Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley (a small University town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Butler’s Academy for Boys and their annual ball:
I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an exectuvie’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this brdello.
If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triplethe next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my régime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the housesof schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if 'only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.' (2.8)
Butler's Academy for Boys makes one think of Samuel Butler (an English poet and satirist, 1613-1680, the author of Hudibras, 1663) and another Samuel Butler, an English novelist and critic (1835-1902), best known for his satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and semi-autobiographical novel The Way of all Flesh (1903). Proud Flesh is a novel or play by Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital):
"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 Fierté de la Chair.* Absurd."
“She was my child, Quilty.” (2.35)
Paradise in Russian, ray brings to mind Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel by Konstantin Merezhkovski (1855-1921) set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island, and John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh, 1923) and Le Bal du comte d'Orgel ("Count d'Orgel's Ball," 1924) are novels by Raymond Radiguet (a French novelist and poet, 1903-1923). In VN's story Tyazhyolyi dym ("Torpid Smoke," 1935) Radiguet's Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel is among the books that at one time or another had done Grisha’s heart good:
Он опять подвинулся к освещённому столу, с надеждой вспомнив, что куда-то засунул забытую однажды приятелем коробочку папирос. Теперь уже не видно было блестящей булавки, а клеенчатая тетрадь лежала иначе, полураскрывшись (как человек меняет положение во сне). Кажется -- между книгами. Полки тянулись сразу над столом, свет лампы добирался до корешков. Тут был и случайный хлам (больше всего), и учебники по политической экономии (я хотел совсем другое, но отец настоял на своём); были и любимые, в разное время потрафившие душе, книги, "Шатёр" и "Сестра моя жизнь", "Вечер у Клэр" и "Bal du compte d'Orgel", "Защита Лужина" и "Двенадцать стульев", Гофман и Гёльдерлин, Боратынский и старый русский Бэдекер.
He examined again his lamp-lit island, remembering hopefully that he had put somewhere a pack of cigarettes which one evening a friend had happened to leave behind. The shiny safety pin had disappeared, while the exercise book now lay otherwise and was half-open (as a person changes position in sleep). Perhaps, between my books. The light just reached their spines on the shelves above the desk. Here was haphazard trash (predominantly), and manuals of political economy (I wanted something quite different, but Father won out); there were also some favorite books that at one time or another had done his heart good: Gumilyov’s collection of poems Shatyor (Tent), Pasternak's Sestra moya Zhizn' (Life, My Sister), Gazdanov's Vecher u Kler (Evening at Claire's), Radiguet's Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, Sirin's Zashchita Luzhina (Luzhin's Defense), Ilf and Petrov’s Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (The Twelve Chairs), Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Baratynski, and an old Russian guidebook.
The portraits of twelve-year-old Raymond Radiguet and twenty-five-year-old Manuel Humbert (a Catalan artist, 1890-1975) were painted in Paris by Amedeo Modigliani (an Italian artist, 1884-1920). Manuel Humbert was the pseudonym of Kurt Michael Caro (a German publicist, 1905-79), the author of Hitlers „Mein Kampf". Dichtung und Wahrheit (Paris, 1936). Caro is Latin for "flesh, meat of an animal."
*La Vie de la Chair in the Russian Lolita (1967). In the Russian Lolita, Quilty's Proud Flesh becomes Zhivoe myaso ("Live Meat"):
Куильти", - сказал я, - "помните ли вы маленькую девочку по имени Долорес Гейз? Долли Гейз? Долорес в Колорадо? Гейзер в Вайоминге?"
"Да, да, вполне возможно, что это она звонила во все эти места. Но не всё ли равно?"
"Мне не все равно, Куильти. Дело в том, что я ее отец".
"Вздор. Никакой вы не отец. Вы иностранный литературный агент. Один француз перевел моё "Живое мясо" как "La Vie de la Chair". Какое идиотство!"
"Она была моим ребёнком, Куильти". (2.35)