How does the author use allusion in the story, That in Aleppo Once…?

• The story's title is an allusion to Shakespeare's Othello. Othello's wife, Desdemona, is free from corruption, yet Othello, provoked by the words of Iago, comes to believe that she has been unfaithful to him. At the end of the play, Othello murders Desdemona, learns that Iago has duped him, and then kills himself out of grief and shame.

• Nabokov also has his narrator allude to the marriage of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin: "She was much younger than I—not as much younger as was Natalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long ear-rings in relation to swarthy Pushkin," but young enough to allow "a sufficient margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius." Like Pushkin, the narrator is a Russian poet with a younger wife. More significant is the fact that Pushkin was betrayed by his wife as the narrator fears he has been. The narrator states that Natalie "yawned" whenever Pushkin's verse "happened to exceed the length of a sonnet," but that his own wife was "attracted by the obscurity" of his poetry. The narrator's wife's fascination with his verse, however, proves ephemeral, since she eventually "tore a hole through its veil and saw a stranger's unlovable face."

• The narrator makes another allusion when he tells V., "I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described." The lady in question here is the title character of Anton Chekhov's story, "The Lady with the Pet Dog" (1899). Chekhov's story concerns Anna Sergeyevna, a young woman in an unhappy marriage who eventually betrays her husband with Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, a married man whom she meets while on holiday. The narrator's comparison of himself to Anna Sergeyevna is significant, for in Chekhov's story she is a confused person who cannot reconcile her desires with her duty, just as the narrator cannot reconcile his love for his wife with what he thought was his duty to himself in forsaking her.