JM Alain Didider Machu: "In the small community of Ramsdale, there's more than one detail that indicates the myth of the Byronian hero. Byron's two dogs, Cavall and Melampus make their appearance... although they belong to the mediocre Jean Farlow".

Various other links between Humbert Humbert and the development of the Romantic movement (as Nabokov outlined in his notes in EO), linking him from King Arthur's Quest towards to Lord Byron, Wordsworth, Poe are outlined, in a fascinating article by Didider-Machu. Unfortunately I could only gain access to it in French and difficult to quote in English.

 

Cf. Prof. Didier Machu, Université de Pau : “Un héros romantique : Humbert Humbert” ; ... 'Bad, mad, and dangerous to know” : la formule lapidaire en laquelle Byron fut caractérisé par Caroline Lamb, ... anglais.u-paris10.fr/IMG/pdf/H_H-_ROMANTIQUE.pdf [ fr 1-day symposium 16 janvier 2010. organizer A-M Paquet-Deyris, Université de paris Ouest Nanterre.

 

I remembered an old note in "The Nabokovian" mentioning both dogs and their Greek source, but could not find it to quote here ( if A.Bouazza would be so kind to help me here?). I also checked in Brian Boyd, « Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t », paru dans Cycnos, Volume 24 n°1, mis en ligne le 20 mars 2008, URL : http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1079.*  but the link with Byron is not mentioned.
Is there a copy of Prof. Didier Machu's article on "Humbert as a Romantic Hero" available in English? My investigatory powers are very limited and any help would be welcome.

 

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*Brian Boyd :  Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t.
I. Introduction: "I think there are many, many details in Lolita that need to be better annotated and that will lead to richer interpretations. Although much remains to be done, in terms of annotation and interpretation, I will focus on just half a page, and on two words we should have looked at more closely: Cavall and Melampus."
V. Annotation and Global Interpretation: Cavall and Melampus
"What I really wanted to get to, though, in the passage at the end of the Hourglass Lake chapter, what I wanted to spend most of my time on if there hadn’t been so much else to notice, is the names of Jean Farlow’s two dogs, Cavall and Melampus.Cavall, as the note in Appel does not tell us, but as the notes in Zimmer’s German edition and from there the note in the Russian Symposium edition do tell us, was King Arthur’s dog. Melampus again yields nothing in Appel, and the German and the Russian editions unhelpfully identify Melampus as a Greek prophet who could understand the language animals. This gets us nowhere. In fact Cavall is indeed not only Arthur’s favorite hound (as in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King),but the first of his hounds to turn the stag, in a hunting episode in The Mabinogion, and Melampus is the name of the first hound of Actaeon, in Ovid’s telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, III....The precision of these allusions startles: two hounds from very different literary traditions that are the first to chase or turn a stag. Like the other ironies around the word “Waterproof,” the precision itself makes us want to annotate more, and to expect more. And there is more, and it will connect with central elements of Lolita.Actaeon, remember, is the hunter who spies Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting, naked. Diana, enraged, turns him into a stag, and his hounds pursue him, Melampus leading, and tear him to pieces. He still feels as a man, but he can express himself only as a deer, so his own hounds and his fellow hunters cannot respond to his strangled voice pleading for them to stop tearing him apart.I hope you can see where this is leading: the Enchanted Hunters motif that runs through the nove...There is much, much more we need to learn about Lolita. Cavall as King Arthur’s dog points again to the Arthurian pattern that seems to have for some reason attached itself to the Lolita theme from the first. Remember that in the afterword to Lolita Nabokov recalls that the protagonist of The Enchanter was called Arthur (no trace of this name survives in the text). The Enchanted Hunters Hotel is in Briceland, named after Broceliande, the forest where Merlin lived in the Arthurian tales. After escaping from rehearsals for the play The Enchanted Hunters, Lolita directs Humbert to another town where another Quilty play is being staged with the authors as guests. The town is Wace, the name of the first writer to recount the Arthurian legends in French. The play being staged there is co-written by Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom. Vivian Darkbloom, as we know, is a woman and an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov,” but Vivian is also the woman who in Arthurian legend and in Tennyson’s retelling is able to usurp Merlin’s magic and entrap him within his own spell. After Wace, Lolita’s next rendezvous with Quilty is at Elphinstone, which surely evokes the elfin stone out of which Arthur at last draws the sword Excalibur when no one else can, and which proves to be the place where Lolita is at last pulled out from Humbert’s clutches on Independence Day....There is much, much more we need to learn about Lolita...We need to get annotating, we need to get interpreting. We still don’t know Lolita."