When authors refer to other great works, people, and events, it’s usually not accidental. Put on your super-sleuth hat and figure out why.
Historical Figures
- King Akhenaten (1.5.8)
- Catullus (1.15.3)
- Hitler (2.8.11)
- James I (1.5.8)
- Queen Nefertiti (1.5.8)
Biblical Characters
- Eve (1.5.9)
- Lilith (1.5.9)
Musical References
- Carmen (1.13.14)
- Tchaikovsky (2.6.1)
Artists
- Aubrey Beardsley (2.23.5)
- Nijinsky (2.6.1)
- Reginald Marsh (2.12.4)
Literary Figures and Literary References
- Annabel Leigh (1.2.3) Humbert Humbert's first love is named after the woman in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem. The part of the beginning of Chapter 1 – "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns" – refers to the poem's lines: "With a love that the winged seraphs in heaven /Coveted her and me."
- Arabian Nights (2.3.14)
- Aristophanes (2.23.5)
- Baker's Dramatic Technique (2.11.32)
- Charles Baudelaire (2.2.11)
- Beatrice (1.5.8; 1.25.4)
- Remy Belleau (1.11.18)
- Bluebeard (2.22.15)
- Robert Browning (1.27.88)
- Chateaubriand (2.1.2)
- Anton Chekhov, Cherry Orchard (2.20.1)
- Agatha Christie (1.8.8)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2.23.6)
- Dante (1.5.8; 1.25.4)
- Charles Dickens (1.8.8)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1.17.2)
- Norman Douglas (2.6.1)
- The Emperor's New Clothes (2.13: 1)
- Freud (2.23.6)
- John Galsworthy (2.2.2)
- André Gide (2.6.1)
- A Girl of the Limberlost (2.3.14)
- Gustave Flaubert (2.1.2)
- Hansel and Gretel (2.13.1)
- Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (2.20.1)
- Hegel (2.26.3)
- Peter Hurd (2.12.4)
- James Joyce (Fore.4): Referenced in the following passage: "the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933 by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book" [Fore.4]: the decision in the case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, in which Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's novel was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.)
- King Lear (2.27.3)
- Rudyard Kipling (2.35.36)
- Laureen (1.5.8)
- Little Women (2.3.14)
- Maeterlinck (2.35.77)
- Moliere (2.23.6)
- Petrarch (1.5.8)
- Edgar Allan Poe (1.25.4)
- Polonius, a character in Hamlet (2.1.11)
- Marcel Proust (2.6.1)
- Pierre de Ronsard (1.11.18)
- Sade's Justine (2.29.61; 2.35.54)
- The Sleeping Beauty (2.13.1)
- William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (2.9.2)
- Ivan Turgenev (2.33.3)
- Uncle Tom, a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1.27.95)
- Friedrich von Schlegel (2.26.3)
- Frederick Waugh (2.12.4)
- Grant Wood (2.12.4)