In an attempt to save his life Clare Quilty offers Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) to arrange for him to attend executions and tells him that the chair is painted yellow:
"Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow -" (2.35)
In a letter of Oct. 11, 1830, to his bride Natalia Goncharov Pushkin says: “je ris jaune (I laugh with yellow laughter), as the poissardes (market women) say:”
L'entrée à Moscou est interdite et me voilà confiné à Boldino. Au nom du ciel, chère Наталья Николаевна, écrivez-moi malgré que vous ne le vouliez pas. Dites-moi où êtes-vous? avez-vous quitté Moscou? y a-t-il un chemin de travers qui puisse me mener à vos pieds? Je suis tout découragé et ne sais vraiment que faire. Il est clair que cette année (maudite année) notre mariage n'aura pas lieu. Mais n'est-ce pas que vous avez quitté Moscou? S'exposer de gaîté de cœur au beau milieu de la peste serait impardonnable. Je sais bien qu'on exagère toujours le tableau de ses ravages et le nombre des victimes; une jeune femme de Constantinople me disait jadis qu'il n'y avait que la canaille qui mourait de la peste — tout cela est bel et bon; mais il faut encore que les gens comme il faut prennent leurs précautions, car c'est là ce qui les sauve et non leur élégance et leur bon ton. Vous êtes donc à la campagne, bien à couvert de la choléra, n'est-ce pas? Envoyez-moi donc votre adresse et le bulletin de votre santé. Quant à nous, nous sommes cernés par les quarantaines, mais l'épidémie n'a pas encore pénétré. Boldino a l'air d'une île entourée de rochers. Point de voisins, point de livres. Un temps affreux. Je passe mon temps à griffonner et à enrager. Je ne sais que fait le pauvre monde, et comment va mon ami Polignac. Ecrivez-moi de ses nouvelles, car ici je ne lis point de journaux. Je deviens si imbécile que c'est une bénédiction. Что дедушка с его медной бабушкой? Оба живы и здоровы, не правда ли? Передо мной теперь географическая карта; я смотрю, как бы дать крюку и приехать к вам через Кяхту или через Архангельск? Дело в том, что для друга семь вёрст не крюк; а ехать прямо на Москву значит семь вёрст киселя есть (да ещё какого? Московского!). Voilà bien de mauvaises plaisanteries. Je ris jaune, comme disent les poissardes. Adieu. Mettez-moi aux pieds de M-me votre mère; mes bien tendres hommages à toute la famille. Adieu, mon bel ange. Je baise le bout de vos ailes, comme disait Voltaire à des gens qui ne vous valaient pas.
Pushkin calls Natalie "my beautiful angel" and kisses the tips of her wings (as Voltaire said to people who are not worth of her). Humbert Humbert calls ladies and gentlemen of the jury "winged gentlemen of the jury."
Pushkin (who did not receive newspapers in Boldino, his family estate in the Province of Nizhniy Novgorod) asks Natalie to write him about Polignac (a French statesman whose appointment as prime minister by Charles X provoked the July Revolution). Pushkin thought that Polignac would be executed and had bet a bottle of champagne with Vyazemski on the outcome of his trial (in December 1830 Polignac was sentenced to life imprisonment). In a letter of Nov. 5, 1830, to Vyazemski Pushkin says that he has no news about Polignac and asks Vyazemski who pays for champagne:
Когда-то свидимся? заехал я в глушь Нижнюю, да и сам не знаю, как выбраться? Точно еловая шишка <в жопе>; вошла хорошо, а выйти так и шершаво. К стати: о Лизе голинькой не имею никакого известия. О Полиньяке тоже. Кто плотит за шампанское, ты или я? Жаль, если я.
Pushkin (who could not leave Boldino because of cholera epidemic) compares himself to a man who has yelovaya shishka (a fir cone) in his back passage: it went in smoothly, but comes out roughly. The chair painted yellow also seems to hint at yelovaya shishka mentioned by Pushkin in his letter to Vyazemski. A similar bilingual pun, yellow-blue Vass frocks (a play on ya lyublyu vas, “I love you”), occurs in Ada (1969):
Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black — the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other — for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles? — and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps. (1.31)
“A stoutish, foppish, baldish young man,” Percy de Prey brings to mind Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin, the main character in Gogol’s story Shinel’ (“The Overcoat,” 1841) who is neskol'ko ryabovat, neskol'ko ryzhevat, neskol'ko na vid dazhe podslepovat, s nebol'shoy lysinoy na lbu (somewhat pock-marked, somewhat red-haired, even somewhat short-sighted in appearance, with a little bald spot on the forehead). In his poem Slava (“Fame,” 1942) VN mentions Akakiy Akakievich:
Есть вещи, вещи,
которые... даже... (Акакий Акакиевич
любил, если помните, "плевелы речи",
и он как Наречье, мой гость восковой)
There are things, things
that... even... (Akakiy Akakievich
loved, if you remember, "the weeds of speech,"
and he is like Adverb, my waxen guest).
