. Taylor” in French-accented English) and “Nurse Lore” (Lolita, 182, 245)—puns on the very name of this genre, even as it alludes to Mère l’Oye and other archetypal female storytellers.

  • 27 For an extended discussion of Vivian Darkbloom as a female persona and of Humbert’s fantasies about (...)

28On another occasion, Humbert invokes Bertrada herself, the original Mère l’Oye, as his own alter ego. When Dolores leaves for summer camp, he fantasizes about changing his gender in order to accompany her: “Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle. Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: ‘Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,’ and drag the sad, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!” (Lolita, 66). As I explain elsewhere, Humbert’s scheme resembles the Wolf’s in “Le Petit Chaperon rouge”: that is, to disguise himself in women’s clothing and lure a little girl into bed. As with traces of the Wolf’s animality, however, evidence of Humbert’s maleness—suggested by the adjectives “somber,” “gawky,” “deep-voiced,” and au grand pied— belies his imagined masquerade.27

29Even so, this particular female persona, who appears only briefly in Humbert’s fancy, confirms Nabokov’s deep familiarity with Perrault’s stories. The phrase “Berthe au Grand Pied” explicitly refers to Bertrada as an historical figure associated with nursery tales.

30By using that sobriquet, characterizing Berthe as “gawky,” and placing her at a “rustic hearth,” Nabokov also evokes Bertrada’s role as Mère l’Oye, especially as she appears in Perrault’s frontispiece. The title “Mlle.,” of course, recalls Perrault’s “Mademoiselle” as well as his own. And by describing this quintessential female French storyteller as “old-fashioned”—a term that echoes the title of Perrault’s book, “Contes du temps passé”—Nabokov acknowledges once more how profoundly he associates Perrault’s tales of long ago with his own memories of Mademoiselle reading aloud to him, in French, in times past.

List of illustrations

31Figure 1: Doré, Gustave (1865), Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. " Oh, Granny, your teeth are tremendous in size!'/'They're to eat you!'—and he ate her!" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1865. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/​items/​6c3fd3a0-c023-b7e1-e040-e00a1806549e

32Figure 2: Doré, Gustave (1865), Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. " Sleeping Beauty." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1865. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/​items/​693fd07a-98d6-0262-e040-e00a18061c98

33Figure 3: Doré, Gustave (1865), Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Blaubart." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/​items/​6e9d6184-eb1d-d518-e040-e00a18064b23

34Figure 4: Illustration of Histoires ou Contes du temps passé: Avec des Moralités. Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (or The Tales of Mother Goose) by Charles Perrault, 1697, engraving.

Bibliografia

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Barabtarlo, Gennady. (1989): Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s, Pnin. Ann Arbor, Ardis.

Barabtarlo, Gennady. (1991): “Those Who Favor Fire on The Enchanter.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24, p.89-112.

Boyd, Brian. ADAonline. Accessed 21 March 2014. http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/.

Boyd, Brian. (1990): Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

“The Cobbler and his Three Daughters.” In Basque Legends, edited by Wentworth Webster, p.173-175.2nd ed. London, Griffith and Farran, 1879.

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Foster, John Burt, Jr. (1993): “An Archeology of ‘Mademoiselle O’: Narrative between Art and Memory.” In A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction, edited by Gennady Barabtarlo and Charles Nicol. New York, Garland, p.111-135.

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Nabokov, Véra and Dmitri Nabokov. (1991): Interview by D. Barton Johnson and Ellendea Proffer. Russian Literature Triquarterly 24, p.73-85.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. (2006): “Easter Rain” [“Pashalnyj dožd’,” 1924]. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov and Peter Constantine. In The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov, p.643-648. Rev. ed. New York, Vintage.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (2006): “A Nursery Tale” [“Skazka,” 1926]. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov with the author. In The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov, p.161-172. Rev. ed. New York, Vintage.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1964): The Defense [Zaščita Lužina, 1930]. Translated by Michael Scammell with the author. New York, Putnam.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. (1989): Bend Sinister [1947]. New York, Vintage.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. (1990): Pale Fire [1962]. New York, Vintage.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1990): Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited [1966]. New York, Vintage.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1989): Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle [1969]. New York, Vintage.

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Opie, Iona and Peter Opie, eds. (1974): The Classic Fairy Tales. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Perrault, Charles. (1974): “The Little Red Riding-Hood.” Translated by Robert Samber. In The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, p.95-97. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Note

1 In his Lectures on Literature (5), Nabokov describes a writer’s functions as entertaining, teaching, and enchanting; only an “enchanter,” however, can be “a major writer.” It is Annabella Gump who mentions the “old enchanter” in The Waltz Invention (37). Annabella’s father seems particularly close to Old Perrault: he prompts the Minister to mention Perrault’s death (18), asks about providing for his widow (36), and is the only character to attend his funeral (59).

2 Nabokov sometimes called such stories “nursery tales”: a convenient term, because it not only acknowledges that they are told to children but also applies to both folktales, which are passed on by word of mouth, and fairy tales, which are literate revisions or imitations of oral narratives. On how folktales became literary fairy tales and then children’s literature, see Lang, xvii-xli; Opie et al., 11-28; and Tatar, xi-xx.

3 The play’s structure and chronology correlate not only with Old Perrault’s death, but also with the proposed annihilation of the mountain where the “old enchanter” once lived, which will occur on the stroke of noon—recalling the enchantment that ends at midnight in Perrault’s “Cendrillon.”

4 For the first English translation by Robert Samber, see Opie et al.

5 One indication of Perrault’s influence: when the Grimms gathered German folktales for their book Kinderund Hausmärchen, they found that several—including “Rotkäpchen,” “Dornröschen,” “Blaubart,” and “Aschenputtel”—were modelled on tales like “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” “La Belle au bois dormant,” “La Barbe bleue,” and “Cendrillon,” respectively, that Perrault had published a century before.

6 In response to an interviewer’s query about which language he found most beautiful, Nabokov answered, “My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French” (Strong Opinions, 49).

7 The family probably also owned a copy of Perrault’s tales in translation, but the catalogue does not list English-language books. I am immensely grateful to Tatiana Ponomareva, director of the Nabokov Museum, for her help.

8 See, for example, two editions currently available in English: Perrault’s Popular Tales and Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

9 Here Nabokov recalls another children’s book that Mademoiselle read aloud: Les Malheurs de Sophie, by Countess de Ségur. On this book and others that he encountered as a child, especially in English, see D. Barton Johnson, “Lodi Reads English: 1899-1910.”

10 Vladimir Nabokov, “Mademoiselle O” (1936), in Stories, 480-93. Nabokov first wrote about Mademoiselle in “Easter Rain” (“Pashalnyj dožd’,” 1924), in Stories, 643-648; and The Defense (Zaščita Lužina, 1930), 16, where Luzhin recalls, with “swooning delight,” “those hours of reading on the veranda.” On the history of “Mademoiselle O,” see John Burt Foster, Jr., “An Archeology of ‘Mademoiselle O’: Narrative between Art and Memory.” On “Mademoiselle O” in the context of writing and language, see Maurice Couturier, “I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov” and Hamrit, “French Echoes.”

11 See Dmitri Nabokov, 100, 116; Gennady Barabtarlo, 1991, 94; and my essay, 2003, 33-34.

12 Cf. “The Little Red Riding Hood” (Opie et al., 97).

13 On nursery tales in Lolita, see Appel, Jr., 345n-347n; Jones, 269-83; and Collins, 77-100.

14 On this illustration, see my essay, 2008, 42, 48-49.

15 The title also suggests “La Belle Dormeuse,” attributed to Charles Rivière Dufresny and cited in the commentary to Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, 2: 528-530.

16 One explanation fot the novel's “Bearded Woman” theme may be that “beard” has a feminine gender in French.

17 Cf. “The Blue Beard” (Opie et al., 109).

18 There is a Basque version of “Bluebeard,” but no evidence that it predates Perrault; see “The Cobbler and his Three Daughters” (Basque Legends, 173-175).

19 See Adam Oberfrank, Jr., 38-54. Oberfrank argues that Nabokov’s works reveal “a Cinderella motif, beginning with a few indirect references in some of the Russian fiction, and gradually reaching fruition in the English novels, where the allusions become more and more overt” (39). He suggests that this motif emphasizes “anti-Cinderellas” who are sexually aggressive rather than innocent.

20 On the novel’s Cinderella and squirrel motifs, see Gennady Barabtarlo, 1989.

21 Oberfrank, “New Worlds,” argues that each female character in Ada takes her turn as Cinderella. See also Brian Boyd’s annotations of this motif at ADAonline.

22 As Boyd points out at ADAonline, the word “miniver”—denoting white or grayish fur trim—provides a multilingual pun on “mini-vair,” reflecting the subtitle of Perrault’s tale in both French (“la Petite Pantoufle de verre”) and English (“the Little Glass Slipper”).

23 Doré also depicts the slipper being placed on Cinderella’s foot (1862, 28).

24 For example, Nabokov cites research on the transcription of “Cendrillon” (Pnin, 158) and on psychoanalytic readings of “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Pale Fire, 271).

25 Note that “O,” the vowel Nabokov chose to represent Mademoiselle’s name when he wrote about her in French, echoes the initial of both Mademoiselle d’Orleans and Mère l’Oye.

26 In Speak, Memory, Nabokov identifies his last glimpse of Mademoiselle with the sight of “an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature” (116), recalling the association between elderly French female storytellers and ungainly waterfowl embodied by Mère l’Oye. Indeed, when the same “enormous old swan” appears in connection with Mademoiselle in “Easter Rain,” it becomes “as clumsy as a goose” (“Easter Rain,” 647).

27 For an extended discussion of Vivian Darkbloom as a female persona and of Humbert’s fantasies about becoming a “fairy-tale nurse,” an “old-fashioned girl,” and similar figures, see my essay, 2016.

Indice delle illustrazioni

Legenda Figure 1: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (“Oh, Granny, your teeth are tremendous in size!'/'They're to eat you!'—and he ate her!”), 1865, wood engravings, 23.5 x 26.5 cm., published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/5330/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 372k
Legenda Figure 2: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “La Belle au bois dormant” (“Sleeping Beauty”), 1865, wood engravings, 19 x 24cm, published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/5330/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 424k
Legenda Figure 3: Gustave Doré’s illustration of “La Barbe-Bleue” (“Blaubart”), 1865, wood engravings, 21 x 24cm, published in Fairy Realm: A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales (New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1865).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/5330/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 436k
Legenda Figure 4: Frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé: Avec des Moralités. Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (or The Tales of Mother Goose), 1697, engraving.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/5330/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 607k

Autore

Enseigne la littérature anglaise et américaine ainsi que l’écriture créative au College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA). Elle a co-dirigé un ouvrage collectif intitulé Nabokov and the Question of Morality : Aesthetics, Ethics and the Metaphysics of Fiction (Palgrave, 2016). Elle a été à deux reprises présidente de la Société Internationale Vladimir Nabokov. Elle a aussi été pendant dix ans responsable de la liste de diffusion Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum (NABOKV-L). Elle a publié une trentaine d’articles sur Nabokov, ainsi que des articles sur d’autres auteurs américains, la littérature de détection, la narratologie, le postmodernisme et Poe.

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