According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and 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.
Mal'chik u Khrista na yolke ("The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree") is a Christmas-time short story by Fyodor Dostoevski (a Russian writer, 1821-1881) that was first published in A Writer's Diary, January 1876. The characters in Dostoevski's novel Igrok ("The Gambler," 1866) set in Roulettenburg (a fictional town modeled on Baden-Baden, a German spa) include Mademoiselle Blanche de Cominges (a courtesan) and the Frenchman de Grieux (Alexey Ivanovich's main rival). The surname Grieux is derived from the Old French word grieu, meaning "grey." Mademoiselle Blanche de Cominges brings to mind Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann mentioned by John Ray, Jr. in his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript:
Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H. H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H. H.” describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
and by Humbert Humbert in his pocket diary that he kept in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger:
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her - and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes - if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my many looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. “Mais allez-y, allez-y! ” Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonderand plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 a. m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air - one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of the dream agent. (1.11)
On December 26, 1875, Fyodor Dostoevski and his daughter Aimée (Lyubochka) attended a children's ball and a Christmas tree held at the St. Petersburg Artists' Club. On December 27, Dostoevski and Anatoly Koni (a Russian jurist, judge, politician and writer, 1844-1927) arrived at the Colony for Juvenile Delinquents on the Okhta (outskirts of St. Petersburg at that time) headed by the famous teacher and writer Pavel Rovinski. Koni is plural of kon', a male horse in Russian. In Humbert Humbert's dream, there is no horse between his legs as he rides with Lolita and her mother around Hourglass Lake. A horse and Gray Star bring to mind Ignat Lebyadkin's poem Zvezde-amazonke ("To a Star on Horseback") in Dostoevski's novel Besy ("The Possessed," 1872):
И порхает звезда на коне
В хороводе других амазонок;
Улыбается с лошади мне
Ари-сто-кратический ребёнок.
And the star flutters on horseback
in the round dance of other amazons.
An aristocratic child
smiles at me from the horse.
The omitted chapter of The Possessed, U Tikhona ("At Tikhon's"), contains Stavrogin's Confession. A rake, Stavrogin debauched ten-year-old girl Matryosha who hanged herself (because she "had killed God"). Humbert Humbert's dream makes one think of Dostoevski's story Son smeshnogo cheloveka ("The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") that was first published in A Writer's Diary (April, 1877). After shooting himself dead in his dream, the story's hero and narrator is taken by the angel to a planet that looks exactly like Earth, but Earth before the fall. On that other Earth, the hero debauches its innocent inhabitants. Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert says that his only regret today is that he did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night:
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties - she had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes - say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
The number 342 (that reappears in Lolita three times) seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth and the second planet of the Solar System). The characters in Dostoevski's novel Podrostok ("The Adolescent," 1875) include Lambert (Arkady Dolgoruki's former schoolmate), a namesake of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777), a Swiss German mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher who provided the first rigorous proof that π (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) is irrational, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers. According to Humbert Humbert, among the pseudonyms he has toyed with before he hit on a particularly apt one was "Lambert Lambert:"
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mind-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
In his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. says that Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).