In Parizhskaya poema ("The Paris Poem," 1943) VN mentions Boulevard Arago (where until quite recently "public decapitations took place in Paris, with local grocers getting the closest view of a reasonably sensational but generally rather messy show"):
Вымирают косматые мамонты,
чуть жива красноглазая мышь.
Бродят отзвуки лиры безграмотной:
с кандачка переход на Буль-Миш.
С полурусского, полузабытого
переход на подобье арго.
Бродит боль позвонка перебитого
в чёрных дебрях Бульвар Араго.
Dying out are the shaggy mammoths,
barely alive is the red-eyed mouse.
Echoes of an illiterate lyre here wander,
from the slipshod to Boul’Mich you pass.
From a tongue half-Russian and half-forgotten
here you pass to a form of argot.
The pain of a severed vertebra wanders
in the black depths of Boulevard Arago.
In the same chapter of Ada Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions Mlle Larivière, Lucette’s governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse:
Yes! Wasn’t that a scream? Larivière blossoming forth, bosoming forth as a great writer! A sensational Canadian bestselling author! Her story ‘The Necklace’ (La rivière de diamants) had become a classic in girls’ schools and her gorgeous pseudonym ‘Guillaume de Monparnasse’ (the leaving out of the ‘t’ made it more intime) was well-known from Quebec to Kaluga. As she put it in her exotic English: ‘Fame struck and the roubles rolled, and the dollars poured’ (both currencies being used at the time in East Estotiland); but good Ida, far from abandoning Marina, with whom she had been platonically and irrevocably in love ever since she had seen her in ‘Bilitis,’ accused herself of neglecting Lucette by overindulging in Literature; consequently she now gave the child, in spurts of vacational zeal, considerably more attention than poor little Ada (said Ada) had received at twelve, after her first (miserable) term at school. Van had been such an idiot; suspecting Cordula! Chaste, gentle, dumb, little Cordula de Prey, when Ada had explained to him, twice, thrice, in different codes, that she had invented a nasty tender schoolmate, at a time when she had been literally torn from him, and only assumed — in advance, so to speak — such a girl’s existence. A kind of blank check that she wanted from him; ‘Well, you got it,’ said Van, ‘but now it’s destroyed and will not be renewed; but why did you run after fat Percy, what was so important?’ (1.31)
In 1901, when he meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known on Antiterra as Lute), Van tells him that Mlle Larivière had been just awarded the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L‘ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
Lebon is Nobel, Luc is cul (Fr., arse) in reverse. In his conversation with Greg Van mentions a diet of champagne and tells Greg that he will pay for the next bottle:
On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him.
Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks, that black goatee.
‘Ne uznayosh’ (You don’t recognize me)?’
‘Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!’ cried Van tearing off his glove.
‘I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You’d never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish, Van.’
‘Diet of champagne, not beer,’ said Professor Veen, putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his ‘umber.’ ‘Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.’
‘I’m also very fat, yes?’
‘What about Grace, I can’t imagine her getting fat?’
‘Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly, too.’
‘Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?’
‘About two years.’
‘To whom?’
‘Maude Sween.’
‘The daughter of the poet?’
‘No, no, her mother is a Brougham.’
Might have replied ‘Ada Veen,’ had Mr Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject. Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever.
‘I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony — no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!’
‘Yes — Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!’
‘You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long —’
‘Neither did she. I was terribly —’
‘How long are you staying —’
‘— terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’
Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.
‘How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me —’
‘So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius — dead, dead, all dead!’
‘I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.’
‘Arkadievich,’ said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.
‘Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?’
‘He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?’
‘In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I gather. Perhaps I’m mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very well: I visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years ago.’
‘Somebody told me she’s a movie actress.’
‘I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen.’
‘Oh, that would be terrible, I declare — to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’
Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting — and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double. (ibid.)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): So you are married, etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Eight: XVIII: 1-4. Pushkin wrote the last two chapters (Seven and Eight) of EO in Boldino, in the fall of 1830. Avenue Guillaume Pitt seems to hint at lyutyi Pit (ferocious Pitt) mentioned by Pushkin in his “Ode to Count Khvostov” (1825):
Султан ярится 1. Кровь Эллады
И резвоскачет 2, и кипит.
Открылись грекам древни клады 3,
Трепещет в Стиксе лютый Пит 4
In footnote 4 Pushkin says: “G. Pitt, the famous English minister and notorious enemy of freedom.” On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) France was annexed by England in 1815.
