After three years of unsuccessful investigations Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) finally tracks down Clare Quilty to Pavor Manor, a wooden house on Grimm Road:
A gas station attendant in Parkington explained to me very clearly how to get to Grimm Road. Wishing to be sure Quilty would be at home, I attempted to ring him up but learned that his private telephone had recently been disconnected. Did that mean he was gone? I started to drive to Grimm Road, twelve miles north of the town. By that time night had eliminated most of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway, a series of short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed my own lights to indicate this or that curve. I could make out a dark valley on one side of the road and wooded slopes on the other, and in front of me, like derelict snowflakes, moths drifted out of the blackness into my probing aura. At the twelfth mile, as foretold, a curiously hooded bridge sheathed me for a moment and, beyond it, a white-washed rock loomed on the right, and a few car lengths further, on the same side, I turned off the highway up gravelly Grimm Road. For a couple of minutes all was dank, dark, dense forest. Then, Pavor Manor, a wooden house with a turret, arose in a circular clearing. Its windows glowed yellow and red; its drive was cluttered with half a dozen cars. I stopped in the shelter of the trees and abolished my lights to ponder the next move quietly. He would be surrounded by his henchmen and whores. I could not help seeing the inside of that festive and ramshackle castle in terms of “Troubled Teens,” a story in one of her magazines, vague “orgies,” a sinister adult with penele cigar, drugs, bodyguards. At least, he was there. I would return in the torpid morning. (2.34)
In Latin pavor means “fear.” In VN’s play Izobretenie Val’sa (“The Waltz Invention,” 1938) Salvator Waltz says that for children a threat is more useful than the language of admonitions and mentions uroki strakha, uroki nezabvennye (the lessons of fear, unforgettable lessons):
Знаю, -- какой-нибудь лукавый умник скажет, что, как основа царствия, угроза -- не то, что мрамор мудрости... Но детям полезнее угроза, чем язык увещеваний, и уроки страха -- уроки незабвенные... (Act Two)
A character in VN’s play, the Minister of War mentions starik Perro (old Perrault) who died last night:
Министр. А нашего генерала я так огрел по телефону, что, кажется, у него прошла подагра. Между прочим, знаете, кто нынче ночью помер? Старик Перро, -- да, да. Вам придётся поехать на похороны. И напомните мне завтра поговорить с Брутом насчёт пенсии для вдовы. Они, оказывается, последнее время сильно нуждались, грустно, я этого даже не знал. (Act One)
Charles Perrault is the author of Le petit chaperon rouge ("Little Red Riding Hood"), a fairy tale known in German as Rotkäppchen by the brothers Grimm.
In VN's story Volshebnik ("The Enchanter," 1939), Lolita’s Russian precursor, the protagonist is compared to the lone wolf getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap:
Пустота между тем заполнялась предварительным серо-человечьим содержанием -- сидя на скамье в больничном саду, успокаиваясь, готовясь к различным хлопотам, связанным с техникой похоронного движения, он с приличной печалью пересматривал в мыслях то, что видел только что воочию: отполированный лоб, прозрачные крылья ноздрей с жемчужиной сбоку, эбеновый крест -- всю эту ювелирную работу смерти -- между прочим презрительно дунул на хирургию и стал думать о том, что всё-таки ей было здорово хорошо под его опекой, что он походя дал ей настоящее счастье, скрасившие последние месяцы её прозябания, а отсюда уже был естественен переход к признанию за умницей судьбой прекрасного поведения и к первому сладкому содроганию крови: бирюк надевал чепец.
Meanwhile, that vacuum was filling with preliminary, grayly human content. Sitting on a bench in the hospital garden, gradually calming down, preparing for the various steps of the funeral procedure, he mentally reviewed with appropriate sadness what he had just seen with his own eyes: the polished forehead, the translucent nostrils with the pearly wart on one side, the ebony cross, all of death’s jewelry work. He parenthetically gave surgery a contemptuous dismissal and started thinking what a superb period she had had under his tutelage, how he had incidentally provided her with some real happiness to brighten the last days of her vegetative existence, and thence it was already a natural transition to crediting clever Fate with splendid behavior, and to the first delicious throb in his bloodstream: the lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap.
Belozubyi v posteli, brat'ya s shapron-ruzh'yami (the white-toothed in bed, the brothers with guns) in VN's Volshebnik is another allusion to Le petit chaperon rouge.
The protagonist is willing to give anything - a bagful of rubies, a pailful of blood - for possessing the girl:
И за всё это, за жар щёк, за двенадцать пар тонких рёбер, за пушок вдоль спины, за дымок души, за глуховатый голос, за ролики и за серый денёк, за то неизвестное, что сейчас подумала, неизвестно на что посмотревши с моста... Мешок рубинов, ведро крови -- всё что угодно...
And for all this, for the glow of her cheeks, the twelve pairs of narrow ribs, the down along her back, her wisp of a soul, that slightly husky voice, the roller skates and the grayish day, the unknown thought that had just run through her head as she glanced at an unknown thing from the bridge… For all this he would have given a sack of rubies, a bucket of blood, anything he was asked….
The enumeration in the above excerpt is an obvious allusion to Lermontov's poem Blagodarnost' ("Gratitude," 1840). In his essay Krasnaya shapochka ("Little Red Riding Hood," 1908) Merezhkovski quotes Lermontov's poem Rodina ("Motherland," 1841):
Люблю отчизну я, но странною любовью;
Её не победит рассудок мой --
Ни слава, купленная кровью,
Ни полный гордого доверия покой,
Ни тёмной старины заветные преданья
Не шевелят во мне отрадного мечтанья.
I love my native land, but with a strange love;
My intellect [rassudok] can not conquer it...
At the beginning of "The Enchanter" rassudok (reason, intellect) is mentioned:
Рассудком зная, что Эвфратский абрикос вреден только в консервах; что грех неотторжим от гражданского быта; что у всех гигиен есть свои гиены; зная, кроме того, что этот самый рассудок не прочь опошлить то, что иначе ему не даётся...
Knowing, rationally, that the Euphrates apricot is harmful only in canned form; that sin is inseparable from civic custom; that all hygienes have their hyenas; knowing, moreover, that this selfsame rationality is not averse to vulgarizing that to which it is otherwise denied access…
Lermontov is the author of Son ("The Dream," 1841). The characters in "The Waltz Invention" include the reporter Son (in the English version, Trance) who runs errands for Waltz. The action in VN’s play seems to take place in “the dream of death” that Lyubov, the wife of the portrait painter Troshcheykin (the main character in VN’s play Sobytie, “The Event,” 1938), dreams after committing suicide on her dead son’s fifth birthday (two days after her mother's fiftieth birthday). Lyubov’s husband (who fears assassination and is mortally afraid of Barbashin) forgets the saying ne tak strashen chyort, kak ego malyuyut (the devil is not as terrible as he is painted) and does not recognize the devil when he appears in disguise of the absurd private detective Barboshin.
The author of Gogol’ i chyort (“Gogol and the Devil,” 1906), Merezhkovski mentions the devil at the end of his essay “Little Red Riding Hood:”
Ежели сейчас в России есть фантастичнейшая сказка, отвлечённейшая утопия, так это мечта о государственной мощи России как "путеводной звезде" для заблудившейся русской интеллигенции. Кажется, лучше пойдёт она к чёрту в лапы, чем в такую Россию, -- не примет, подобно Красной Шапочке, волка за бабушку.
According to Merezhkovski, the Russian intelligentsia would rather go to the devil’s paws than mistake, like Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf for her granny. Putevodnaya zvezda (the guiding star) mentioned by Merezhkovski brings to mind Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where Lolita dies.