During Humbert's second road trip with Lolita across the USA a very old barber in Kasbeam gives Humbert a very mediocre haircut. Kasbeam brings to mind Mount Kazbek famously mentioned by Lermontov in his poem The Demon (1829-40) and Kazbich, a character in Bela, the first novella in Lermontov's Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time," 1840). The epigraph to Lermontov's poem Ne ver' sebe ("Don't Trust Yourself," 1839) is from A. Barbier's poem Iambs (1831):
Que nous font aprés tout les vulgaires
abois
De tous ces charlatans, qui donnent de
la voix,
Les marchands de pathos et les faiseurs
d’emphase
Et tous les baladins qui dansent sur
la phrase?
A. Barbier
Barbier is French for barber. The Barber of Seville is a comedy (1775) by Beaumarchais and an opera (1816) by Rossini. Seville is the capital and largest city of Andalusia (a province in Spain). Humbert compares Lolita to Carmen, the title character of a novella (1845) by Mérimée. The action in it takes place in Andalusia (in Córdoba and Seville).
In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita "Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone" becomes pod znakom Serebryanoy Shpory, v Elfinstone:
The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pine-log kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all - well, really… After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain - and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. (2.22)
Двухкомнатный коттедж, вперёд задержанный нами, под знаком Серебряной Шпоры, в Эльфинстоне (не дай Бог никому услышать их стон), оказался принадлежащим к лакированной, смугло-сосновой, избяной породе, которая так нравилась Лолите в дни нашей первой беззаботной поездки. Ах, всё теперь изменилось... Я говорю не о Траппе или Траппах... В конце концов... ну, сами понимаете... В конце концов, господа, становилось достаточно ясно, что все эти идентичные детективы в призматически-меняющихся автомобилях были порождением моей мании преследования, повторными видениями, основанными на совпадениях и случайном сходстве. Soyons logiques, кукарекала и петушилась галльская часть моего рассудка, прогоняя всякую мысль, что какой-нибудь очарованный Лолитой коммивояжер или гангстер из кинокомедии и его приспешники травят меня, надувают меня и разными другими уморительными способами пользуются моим странным положением перед законом. Помнится, я что-то напевал, заглушая панику. Мне даже удалось выработать теорию, объясняющую подложный вызов из "Бурдолея"... Но если я мог не думать о Траппе, как я не думал о недавних своих конвульсиях на газоне в Чампионе, я никак не мог поладить с другой мукой: знать, что Лолита так близка и вместе с тем так горестно недостижима, и так любить её, так любить как раз накануне новой эры, когда по моим волховским исчислениям она бы должна была перестать быть нимфеткой, перестать терзать меня...
Na serebryanye shpory… (“At the silver spurs I look pensively,” 1833-34) is a poem by Lermontov. G. Ivanov’s poem Melodiya stanovitsya tsvetkom... ("The melody becomes a flower," 1951) ends in the lines I Lermontov odin vykhodit na dorogu, / Serebryanymi shporami zvenya (and Lermontov goes out on the road alone, / jingling with his silver spurs):
Мелодия становится цветком,
Он распускается и осыпается,
Он делается ветром и песком,
Летящим на огонь весенним мотыльком,
Ветвями ивы в воду опускается...
Проходит тысяча мгновенных лет
И перевоплощается мелодия
В тяжёлый взгляд, в сиянье эполет,
В рейтузы, в ментик, в "Ваше благородие"
В корнета гвардии - о, почему бы нет?..
Туман... Тамань... Пустыня внемлет Богу.
- Как далеко до завтрашнего дня!..
И Лермонтов один выходит на дорогу,
Серебряными шпорами звеня.
The allusion is, of course, to the first stanza of Lermontov’s poem Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu (“I go out on the road alone…” 1841), in which star converses with star:
Выхожу один я на дорогу;
Сквозь туман кремнистый путь блестит;
Ночь тиха. Пустыня внемлет богу,
И звезда с звездою говорит.
Alone I set out on the road;
The flinty path is sparkling in the mist;
The night is still. The desert harks to God,
And star with star converses.
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.
Gray Star and Mona Dahl (Lolita's friend at Beardsley College) bring to mind seraya ot zvyozd dal’ (remote regions grey from the stars) mentioned by VN at the beginning of Drugie berega (“Other Shores,” 1954), the Russian version of his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951):
Сколько раз я чуть не вывихивал разума, стараясь высмотреть малейший луч личного среди безличной тьмы по оба предела жизни? Я готов был стать единоверцем последнего шамана, только бы не отказаться от внутреннего убеждения, что себя я не вижу в вечности лишь из-за земного времени, глухой стеной окружающего жизнь. Я забирался мыслью в серую от звёзд даль -- но ладонь скользила всё по той же совершенно непроницаемой глади. Кажется, кроме самоубийства, я перепробовал все выходы. Я отказывался от своего лица, чтобы проникнуть заурядным привидением в мир, существовавший до меня. Я мирился с унизительным соседством романисток, лепечущих о разных йогах и атлантидах. Я терпел даже отчёты о медиумистических переживаниях каких-то английских полковников индийской службы, довольно ясно помнящих свои прежние воплощения под ивами Лхассы. В поисках ключей и разгадок я рылся в своих самых ранних снах -- и раз уж я заговорил о снах, прошу заметить, что безоговорочно отметаю фрейдовщину и всю её тёмную средневековую подоплеку, с её маниакальной погоней за половой символикой, с её угрюмыми эмбриончиками, подглядывающими из природных засад угрюмое родительское соитие.
Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. (Chapter One, 1)
Harold Haze and his wife Charlotte (Lolita's parents) spent their honeymoon in Vera Cruz, Mexico (where Lolita was conceived). Describing his stay with Lolita in Kasbeam, Humbert mentions Pisky (the town where Lolita was born):
That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of food crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put up at Chestnut Court - nice cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees, an old swing - and a tremendous sunset which the tried child ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam because it was only thirty miles north from her home town but on the following morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again the sidewalk where she had played hopscotch some five years before. For obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip, even though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way - to remain in the car and not look up old friends. My relief at her abandoning the project was spoiled by the thought that had she felt I were totally against the nostalgic possibilities of Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not have given up so easily. On my mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too and complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed till teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt better she suggested we just continue westward. I must say she was very sweet and languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I decided to go and fetch her a toothsome picnic lunch in Kasbeam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of a hill, and from our window you could see the road winding down, and then running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chestnut trees, towards the pretty town, which looked singularly distinct and toylike in the pure morning distance. One could make out an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle, and a dog, a bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those pilgrims and mules winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue hills and red little people. I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down, eventually meeting the cyclist - a plain plump girl with pigtails, followed by a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. (2.16)
In Elphinstone (a city where Lolita is hospitalized and abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty) Humbert dreams of going with Lolita to Mexico:
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap - two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. (2.22)