Repetition in written works can produce the illusion of
hidden meanings and this is why, after I became curious about "forty sleeping
tablets" and some kind of "robbery", I felt the itch to go after another
sentence, one about forty thieves.
The capsules Humbert Humbert treasured ( forty of them, all told — forty
nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob
myself of...) led me, at first, to Pale Fire [ forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence
of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)] but I knew
it was another sentence I had in mind. I
finally found it in Bend Sinister: Oh, of course I loved her like forty thousand brothers, as
thick as thieves (terracotta jars, a cypress, a fingernail moon) but we
all were Lamord's pupils, if you know what I mean.'
Chance made me notice other references using "forty"
(numbers of poems, pages,distances, middle-aged men and women ).
There was even a different kind of repetition in RLSK with an
echo of Lolita: So
this was the way I got a list of some forty-two
names among which Sebastian's (S. Knight, 36 Oak Park Gardens,
London, SW) seemed strangely lovely and lost. ...Out of
forty-one unknown persons as many as thirty-seven 'did not come
to question' as the little man put it.
Cp: :
“Haze, Dolores (she!)
in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses - a
fairy princess between her two maids of honor…”.
In the meantime, while oscillating between
those "42" and "41" names, I remembered that VN once
mentioned that he confused his age because of the turn of the Century (SM),
a mistake that reappeared in Kinbote's mistakes about his own and
Shade's ages. I had started to count dates in "Lolita" ( and,
like Humbert Humbert confessed when calculating the mileage, gas and
various others expenses he incurred, from Aug.47 to mid-August 48, I'm
also poor in Arythmetics...)when I noticed that there was often
a "sliding" that displaced a year in "Lolita", or made it impossible
to ascertain years and ages with precision. Almost as if the year of
HH's road-escapade with Lolita was so "hazy" that it could have
been an invention of his, like Kinbote's
Zembla...
Next I was struck by Nabokov's description in OEL..: "It had taken me some forty years to invent
Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing
America." and I contrasted it with a 1962 BBC interview. When asked
if he would ever return to Russia, Nabokov answered: I will
never return. I will never surrender [...] let us not forget that Russia has
grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart
from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think.
This kind of interval and exile is recurrently mentioned: Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted
me to see a dentist when sober [...] His name was Molnar
with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years
later in A Kingdom by the Sea; how did you, the author, manage
to think up those subtle turns [...]that only a Russian would make?
Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still--"
Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to
give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years
later); The "Boyan"
publishing firm [...] occupied a smart three-story house of the
hotel particulier type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema:
forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had
been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. (LATH);
and for no special reason the reader suddenly saw, with
passionate and ridiculous lucidity, his parents, Dr Pavel Pnin and Valeria Pnin,
he with a medical journal, she with a political review, sitting in two
armchairs, facing each other in a small, cheerfully lighted drawing room on
Galernaya Street, St Petersburg, forty years ago.; And at the
heart of that heart sat the King, pale and calm, and on the whole closely
resembling his son as that under-former imagined he would look at forty
himself.[...] Pale and calm[...] 'Abdication!
One-third of the alphabet!'[...]'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity
of exile.'; 'Avtomobil', kostyum [...]said Varvara, and introduced Pnin to Roza
Abramovna Shpolyanski.'We had some mutual friends forty years
ago,' remarked that lady, peering at Pnin with curiosity (PNIN); This was the first year of the Soviet
regime; out of forty pupils in the class only seventeen remained, and every day
they met the teachers with the question 'Will there be lessons today?'
(The Defense)
Although my results were far from "mysterious"
in relation to a real experience relating
forty-years, Russia and exile, the uncertainties in Lolita (
how old was she, 12 going to 13, as HH often mentioned, or 13
already, from another complicated counting that involved a 9
year-old HH in the Riviera?) made me doubt HH's grandiose
"confessions" about that which might only have been a
trivial case of murder. As if it had been
jailed "Gradus" who wrote Pale Fire...(I'm only teasing the list with a
very old issue!!!)