In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Mona Dahl (Lolita's best friend and confidant at Beardsley) asks Humbert Humbert to tell her about Ball Zack:
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that shcool year. In the meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I enteretain Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps - could I be mistaken? - a faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke - I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was -? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona’s cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrivedand slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position - a knight’s move from the top - always strangely disturbed me. (2.9)
According to Humbert, the girls called Reverend Rigger "Rev. Rigor Mortis:"
Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont, had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a brilliant garçon; but that was all; memory refused to supply me with the name of the château-lover. (2.24)
Rigor mortis means "postmortem rigidity" (the third stage of death, one of the recognizable signs of death, caused by chemical changes in the muscles post mortem, which cause the limbs of the corpse to stiffen). One of the main characters in Mark Aldanov's Povest' o smerti ("A Tale about Death," 1952) is Honoré de Balzac (a French novelist and playwright, 1799-1850). In the authorial Preface (Ot avtora) to it Aldanov writes:
Эта книга входит в серию моих исторических и современных романов, которую закончит роман "Освобождение". Новый читатель мог бы, если б хотел и имел терпение, ознакомиться с ней в следующем порядке: "Пуншевая водка" (1762 год); "Девятое термидора" (1792-4); "Чертов мост" (1796-9); "Заговор" (1800-1); "Святая Елена, маленький остров" (1821); "Могила воина" (1824); "Десятая симфония" (1815-54); "Повесть о смерти" (1847-50); "Истоки" (1874-81); "Ключ" (1916-17); "Бегство" (1918); "Пещера" (1919-20); "Начало конца" (1937); "Освобождение" (1948). Их многое связывает, -- от общих действующих лиц (или предков и потомков) до некоторых вещей, переходящих от поколения к поколению.
Некоторые главы "Повести о смерти" (как и "Освобождения") появились в последние годы в "Новом русском слове".
According to Aldanov, A Tale about Death is a part of the series of his historical and modern novels that will be completed with Osvobozhdenie ("Liberation"), the last novel in the series. In Aldanov's list, A Tale about Death is preceded by Desyataya simfoniya ("The Tenth Symphony," 1931), a novel dedicated to Sergey Rakhmaninov (a Russian composer, 1873-1943). The epigraph to The Tenth Symphony is from Purgatorio (Canto XI, 80-81):
Е l'onor di quell'arte Ch'alluminare e chiamata in Parisi
Dante
Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mona Dahl is now a student in Paris. If Mona visits the Louvre Museum, she would see there her famous namesake (painted by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503). At the beginning of his authorial Preface (Ot avtora) to The Tenth Symphony - Azef (the novel's full title) Aldanov mentions odna iz dal'nikh komnat Luvra (one of the distant rooms of the Louvre):
В одной из дальних комнат Лувра, за отделом мебели, висят картины Изабе. Небольшая продолговатая комната со стенами, выкрашенными желто-коричневой краской, серенькая с золотым ободком дверь не в пять раз (как двери в парадных залах), а только раза в два выше человеческого роста. Единственное окно завешено. В комнате почти всегда полутемно; нелегко разглядеть как следует эти небольшие картины в старых золоченых, черных, коричневых рамках. На маленьком старинном столе, под стеклом, на выцветшем зеленом бархате - миниатюры. Все это собрано и завещано Лувру дочерью Изабе; она покончила с собой лет пятьдесят тому назад.
Эти чудесные миниатюры, по-моему, еще не оценены по достоинству. Ничто, кажется, не связывает их между собой, а в них целая эпоха: истинный клад для историка и романиста. Они дают нам то, чего не дали огромные полотна Гро или Давида.
Изабе в юности знал людей, которые помнили Людовика XIV. Автор этих страниц раз в жизни видел императрицу Евгению, лично знавшую Изабе. Волнующая связь времен в своей слитности непостижима, - это, быть может, довод в пользу отрывочного, миниатюрного искусства.
