Describing his life with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Rita’s brother, the mayor and boaster of Grainball:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did - and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband - and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant - the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was - and no doubt still is - a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
Rita's brother seems to be a cross between Khlestakov (a boaster whom everybody mistakes for an inspector traveling incognito) and the Town Mayor, the characters in Gogol's Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836). At the end of Gogol's play the Town Mayor says that all he sees are svinye ryla (pigs' snouts) instead of faces, and nothing more. Rita is a short form of Margarita, a feminine given name that means “pearl.” It brings to mind the Latin saying [nolite mittere] margaritas ante porcos ([don't throw] pearls before swine). This saying is based on the verse found in the Bible (Matthew 7:6) in which it is written: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” The Russian version of this saying is quoted by Gogol in his Foreword to Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki ("Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka," 1832):
Бывало, поставит перед собою палец и, глядя на конец его, пойдет рассказывать – вычурно да хитро, как в печатных книжках! Иной раз слушаешь, слушаешь, да и раздумье нападет. Ничего, хоть убей, не понимаешь. Откуда он слов понабрался таких! Фома Григорьевич раз ему насчет этого славную сплел присказку: он рассказал ему, как один школьник, учившийся у какого-то дьяка грамоте, приехал к отцу и стал таким латыньщиком, что позабыл даже наш язык православный. Все слова сворачивает на ус. Лопата у него – лопатус, баба – бабус. Вот, случилось раз, пошли они вместе с отцом в поле. "Как это, батьку, по-вашему называется?" Да и наступил, разинувши рот, ногою на зубцы. Тот не успел собраться с ответом, как ручка, размахнувшись, поднялась и – хвать его по лбу. "Проклятые грабли! – закричал школьник, ухватясь рукою за лоб и подскочивши на аршин, – как же они, черт бы спихнул с мосту отца их, больно бьются!" Так вот как! Припомнил и имя, голубчик! Такая присказка не по душе пришлась затейливому рассказчику. Не говоря ни слова, встал он с места, расставил ноги свои посереди комнаты, нагнул голову немного вперед, засунул руку в задний карман горохового кафтана своего, вытащил круглую под лаком табакерку, щелкнул пальцем по намалеванной роже какого-то бусурманского генерала и, захвативши немалую порцию табаку, растертого с золою и листьями любистка, поднес ее коромыслом к носу и вытянул носом на лету всю кучку, не дотронувшись даже до большого пальца, – и всё ни слова; да как полез в другой карман и вынул синий в клетках бумажный платок, тогда только проворчал про себя чуть ли еще не поговорку: "Не мечите бисер перед свиньями"...
And there's another one. Well, he is such a fine young gentleman that you might easily take him for an assessor or landreeve. When he tells a story he holds up his finger and studies the tip of it, and he uses as many tricks and flourishes as you would find in a book. You listen and listen and begin to get puzzled; you find that for the life of you you can't make head or tail of it. Where did he pick up all those words Foma Grigoryevich once got back at him for this. He told him how a lad who had been having lessons from a deacon came back to his father such a Latin scholar that he had forgotten our own tongue: he put us on the end of all the words; a spade was "spadus," a grampa was "grampus." One day when he was with his father in the fields, he saw a rake and asked: "What do you call that, Father" And without looking what he was doing he stepped on the teeth of the rake. Before his father could answer, the handle swung up and hit the lad on the head. "Damn that rake!" he cried, clapping his hand to his forehead and jumping half a yard into the air. "May the devil shove its father off a bridge!" So he remembered the name after all!
The tale was not to the taste of our ingenious story-teller. He rose from his seat without a word, stood in the middle of the room with his legs apart, craned his head forward a little, thrust his hand into the back pocket of his pea-green coat, took out his round lacquer snuff-box, tapped the face of some Mussulman general, and, taking a good pinch of snuff powdered with wood ash and leaves of lovage, crooked his elbow, lifted his hand to his nose and sniffed the whole pinch up with no help from his thumb-all without a word. And it was only when he brought out a checked blue cotton handkerchief from another pocket that he muttered something - even think it was a saying - about not casting your pearls before swine.
