According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), at first he wanted to use his notes in toto at his trial:
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mind-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred. (2.36)
Actually, it took Humbert (who murders Quilty and is arrested on Sept. 25, 1952, and who dies in legal captivity on Nov. 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) fifty-two days to write Lolita. According to Clare Quilty, he is the author of fifty-two successful scenarios:
“My dear sir,” he said, “stop trifling with life and death. I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century sexcapades. I’m the author of fifty-two successful scenarios. I know all the ropes. Let me handle this. There should be a poker somewhere, why don’t I fetch it, and then we’ll fish out your property.” (2.35).
Describing his tussle with Quilty, Humbert mentions the obligatory scene in the Westerns and calls Quilty “the scenario writer:”
In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A. D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. (ibid.)
Discussing Ada’s career as an actress, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Painted Westerns and the foul fancy of scriptwriters:
After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid — until the director blamed her for moving like an angular ‘backfish.’ She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G.A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out — except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained. (2.9)
In Yuzlik’s film Don Juan’s Last Fling (that Van and Lucette watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall) Ada played the gitanilla. In a letter to Van (written after Lucette’s suicide) Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) writes:
The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan's Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl's career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his 'fantasy' on Cervantes's crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as 'Quicks.' Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. (3.7)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) VN’s Lolita is known as The Gitanilla by the Spanish writer Osberg. Osberg is an anagram of Borges. J. L. Borges is the author of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939). In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) Krug and Ember had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare:
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers, librarians, the Stratford-on-Avon people, since in order to be responsible for all references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurious interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited; there still was a snag here, a bothersome flaw, but perhaps it might be eliminated, too, just as a cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn. (chapter 6)
At the dinner with the Vinelanders and the three cinematists (including Yuzlik) in Bellevue Hotel Van offers a prepared version of the financial state of affairs invented in toto:
'Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chere. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette's accounts in several Swiss banks -' and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. 'I suggest,' he added, 'that if you have no other engagements' - (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) - 'you and I go to see Maitre Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here - who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh - I mean sign with a sigh - the matter is tedious. All right? All right.' (3.8)
At this dinner Yuzlik calls Van “Vasco de Gama:”
I’m delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,’ said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.
The same garbling — and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik’s source of recondite information — occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the ‘best seller’ trellis — mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan ‘charlotte russe’ served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel’s head cook, who hailed from California’s Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada’s when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year’s Eve, 1893, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince’s club); and the other — to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan’s Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon’s politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:
‘Jack Chose’s book, is certainly most entertaining — especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album’ — (Yuzlik’s eyes darted aside in specious recollection; whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory) — ‘but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.’ (3.8)
As a Chose student, Van performs in variety shows dancing on his hands as Mascodagama (1.30). Van’s stage name blends maska (Russ., mask) with Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator who discovered the sea route from Portugal around the continent of Africa to India. Maska (“The Mask,” 1884) is a story by Chekhov. In his memoir essay O Chekhove (“On Chekhov”) Vasiliy Nemirovich-Danchenko quotes the words of Chekhov who said that he was not Vasco da Gama or Stanley and would not go to Africa (as recommended to him by doctors):
-- А то ещё куда меня гонят? В Африку. Что я Васко да Гама, что ли? Ведь это, слушайте же, в опере хорошо... Ни за что не поеду. Тоже нашли Стенли. Пусть Василий Иванович едет. Его мамка в детстве ушибла. Ему чем дальше, тем лучше... А я ни за что. Мало я черномази видал! Даже если мне ещё тарелку гречневой каши дадут, не поеду!
In his essay on Chekhov (whose play "The Three Sisters," 1901, is known on Antiterra as Four Sisters), Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Shestov calls Chekhov pevets beznadyozhnosti (the poet of hopelessness):
Чтобы в двух словах определить его тенденцию, я скажу: Чехов был певцом безнадежности. Упорно, уныло, однообразно в течение в сей своей почти 25-летней литературной деятельности Чехов только одно и делал: теми или иными способами убивал человеческие надежды. В этом, на мой взгляд, сущность его творчества.
To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Chekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Chekhov was doing one alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his creation. (I)
In his essay Shestov (whose pseudonym comes from shest’, “six”) speaks of Chekhov’s stories Palata No. 6 (Ward Six, 1892):
И, кажется, “Палату № 6” в своё время очень сочувственно приняли. Кстати прибавим, что доктор умирает очень красиво: в последние минуты видит стадо оленей и т. п.