«Десятая симфония», конечно, никак не исторический роман и не роман вообще. По замыслу автора, она близка к тому, что в восемнадцатом веке называлось философской повестью, а правильнее было бы называть повестью символической. Основной символ достаточно ясен: «И вот лестница стоит на земле, а верх ее касается неба». Боюсь, основной символ высказан слишком грубо, а неосновные - слишком незаметно. Но об этом судить читателю. Во всяком случае, по идее в небольшой книге этой все связано; неоднородность двух ее частей объясняется тем, что я не чувствовал себя способным писать об Азефе в беллетристической форме.
According to Aldanov, The Tenth Symphony is not a historical novel and not a novel at all. By the authorial idea, it is close to what in the eighteenth century was called a philosophical tale what one might more correctly call a symbolical tale. The main symbol is clear enough: "And here stands a ladder upon the earth, and its top touches heaven." In Genesis (28:12) Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. The list of Lolita's class at the Ramsdale school (a poem that Humbert knows by heart) begins with Grace, Angel, and ends with Windmuller, Louise (now a college sophomore, according to John Ray, Jr.):
Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People’s Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child’s pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school. It is a poem I know already by heart.
Angel, Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack
Beale, Mary
Buck, Daniel
Byron, Marguerite
Campbell, Alice
Carmine, Rose
Chatfield, Phyllis
Clarke, Gordon
Cowan, John
Cowan, Marion
Duncan, Walter
Falter, Ted
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Glave, Mabel
Goodale, Donald
Green, Lucinda
Hamilton, Mary Rose
Haze, Dolores
Honeck, Rosaline
Knight, Kenneth
McCoo, Virginia
McCrystal, Vivian
McFate, Aubrey
Miranda, Anthony
Miranda, Viola
Rosato, Emil
Schlenker, Lena
Scott, Donald
Sheridan, Agnes
Sherva, Oleg
Smith, Hazel
Talbot, Edgar
Talbot, Edwin
Wain, Lull
Williams, Ralph
Windmuller, Louise
A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this “Haze, Dolores” (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of rosesa fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita. (1.11)
The Talbot twins, Edgar and Edwin (with whose elder sister Elizabeth Lolita had a lesbian relationship the previous summer), bring to mind George Talbot, a character (Queen Elizabet's adviser) in Friedrich Schiller's verse play Maria Stuart (1800). In Schiller's tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801) Talbot (the English commander-in-chief) says before his death: "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens (Against stupidity, the gods themselves battle in vain)." Glupost' being Russian for Dummheit (stupidity), Talbot's last words bring to mind Pokhvala gluposti, the Russian title of In Praise of Folly (1509), an essay written in Latin (Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium) by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), a Dutch humanist, Catholic theologian, satirist and philosopher.
After escaping from the Elphinstone hospital with Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who, after a while, throws her away and whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from him), Lolita marries Dick Schiller, a young mining engineer and veteran of a distant was who is hard of hearing. When he composed his Ninth Symphony (1824), in which he used (in the final movement) Schiller's Ode to Joy (An die Freude, 1786), Ludwig van Beethoven (a German composer, 1770-1827) was practically deaf. Bethoven is the author of nine symphonies. The Tenth Symphony was written by Mark Adanov (a Russian writer, 1886-1957). One is tempted to call VN's Lolita "the eleventh symphony." According to John Ray, Jr., Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. November is the eleventh month of the year. Mona Dahl's "Ball Zack" makes one think of football and Alexander Zak (VN's pupil in Berlin in the 1920s). A football team has eleven players (in St. Petersburg before the 1917 Revolution, at Cambridge and in Berlin in the 1920s VN was a goalkeeper). Vratar' (goalkeeper in Russian) brings to mind vrata ada (the gates of hell) in Dante's Inferno, with the inscription above them: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"). Dante's Divine Comedy (1508-21) has three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. In Dante's Hell there are nine circles. Describing his life with Lolita, Humbert says that he dwelled deep in his elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise:
She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would - invariably, with icy precision - plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise. (2.3)