Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says that his only regret is that he did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night:
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties - she had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in - after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes - say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
The number 342 that reappears in Lolita three times (342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale; 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters; between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert registers, if not actually stays, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes) seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth, and the second planets of the Solar System). In Chapter Ten (XV: 1) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin calls Lunin (a Decembrist, 1787-1845) drug Marsa, Vakkha i Venery (a friend of Mars, Bacchus and Venus):
Друг Марса, Вакха и Венеры,
Тут Лунин дерзко предлагал
Свои решительные меры
И вдохновенно бормотал.
Читал свои Ноэли Пушкин,
Меланхолический Якушкин,
Казалось, молча обнажал
Цареубийственный кинжал.
Одну Россию в мире видя,
Преследуя свой идеал,
Хромой Тургенев им внимал
И, слово рабство ненавидя,
Предвидел в сей толпе дворян
Освободителей крестьян.
A friend of Mars, Bacchus and Venus,
here Lunin daringly suggested
his decisive measures
and muttered in a trance of inspiration;
Pushkin read his noels;
melancholy Yakushkin,
it seemed silently bared
a regicidal dagger;
seeing but Russia in the world,
in her caressing his ideal,
to them did lame Turgenev hearken
and the word slavery hating,
in this crowd of nobles foresaw
the liberators of the peasants.
The surname Lunin comes from luna (moon) or, perhaps, from lun' (a harrier, any of the several species of diurnal hawks) and differs only in one letter from Lenin (whose elder brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was hanged in 1887 for a failed assassination of Alexander III). The number 342 (3-4-2) makes one think of Lenin's book Shag vperyod, dva shaga nazad: Krisis v nashey partii ("One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: A Crisis in Our Party," 1904). Leaving Earth that very same night, Humbert would at first go to Mars (one step forward) and then fly over to Venus (two steps back). 3 + 4 + 2 = 9. Till 2006 there were nine planets in the Solar System.
Klyuch ("The Key," 1929), Begstvo ("The Escape," 1932) and Peshchera ("The Cave," 1936) is a trilogy by Mark Aldanov, the author of Lenin's political biography (1919). "The Key" begins with the murder of Fischer, a rich banker who loves little girls. The title of the third novel, Peshchera, brings to mind a kind of cave where Humbert attempted to possess Annabel Leigh (Humbert's childhood love) for the last time:
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. (1.5)
A snapshot mentioned by Humbert was taken on August 31, 1923 (the last day of Humbert's and Annabel's fatal summer). In non-leap years August 31 is the 243d day of the year. 243 is 342 in reverse. Four months later Annabel died of typhus in Corfu. It seems that Annabel Leigh died on January 1, 1924 (Lenin died on January 21, 1924, three weeks after the New Year). Dolores Haze was born on January 1, 1935 (eleven years after Annabel's death).
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:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
Like 1924 (the year of Lenin's death), 1952 (the year of Humbert's and Lolita's death) was a leap year. Lolita is abducted from Humbert on July 4, 1949. Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert exclaims “Reader! Bruder!”:
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed - what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up - at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault - and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form - nothing of myself could I make out. (2.26)
In his poem An die Freude (“Ode to Joy,” 1785) used by Beethoven in the fourth and last movement of his Ninth Symphony (1824) Schiller says “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” (All people will be brothers). When he composed Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was practically deaf. A veteran of a remote war, Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) is hard of hearing:
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing.
Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dolly plied me with marshmallows and potato chips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount. (2.29)
Beethoven's Appassionata (1806) was Lenin's favorite piece of music. Above Humbert's bed in the Haze house in Ramsdale there is a reproduction of René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata:”
But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left - into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my” bed René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi-studio”! Let’s get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed. (1.10)
“The Kreutzer Sonata” is the Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 in A major (1803) by Ludwig van Beethoven. In his memoir essay Tolstoy v muzykal'nom mire ("Tolstoy in the Musical World," 1939) Leonid Sabaneyev (whose father, the author of a popular book on fishing, was a personal friend of Alexander III) mentions Beethoven's sonata Quasi una fantasia (also know as "The Moonlight Sonata"):
В очень категорической форме это двойственное отношение проявилось, когда Толстой, после исполнения Гольденвейзером сонаты Бетховена (Quasi una fantasia, именуемой обычно почему-то «Лунной») — исполнения, к слову сказать, суховатого и весьма среднего, прослезился и сказал недовольно: «Как я испорчен! На меня эта музыка все-таки действует!»
The author of Kreytserova sonata (“The Kreutzer Sonata,” 1889), Tolstoy died on Nov. 7, 1910. Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris.