According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), his mother was a granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively:
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)
A parson-naturalist was a cleric, who often saw the study of natural science as an extension of his religious work. The philosophy entailed the belief that God, as the creator of all things, wanted man to understand his creations and thus to study them by collecting and classifying organisms and other natural phenomena.
The naturalist theologians John Ray (1627–1705) and William Paley (1743–1805) argued that the elaborate complexity of the world of nature was evidence for the existence of a creator. Accordingly, a parson-naturalist frequently made use of his insights into philosophy and theology when interpreting what he observed in natural history. Charles Darwin (1809-82) aspired to be a parson-naturalist until his return from his voyage aboard Beagle. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was born in southern Wales but spent the later years of his life at a number of homes in Dorset and is sometimes called "Dorset's Darwin."
The name of the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr., seems to be a tribute to the naturalist theologian John Ray.
The author of Chto delat'? ("What to Do?", 1864), N. G. Chernyshevski (1828-89) was the son of a priest. In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev points out that Chernyshevski criticized Darwin and Wallace:
Когда однажды, в 55 году, расписавшись о Пушкине, он захотел дать пример "бессмысленного сочетания слов", то привел мимоходом тут же выдуманное "синий звук", - на свою голову напророчив пробивший через полвека блоковский "звонко-синий час". "Научный анализ показывает вздорность таких сочетаний", - писал он, - не зная о физиологическом факте "окрашенного слуха". "Не всё ли равно, - спрашивал он (у радостно соглашавшегося с ним бахмучанского или новомиргородского читателя), - голубоперая щука или щука с голубым пером (конечно второе, крикнули бы мы, - так оно выделяется лучше, в профиль!), ибо настоящему мыслителю некогда заниматься этим, особенно если он проводит на народной площади больше времени, чем в своей рабочей комнате". Другое дело - "общий план". Любовь к общему (к энциклопедии), презрительная ненависть к особому (к монографии) и заставляли его упрекать Дарвина в недельности, Уоллеса в нелепости ("... все эти ученые специальности от изучения крылышек бабочек до изучения наречий кафрского языка"). У самого Чернышевского был в этом смысле какой-то опасный размах, какое-то разудалое и самоуверенное "всё сойдет", бросающее сомнительную тень на достоинства как раз специальных его трудов. "Общий интерес" он понимал, однако, по-своему: исходил из мысли, что больше всего читателя интересует "производительность". Разбирая в 55 году какой-то журнал, он хвалит в нем статьи "Термометрическое состояние земли" и "Русские каменноугольные бассейны", решительно бракуя, как слишком специальную, ту единственную, которую хотелось бы прочесть: "Географическое распространение верблюда".
Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”
"The Geographical Distribution of the Camel” brings to mind the Drome cigarettes that Clare Quilty (a playwright who abducts Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital and whom Humbert tracks down and kills) smokes and advertizes.
In The Gift Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's stepfather, Fyodor's landlord) tells Fyodor that, if he had time, he would have written a novel:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал... Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, - но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, - знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, - знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, - и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать - соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем - просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, - и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" - и Борис Иванович, обрати в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (Chapter Three)
In Lolita Humbert (who is thirty-seven in 1947) falls in love with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and, not long thinking, marries her mother.
The surname Chernyshevski comes from chyornyi (black) and brings to mind Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (schwarz is German for "black") mentioned by John Ray, Jr. in his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript:
Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unsweri\vingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H. H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H. H.” describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
On the other hand, John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Luch sveta v tyomnom tsarstve ("A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom," 1860), Dobrolyubov's article on Ostrovski's play Groza ("The Thunderstorm," 1859). In Ostrovski's play Katerina (whom Dobrolyubov compares to a ray of light) fears that she will be killed by lightning. Humbert's photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning). Clare Quilty is the author of The Lady who Loved Lightning.