One of the stories in "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" is Noch' pered Rozhdestvom ("Christmas Eve"). According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. Gogol died in 1852, exactly one hundred years before (in the times when Alaska was a part of the Russian empire).
In her Zapiski (“Memoirs,” 1900-02) Marfa Sabinin describes her only meeting with Gogol in the summer of 1845 (when the memoirist was fourteen) in Weimar:
«17 (29) июня <...> узнали, что приехали и были у отца Николай Васильевич Гоголь и граф Александр Петрович Толстой. На другой день они пришли к отцу, и я в первый и последний раз видела знаменитого писателя. Он был небольшого роста и очень худощав; его узкая голова имела своеобразную форму — френолог бы сказал, что выдаются религиозность и упрямство. Светлые волосы висели прямыми прядями вокруг головы. Лоб его, как будто подавшийся назад, всего больше выступал над глазами, которые были длинноватые и зорко смотрели; нос сгорбленный, очень длинный и худой, а тонкие губы имели сатирическую улыбку. Гоголь был очень нервный, движения его были живые и угловатые, и он не сидел долго на одном месте: встанет, скажет что-нибудь, пройдется несколько раз по комнате и опять сядет. Он приехал в Веймар, чтобы поговорить с моим отцом о своем желании поступить в монастырь. Видя его болезненное состояние, следствием которого было ипохондрическое настроение духа, отец отговаривал его и убедил не принимать окончательного решения. Вообще Гоголь мало говорил, оживлялся только когда говорил, а то все сидел в раздумье. Он попросил меня сыграть ему Шопена; помню только, что я играла ему. Моей матери он подарил хромолитографию — вид Брюлевской террасы; она наклеила этот вид в свой альбом и попросила Гоголя подписаться под ним. Он долго ходил по комнате, наконец сел к столу и написал: „Совсем забыл свою фамилию; кажется, был когда-то Гоголем“. Он исповедовался вечером накануне своего отъезда, и исповедь его длилась очень долго. После Св. Причастия он и его спутник сейчас же отправились в дальнейший путь в Россию, пробыв в Веймаре пять дней.»
According to Marfa Sabinin, a phrenologist would have said that a peculiar form of Gogol’s narrow head indicates Gogol’s religiousity and obstinacy. Phrenology is a pseudoscience founded by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. Brain + Gall = grain + ball = Grainball.
Liszt’s best pupil, Marfa Sabinin played some Chopin for Gogol. Lolita uses piano lessons that she takes with Miss Emperor as an alibi for her meetings with Quilty. At the moment of her abduction (Jule 4, 1949) from the Elphinstone hospital Lolita is fourteen (the age of Marfa Sabinin when she met Gogol). Humbert fails to find out the identity of Lolita’s lover and abandons the search, believing that the fiend is either in Tartary or burning away in his cerebellum:
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze - dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat - the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we were in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses! (2.26)
The amnesiac whom Humbert and Rita find in their bed brings to mind Gogol's inscription in the album of Marfa Sabinin's mother:
"Совсем забыл свою фамилию; кажется, был когда-то Гоголем."
"I have completely forgotten my surname; it seems that I was once Gogol."
Jack Humbertson is almost an albino. The Russian word for "albino," al'binos rhymes with nos (nose). Nos ("The Nose," 1835) is a story by Gogol. Perhaps, the mysterious person whom Humbert and Rita find snoring in their bed is someone's nose (or a different run-away organ) of one of those labeled, fat, pink men who stagger around the hotel where they hold conventions? Recalling his life with Lolita, Humbert compares himself to a big phallus:
There was the day, during our first trip - our first circle of paradise - when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn - to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration - and every limit presupposes something beyond it - hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her. (2.32)