Vanda Broom (Van thinks that he met a Broom somewhere) is Ada's lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill. According to Ada, Vanda (whose real favorite was Grace Erminin, Greg's twin sister) had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places (2.6). Humbert Humbert's chess partner at Beardsley, Gaston Godin (who loves little boys) gets involved in a sale histoire, in Naples of all places:
I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a year later, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not return, he got involved in a sale histoire, in Naples of all places!). I would have hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a queer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There he was devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language - there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young - oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I. (2.6)
As Brian Boyd has suggested, Bagration Island is a play on “buggeration.” Humbert Humbert kills Clare Quilty, because he had “sodomized” Lolita:
To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage… To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands… To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain… To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling - oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! (2.35)
Quilty calls Humbert “a beastly pervert:”
Concentrate,” I said, “on the thought of Dolly Haze whom you kidnapped.”
“I did not!” he cried. “You’re all wet. I saved her from a beastly pervert. Show me your badge instead of shooting at my foot, you ape, you. Where is that badge? I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd! That joy ride, I grant you, was a silly stunt but you got her back, didn’t you? Come, let’s have a drink.” (ibid.)
In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. says that he had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed. The Poling Prize seems to hint at Polignac and Linus Pauling (an American scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954).
Like his maker, Humbert Humbert is against capital punishment:
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive. (2.36)
Humbert Humbert dies in legal captivity on Nov. 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. On Nov. 4 (Nov. 16, New Style), 1836, Pushkin and his friends received an anonymous letter in which Pushkin was nominated "coadjutor to the Grand Master of the Order of Cuckolds and historiographer of the Order." The letter was signed: "Perpetual Secretary: Count J. Borch." As VN points out in his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 48), the monde dubbed Count Joseph Borch and his wife Lyubov a model couple because "she lived with the coachman, and he with the postilion." Pushkin's adversary in his fatal duel, d'Anthès was Baron Heeckeren's adopted son and lover. Quilty offers Humbert an old-fashioned duel, sword or pistol:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. (2.35)
In Ada Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) fights a sword duel with Baron d'Onsky, Marina's lover whose name seems to hint at Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion). Charlotte's letter to Humbert Humbert is a parody of Tatiana's letter to Onegin in Chapter Three of Pushkin's novel in verse.
In a farewell letter to Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) Demon mentions his aunt's ranch near Lolita, Texas:
‘Adieu. Perhaps it is better thus,’ wrote Demon to Marina in mid-April, 1869 (the letter may be either a copy in his calligraphic hand or the unposted original), ‘for whatever bliss might have attended our married life, and however long that blissful life might have lasted, one image I shall not forget and will not forgive. Let it sink in, my dear. Let me repeat it in such terms as a stage performer can appreciate. You had gone to Boston to see an old aunt — a cliché, but the truth for the nonce — and I had gone to my aunt’s ranch near Lolita, Texas. Early one February morning (around noon chez vous) I rang you up at your hotel from a roadside booth of pure crystal still tear-stained after a tremendous thunderstorm to ask you to fly over at once, because I, Demon, rattling my crumpled wings and cursing the automatic dorophone, could not live without you and because I wished you to see, with me holding you, the daze of desert flowers that the rain had brought out. Your voice was remote but sweet; you said you were in Eve’s state, hold the line, let me put on a penyuar. Instead, blocking my ear, you spoke, I suppose, to the man with whom you had spent the night (and whom I would have dispatched, had I not been overeager to castrate him). Now that is the sketch made by a young artist in Parma, in the sixteenth century, for the fresco of our destiny, in a prophetic trance, and coinciding, except for the apple of terrible knowledge, with an image repeated in two men’s minds. Your runaway maid, by the way, has been found by the police in a brothel here and will be shipped to you as soon as she is sufficiently stuffed with mercury.’ (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Lolita, Texas: this town exists, or, rather, existed, for it has been renamed, I believe, after the appearance of the notorious novel.
In one of his epigrams on Aglaya Davydov Pushkin mentions Mercury, a god who punishes Aglaya for her love of chuzhdyi pol (people of the opposite gender):
Оставя честь судьбе на произвол,
Давыдова, живая жертва фурий,
От малых лет любила чуждый пол,
И вдруг беда! казнит её Меркурий,
Раскаяться приходит ей пора,
Она лежит, глаз пухнет понемногу,
Вдруг лопнул он: что ж дама? — «Слава богу!
Всё к лучшему: вот новая <дыра>!»
Chuzhdyi pol in Pushkin's epigram brings to mind the Poling Prize in Lolita. Rogonosets velichavyi (the majestical cornuto) in Chapter One (XII: 12) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is Aglaya's husband, general Alexander Davydov. In his epistle (quoted by VN in his EO Commentary, vol. III, p. 331) to Aglaya's brother-in-law, general Vasiliy Davydov, Pushkin mentions nash bezrukiy knyaz' (our one-armed prince). At Marina's funeral Ada meets d'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’ (3.8)