According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), his father had a dash of the Danube in his veins:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. 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. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)
The Danube's Russian name is Dunay. Wanda von Dunajew is the central female character in Leopold Sacher-Masoch's novella Venus in Furs (1870). "A furry warmth" mentioned by Humbert seems to hint at the title of Sacher-Masoch's novella.
The name Sacher brings to mind sicher ist sicher (better safe than sorry), the words of Humbert's Swiss uncle Gustave Trapp that Humbert quotes when he describes his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland):
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 Mikhail 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) and differs only in one letter from Lenin. 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.
A character in Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Severin von Kusiemski brings to mind No vreden sever dlya menya (but harmful is the North to me), a line in Chapter One (II: 14) in Pushkin's EO:
Так думал молодой повеса,
Летя в пыли на почтовых,
Всевышней волею Зевеса
Наследник всех своих родных.
Друзья Людмилы и Руслана!
С героем моего романа
Без предисловий, сей же час
Позвольте познакомить вас:
Онегин, добрый мой приятель,
Родился на брегах Невы,
Где, может быть, родились вы
Или блистали, мой читатель;
Там некогда гулял и я:
Но вреден север для меня.1
Thus a young scapegrace thought
as with post horses in the dust he flew,
by the most lofty will of Zeus
the heir of all his kin.
Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan!
The hero of my novel,
without preambles, forthwith,
I'd like to have you meet:
Onegin, a good pal of mine,
was born upon the Neva's banks,
where maybe you were born,
or used to shine, my reader!
There formerly I too promenaded —
but harmful is the North to me.1
1. Written in Bessarabia. (Pushkin's note)
Like Pushkin's Onegin, VN was born na bregakh Nevy (upon the Neva's banks). An American citizen, he had a dash of the Neva in his veins.
In Chapter Four ( XXVI: 9-14) of EO Lenski plays chess with Olga and with a pawn takes in abstraction his own rook:
Уединясь от всех далёко,
Они над шахматной доской,
На стол облокотясь, порой
Сидят, задумавшись глубоко,
И Ленской пешкою ладью
Берёт в рассеяньи свою.
Secluded far from everybody,
over the chessboard they,
their elbows on the table, sometimes
sit deep in thought,
and Lenski with a pawn
takes in abstraction his own rook.
In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stuliev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) one of the chapters is entitled Mezhduplanetnyi shakhmatnyi kongress (“The Interplanetary Chess Tournament”). At Beardsley Humbert plays chess with Gaston Godin, an old pederast. Describing his life in Paris, Humbert mentions uranists (homosexuals):
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
... Fräulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégé de la poesie anglaise ” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the fortiesand the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. (1.5)
The word "uranist" comes from Aphrodite Urania. The ancient Roman goddess of love, Venus corresponds to Greek Aphrodite. Uran is the seventh planet of the Solar System.
In The Twelve Chairs Ostap Bender (who constantly appeals to gentlemen of the jury) marries Mme Gritsatsuev (a passionate woman, a poet's dream) in order to get access to one of her chairs. Humbert marries Charlotte Haze (a widow, like Mme Gritsatsuev) in order to get access to her daughter.
Clare Quilty (a playwright who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital and whom Humbert tracked down in order to kill him) tells Humbert that a Frenchman once translated his Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair:
“People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre , they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.”
“Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?”
“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”
“I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fiert de la Chair. Absurd.”
“She was my child, Quilty.” (1.35)
According to Quilty, he has made a private movie out of Marquis de Sade's Justine:
“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)
De Sade and Sacher-Masoch make one think of sadomasochism.
In Ilf and Petrov's novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) Ostap Bender calls himself Bender-Zadunayskiy. Zadunayskiy means “Trans-Danubian.” The novel's characters include Aleksandr Ivanovich Koreyko (a secret Soviet millionaire whom Bender blackmails). When Humbert revisits Ramsdale in 1952, Mrs. Chatfield tells him that Charlie Holmes (Lolita's first lover, son of the headmistress of Camp Q) has just been killed in Korea:
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, 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)
Humbert Humbert thinks of the French phrase vient de mourir. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his first erotic experience and quotes the words of his father, "Tolstoy vient de mourir:"
High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother.
“Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters. (Chapter Ten, 3)
Leo Tolstoy died on Nov. 7, 1910 (OS). Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris.
Harold Haze (Lolita's father) and his wife Charlotte spent their honeymoon in Vera-Cruz, Mexico (where Lolita was conceived). In The Twelve Chairs Ellochka the Cannibal (whose vocabulary consists of thirty words and short phrases) tells Ostap Bender that her fur collar is a meksikanskiy tushkan (Mexican jerboa). In the vocubalary of Fima Sobak (Ellochka's best friend, a cultured girl) there are one hundred and eighty words (one of them is "homosexualism"). Sobaka is Russian for "dog." Lolita's mother dies under the wheels of a truck because of a neighbor's hysterical dog.
The name Fima is a diminutive of Serafima. Serafim is Russian for "seraph." In Pushkin's poem Prorok ("The Prophet," 1826) shestikrylyi serafim (a six-winged seraph) appeared to the hero at the crossroads. In E. A. Poe's poem Annabel Lee (1849) the wingèd seraphs of Heaven coveted Annabel and the author. At the beginning of Lolita Humbert mentions "the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs:"
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. (1.1)
The beginning of VN's novel makes one think of Plodotvornaya debyutnaya ideya ("A Fruitful Opening Idea"), the introductory lecture that in The Twelve Chairs Ostap Bender reads in the Vasyuki Chess Club. In his lecture Ostap asks: "what is an idea?" and answers: "an idea is quasi una fantasia." When Humbert revisits Ramsdale in 1952, Stella Fantasia (Lolita's former classmate) marries Murphy. The name Murphy means "sea warrior" and brings to mind a princedom by the sea where thirteen-year-old Humbert loved Annabel Leigh.
The name Stella means in Latin "star." The Russian version of the saying per aspera ad astra (through hardships to the stars), cherez ternii k zvyozdam, brings to mind klubok terniy, as in the Russian Lolita (1967) VN renders "tangle of thorns" (Look at this tangle of thorns).