The reference to the oversensitive princess (a pea hidden below a
pile of duvets) comes from a H.C.Andersen's story. It led me to
Michael Maar's "Speak,Nabokov", when he details the presence of Andersen's
"Little Mermaid" in the work of Nabokov. (I felt cheated by not finding her in
Copenhagen but I was told that she'd been carried away, perhaps with stone
and a few grains of salt, to an exhibit in Japan). Maar stresses the theme of
homosexual love and androgyny.*Geeta, in her pastiche, hinted at
Andersen/Nabokov's "cold queens," besides the rendering of a
finicky Pnin-allergic Lara...
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* Cf.M.Maar "Speak, Nabokov", sub-chapter "Mermaids and Hetaerae" where he wrote: "the most brutal wars are
civil and fratricidal ones. Along with Freud and Doestoyevsky, Mann occupies a
few posts in the borderland that Nabokov claims for himself alone.// An
important arena in this disputed territory is the fairy tale...Nabokov, too, was
under the spell of the Danish writer...And the Snow Queen appears in it in
various guises. The famous beginning of the fairy tale even plays a hidden key
role in his novel Pnin."(18-19)
"Hans Andersen had been - take note! - a
stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind and believing himself to
be a cathedral. The man from Lübeck...fuses with the fairy-tale Dane into one
person....Literature can be a great ballroom resounding with echoes...no more
an accident that Humbert gives his nymphet a deluxe volume of Andersen's
The Little Mermaid...His late novel Ada is a thinly veiled retelling of the sad
fairy tale." (19-20)
"How closely Nabokov cleaves to his model in Ada
becomes apparent when the novel is superimposed over the Andersen tale... Van
and Ada are lovers against whom the little mermaid Lucette has no chance...She
remains the third wheel, suffers in silence like the mermaid, and shares with
her a watery death."(21)
"The death of the little mermaid must have been
intended as Ada's climx from the beginning...It's astounding that Nabokov
simultaneously manages to keep one eye on the Lübeck cathedral... Esmeralda and
mermaid - the coupling comes directly from Thomas Mann"(22).
"Mermaids prior to Andersen have in common that
they're cold and soulless.. Andersen's undine also wants an immortal soul, but
the actual reason for her ascent into the human world is her silent love for the
prince... In this fairy tale, Andersen was writing in code about his passion for
Edvard Collin, the true love of his life. Like the fairy-tale prince, Collin
tolerated the presence of the unusual old maid as a good friend in his house,
but reserved his bedroom for real women. The Little Mermaid was written when
Collin got married..." (23) "The mermaid is an androgynous male who loves
another man and wants to be close to him, even if it brings him nothing but
torments." (24) and much more with the link to Lolita/Aurora Lee as presented in
TOOL (33).