And, I believe, Ward No. 6 met with a sympathetic reception at the time. In passing I would say that the doctor dies very beautifully: in his last moments he sees a herd of deer... (VI)
and Duel’ (“The Duel,” 1891):
Ближайший по времени рассказ его “Дуэль” носит уже иной характер. Развязка в нем тоже как будто бы идеалистическая, но только как будто бы. Главный герой, Лаевский — “паразит”, как все чеховские герои. Он ничего не делает и ничего делать не умеет, даже не хочет, живёт наполовину на чужой счет, входит в долги, соблазняет женщин и т. д. Положение его невыносимое. Живёт с чужой женой, которая опостылела ему, как и собственная особа, но от которой он не умеет избавиться, вечно нуждается и кругом в долгах, знакомые его не любят и презирают. Он всегда так чувствует себя, что готов бежать без оглядки, всё равно куда, лишь бы уйти с того места, где он сейчас живёт. И его незаконная жена приблизительно в таком же, если не более ужасном, состоянии. Неизвестно зачем, без любви, даже без влечения она отдаётся первому встречному пошляку.
His very next story, The Duel, has a different character. Its conclusion is also apparently idealistic, but only in appearance. The principal hero Laevsky is a parasite like all Chekhov's heroes. He does nothing, can do nothing, does not even wish to do anything, lives chiefly at others' expense, runs up debts, seduces women... His condition is intolerable and he is living with another man's wife, whom he has come to loathe as he loathes himself, yet he cannot get rid of her. He is always in straitened circumstances and in debt everywhere: his friends dislike and despise him. His state of mind is always such that he is ready to run no matter where, never looking backwards, only away from the place where he is living now. His illegal wife is in roughly the same position, unless it be even more horrible. Without knowing why, without love, without even being attracted, she gives herself to the first, commonplace man she meets. (ibid.)
Pervyi vstrechnyi poshlyak (the first, commonplace man she meets) brings to mind Doc Fitzbishop, the surgeon in the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper) whom Van calls poshlyak:
On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal ‘arethusoides’ but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak (‘pretentious vulgarian’) and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack’s martyrdom. (1.42)
Lucette’s music teacher, Philip Rack dies in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital:
Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn't they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? 'Ward Five,' answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack's address at Harper's music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. (ibid.)
Ward Five and Chekhov’ “Ward Six” bring to mind the fifty-six days that, according to Humbert Humbert, it took him to write Lolita. In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov compares his story “Ward Six” to sweet lemonade and mentions the ghost of Hamlet’s father:
Вас нетрудно понять, и Вы напрасно браните себя за то, что неясно выражаетесь. Вы горький пьяница, а я угостил Вас сладким лимонадом, и Вы, отдавая должное лимонаду, справедливо замечаете, что в нем нет спирта. В наших произведениях нет именно алкоголя, который бы пьянил и порабощал, и это Вы хорошо даёте попять. Отчего нет? Оставляя в стороне "Палату No 6" и меня самого, будем говорить вообще, ибо это интересней. Будем говорить об общих причинах, коли Вам не скучно, и давайте захватим целую эпоху. Скажите по совести, кто из моих сверстников, т. е. людей в возрасте 30--45 лет, дал миру хотя одну каплю алкоголя? Разве Короленко, Надсон и все нынешние драматурги не лимонад? Разве картины Репина или Шишкина кружили Вам голову? Мило, талантливо, Вы восхищаетесь и в то же время никак не можете забыть, что Вам хочется курить. Наука и техника переживают теперь великое время, для нашего же брата это время рыхлое, кислое, скучное, сами мы кислы и скучны, умеем рождать только гуттаперчевых мальчиков, и не видит этого только Стасов, которому природа дала редкую способность пьянеть даже от помоев. Причины тут не в глупости нашей, не в бездарности и не в наглости, как думает Буренин, а в болезни, которая для художника хуже сифилиса и полового истощения. У нас нет "чего-то", это справедливо, и это значит, что поднимите подол нашей музе, и Вы увидите там плоское место. Вспомните, что писатели, которых мы называем вечными или просто хорошими и которые пьянят нас, имеют один общий и весьма важный признак: они куда-то идут и Вас зовут туда же, и Вы чувствуете не умом, а всем своим существом, что у них есть какая-то цель, как у тени отца Гамлета, которая недаром приходила и тревожила воображение. У одних, смотря по калибру, цели ближайшие -- крепостное право, освобождение родины, политика, красота или просто водка, как у Дениса Давыдова, у других цели отдалённые -- бог, загробная жизнь, счастье человечества и т. п. Лучшие из них реальны и пишут жизнь такою, какая она есть, но оттого, что каждая строчка пропитана, как соком, сознанием цели, Вы, кроме жизни, какая есть, чувствуете ещё ту жизнь, какая должна быть, и это пленяет Вас.
It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside "Ward No. 6" and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let ms discuss the general causes, if that won't bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.
In his Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions the caretakers of various cemeteries who report that no ghosts walk. In his memoir essay “On Chekhov” (that opens his book “At Cemeteries”) Nemirovich compares Chekhov’s laughter to luch v potyomkakh (a ray in the dark):
Смеялся он редко, но когда смеялся, всем становилось весело, точно луч в потёмках.
He laughed seldom, but when he laughed, everybody was merry, like a ray in the dark.
The author of Speak, Memory (1951), VN was not only a genius of total recall, but also a genius of total invention.