After murdering Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) wonders if some surgeon of genius might not revive his victim:
I wondered idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. (2.36)
In the novel’s Russian version (1967) Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert Humbert in Russian spelling) calls Quilty (the writer who always smoked the Drom cigarettes and who is in the Droms ad) Kurilkuilty (“Smoquilty”) and Kler-Dromader (“Clare the Dromedary”):
Мелькнула досужая мысль, что, может быть, гениальный хирург изменит собственную карьеру и вместе с нею — как знать — всю судьбу человечества, тем, что воскресит Курилкуильти, Клэра-Дромадера. (2.36)
Kurilkuilty seems to hint at Pushkin’s epigram on Kachenovski, Zhiv, zhiv Kurilka (“Alive, alive is Kurilka, 1825):
Как! жив ещё Курилка журналист?
— Живёхонек! всё так же сух и скучен,
И груб, и глуп, и завистью размучен,
Всё тискает в свой непотребный лист —
И старый вздор, и вздорную новинку.
— Фу! надоел Курилка журналист!
Как загасить вонючую лучинку?
Как уморить Курилку моего?
Дай мне совет. — Да... плюнуть на него.
Pushkin’s epigram ends in the lines:
How to kill my Kurilka?
Give me an advice. – How… just spit on him.
In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) Father Fyodor (one of the three diamond hunters) in a letter to his wife from Baku mentions odnogorbyi verblyud (the dromedary) that spat on him at the bazaar:
Ох, матушка, забыл тебе написать про два страшных случая, происшедших со мною в городе Баку: 1) Уронил пиджак брата твоего булочника в Каспийское море и 2) В меня на базаре плюнул одногорбый верблюд. Эти оба происшествия меня крайне удивили. Почему власти допускают такое бесчинство над проезжими пассажирами, тем более что верблюда я не тронул, а даже сделал ему приятное - пощекотал хворостинкой в ноздре. А пиджак ловили всем обществом, еле выловили, а он возьми и окажись весь в керосине. Уж я и не знаю, что скажу брату твоему булочнику. Ты, голубка, пока что держи язык за зубами. Обедает ли еще Евстигнеев, а если нет, то почему?
Oh, I forgot to tell you about two frightful things that happened to me here in Baku: (1) I accidentally dropped your brother's coat in the Caspian; and (2) I was spat on in the bazaar by a dromedary. Both these happenings greatly amazed me. Why do the authorities allows such scandalous behaviour towards travellers, all the more since I had not touched the dromedary, but had actually been nice to it and tickled its nose with a twig. As for the jacket, everybody helped to fish it out and we only just managed it; it was covered with kerosene, believe it or not. Don't mention a word about it, my dearest. Is Evstigneyev still having meals?
At the end of Ilf and Petrov’s novel Vorob’yaninov with a razor cuts Bender’s throat while Bender is asleep. But in Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) we learn that the surgeons managed to save Bender’s life. In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) Shade mentions "those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." In “The Golden Calf” Ostap Bender (whose father was a Turkish subject) calls himself Bender-Zadunayskiy. Zadunayskiy means “Trans-Danubian.” According to Humbert Humbert, his father had a dash of the Danube in his veins:
My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. (1.2)
In his story Tyazhyolyi dym (“Torpid Smoke,” 1935) VN mentions Ilf and Petrov’s "Twelve Chairs" and Gaito Gazdanov's novel Vecher u Kler ("Evening at Claire's," 1929):
Он опять подвинулся к освещенному столу, с надеждой вспомнив, что куда-то засунул забытую однажды приятелем коробочку папирос. Теперь уже не видно было блестящей булавки, а клеенчатая тетрадь лежала иначе, полураскрывшись (как человек меняет положение во сне). Кажется - между книгами. Полки тянулись сразу над столом, свет лампы добирался до корешков. Тут был и случайный хлам (больше всего), и учебники по политической экономии (я хотел совсем другое, но отец настоял на своем); были и любимые, в разное время потрафившие душе, книги, "Шатер" и "Сестра моя жизнь", "Вечер у Клэр" и "Bal du compte d'Orgel" ("Бал графа д'Оржеля"), "Защита Лужина" и "Двенадцать стульев", Гофман и Гёльдерлин, Боратынский и старый русский Бэдекер. Он почувствовал, уже не первый,- нежный, таинственный толчок в душе и замер, прислушиваясь - не повторится ли? Душа была напряжена до крайности, мысли затмевались, и, придя в себя, он не сразу вспомнил, почему стоит у стола и трогает книги. Бело-синяя картонная коробочка, засунутая между Зомбартом и Достоевским, оказалась пустой. По-видимому, не отвертеться. Была, впрочем, еще одна возможность.
