Perusing old issues of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) finds out, among other things, that the size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host:
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed - what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form nothing of myself could I make out. (2.26)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert Gumbert calls an old man who follows Rita (a girl whom Humbert picked up at a roadside bar somewhere between Montreal and New York) into the barroom porazitel'nyi parazit (a remarkable parasite):
Поразительный паразит пошёл за Ритой в бар. С той грустной улыбкой, которая появлялась у неё на лице от избытка алкоголя, она представила меня агрессивно-пьяному старику, говоря, что он — запамятовала вашу фамилию, дорогуша — учился с ней в одной школе. Он дерзко попробовал задержать её, и в последовавшей потасовке я больно ушиб большой палец об его весьма твёрдую голову. Затем мне пришлось некоторое время прогуливать и проветривать Риту в раскрашенном осенью парке Зачарованных Охотников. Она всхлипывала и повторяла, что скоро, скоро я брошу её, как все в жизни её бросали, и я спел ей вполголоса задумчивую французскую балладу и сочинил альбомный стишок ей в забаву:
Палитра клёнов в озере, как рана,
Отражена. Ведёт их на убой
В багряном одеянии Диана
Перед гостиницею голубой.
Она спросила: «Но почему голубой, когда она белая? Почему — Господи Боже мой…» — и зарыдала снова. Я решительно повёл её к автомобилю. Мы продолжали наш путь в Нью-Йорк, и там она опять зажила в меру счастливо, прохлаждаясь под дымчатой синевой посреди нашей маленькой террасы на тридцатом этаже. Замечаю, что каким-то образом у меня безнадёжно спутались два разных эпизода — моё посещение Брайсландской библиотеки на обратном пути в Нью-Йорк и прогулка в парке на переднем пути в Кантрип, но подобным смешением смазанных красок не должен брезговать художник-мнемозинист.
I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this was - what was the name again, son? - a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain her, and in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his hard head. In the silent painted park where I walked her and aired her a little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had, and I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive rhymes to amuse her:
The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorse to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
She said: “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” and started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the little terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection. (2.26)
In Ot avtorov, the authorial note prefacing their novel Zolotoy telyonok (The Little Golden Calf, 1931), Ilf and Petrov, the authors of Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928) and Odnoetazhnaya Amerika (1937), a travelogue translated into English as Little Golden America, mention the humorless author of a six-volume novel entitled A parazity nikogda! ("And the Parasites are Never!"):
— Скажите, — спросил нас некий строгий гражданин из числа тех, что признали советскую власть несколько позже Англии и чуть раньше Греции, — скажите, почему вы пишете смешно? Что за смешки в реконструктивный период? Вы что, с ума сошли?
После этого он долго и сердито убеждал нас в том, что сейчас смех вреден.
— Смеяться грешно? — говорил он. — Да, смеяться нельзя! И улыбаться нельзя! Когда я вижу эту новую жизнь, эти сдвиги, мне не хочется улыбаться, мне хочется молиться!
— Но ведь мы не просто смеемся, — возражали мы. — Наша цель - сатира именно на тех людей, которые не понимают реконструктивного периода.
— Сатира не может быть смешной, — сказал строгий товарищ и, подхватив под руку какого-то кустаря-баптиста, которого он принял за стопроцентного пролетария, повел его к себе на квартиру.
Повел описывать скучными словами, повел вставлять в шеститомный роман под названием: «А паразиты никогда!»
The novel's strange title, A parazity nikogda! ("And the Parasites are Never!"), was borrowed by the humorless author from the 1902 Russian text (by Arkadiy Kotz, 1872-1943) of the Internationale (the national anthem of Soviet Russia in 1918-1944):
Лишь мы, работники всемирной
Великой армии труда,
Владеть землёй имеем право,
Но паразиты — никогда!
И если гром великий грянет
Над сворой псов и палачей,
Для нас всё так же солнце станет
Сиять огнём своих лучей.
The stanza's Line 6, Nad svoroy psov i palachey ("Over the pack of dogs and executioners"), brings to mind Actaeon's hunting hounds that tore their master (transformed into a stag by Diana, the ancient Roman goddess of hunting) apart. The stanza's last lines, Dlya nas vsyo tak zhe solntse stanet / Siyat' ognyom svoikh luchey ("For us the sun will as ever / shine with the fire of its rays"), makes one think of John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). In his Foreword John Ray, Jr. mentions Humbert's singing violin:
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual;” and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H. H.” No doubt, he is horrible, is is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
Humbert's singing violin (Gumbert's pevuchaya skripka) makes one think of Chekhov's story Skripka Rotshil'da ("Rothschild's Violin," 1894). Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos; a Study of Bird Parasites (1952) is a book (it was a huge success) by Miriam Rothschild (a British natural scientist and author with contributions to zoology, entomology, and botany, 1908-2005). Miriam Rothschild's birthday, August 5, is the day of Fiedrich Engels's death (Karl Marx's closest friend and coauthor, Friedrich Engels died, at age seventy-four, on August 5, 1895). In the Russian Lolita John Ray's Foreword is dated "August 5, 1955:"
Джон Рэй, д-р философии
Видворт, Массачусетс
5 августа 1955 года
Btw., Rita is a character (a young lady who can drink any amount of liquor without ever getting drunk and who tastelessly tells obscene stories) is a character in Chekhov's story Volodya bol'shoy i Volodya malen'kiy ("The Two Volodyas," 1893).
The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. The territory of the Soviet Union (USSR) occupied approximately one-sixth of the Earth's total land surface, making it the largest country in the world, stretching across vast parts of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia and encompassing fifteen constituent republics before its dissolution in 1991.