He examined again his lamp-lit island, remembering hopefully that he had put somewhere a pack of cigarettes which one evening a friend had happened to leave behind. The shiny safety pin had disappeared, while the exercise book now lay otherwise and was half-open (as a person changes position in sleep). Perhaps, between my books. The light just reached their spines on the shelves above the desk. Here was haphazard trash (predominantly), and manuals of political economy (I wanted something quite different, but Father won out); there were also some favorite books that at one time or another had done his heart good: Gumilyov’s collection of poems Shatyor (Tent), Pasternak’s Sestra moya Zhizn’ (Life, My Sister), Gazdanov’s Vecher u Kler (Evening at Claire’s), Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, Sirin’s Zashchita Luzhina (Luzhin’s Defense), Ilf and Petrov’s Dvenadtsat’ Stul’ev (Twelve Chairs), Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Baratynski, and an old Russian guidebook. Again that gentle mysterious shock. He listened. Would the thrill be repeated? His mind was in a state of extreme tension, logical thought was eclipsed, and when he came out of his trance, it took him some time to recall why he was standing near the shelves and fingering books. The blue-and-white package that he had stuck between Professor Sombart and Dostoyevski proved to be empty. Well, it had to be done, no getting out of it. There was, however, another possibility.
The title of VN’s story brings to mind Hodasevich’s collection Tyazhyolaya lira (“Heavy Lyre,” 1923). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions Hodasevich and his Heavy Lyre:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
The half of a Caporal Vert cigarette brings to mind mais un Caporal est une cigarette (Quilty’s words to Humbert):
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. (2.35)
One of Kipling’s Just So Stories is “How the Camel Got His Hump.” In the penultimate couplet of his poem The Betrothed (1886) Kipling says:
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
In "The Golden Calf" Bender and Koreyko cross the desert on camels. The surname Koreyko (of the secret Soviet millionaire) comes from Korea. When Humbert revisits Ramsdale, Mrs. Chatfield tells him that Charlie Holmes (Lolita's first lover) has just been killed in Korea:
It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen -
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)
When Panikovski (one of the members of the Antelope Gnu team in "The Golden Calf") sees Zosya Sinitski (a girl with whom both Bender and Koreyko are in love), he exclaims: kakaya femina! (what a woman!). In the dining room of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Humbert thinks: "Oh fame! Oh femina:"
“Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
“Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?”
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.
“Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Droms ad.”
Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina! (1.27)
In the draft Pushkin’s mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne (“A Small House in Kolomna,” 1830) has the epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 279-80): Modo vir, modo femina (now a man, now a woman). There is modo in Quasimodo, the hunchback in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). In the Russian Lolita Gumbert Gumbert mentions Victor Hugo, the author of L'Art d'être grand-père ("The Art of Being a Grandfather," 1877):
Мне теперь думается, что было большой ошибкой вернуться на восток и отдать ее в частную гимназию в Бердслее, вместо того чтобы каким-нибудь образом перебраться через мексиканскую границу, благо было так близко, и притаиться годика на два в субтропическом парадизе, после чего я мог бы преспокойно жениться на маленькой моей креолке; ибо, признаюсь, смотря по состоянию моих гланд и ганглий, я переходил в течение того же дня от одного полюса сумасшествия к другому - от мысли, что около 1950-ro года мне придется тем или иным способом отделаться от трудного подростка, чьё волшебное нимфетство к тому времени испарится, - к мысли, что при некотором прилежании и везении мне, может быть, удастся в недалеком будущем заставить ее произвести изящнейшую нимфетку с моей кровью в жилах, Лолиту Вторую, которой было бы восемь или девять лет в 1960-ом году, когда я еще был бы dans la force de l'age; больше скажу - у подзорной трубы моего ума или безумия, хватало силы различить в отдалении лет un vieillard encore vert (или это зелёненькое - просто гниль?), странноватого, нежного, слюнявого д-ра Гумберта, упражняющегося на бесконечно прелестной Лолите Третьей в "искусстве быть дедом", воспетом Виктором Гюго.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporatedto the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert - or was it green rot? - bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. (2.3)
On the other hand, Modo vir, modo femina brings to mind Quilty's coauthor Vivian Darkbloom (who writes a biography My Cue after Quilty's death). Although Vivian is a woman, Vivian Darkbloom is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov.