The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital). The name Clare Quilty seems to hint at the phrase "clearly guilty" and brings to mind Dazhe v stol' ochevidnoy vine (Even such a self-evident fault), a line in Sasha Chernyshevski's poem quoted by Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), in his book on Chernyshevski (a radical critic, 1828-1889):
Поступив на службу к керосинщику Нобелю и получив доверенность на сопровождение по Волге груза на барже, Саша по пути, в знойный, нефтяной, сатанинский полдень, сбил с головы бухгалтера фуражку, бросил в радужную воду ключи и уехал домой в Астрахань. Тем же летом появились в "Вестнике Европы" четыре его стихотворения; таланта проблеск в них есть: "Если жизнь покажется горькой (кстати обратим внимание на мнимо-добавочный слог, "жизень", - что чрезвычайно характерно для неуравновешенных русских поэтов из горемык: как бы знак того, что в жизни у них как раз и недостаёт того, что могло бы превратить её в песнь), то, её не коря, рассуди - ведь ты сам виноват, что родился, с тёплым, любящим сердцем в груди.. Если ж ты не захочешь сознаться даже в столь очевидной вине..." (вот только эта строка звенит по-настоящему).
Having entered the service of the oilman Nobel, and being entrusted to accompany a bargeload along the Volga, Sasha, en route, one sultry, oil-soaked, satanic noon, knocked the bookkeeper’s cap off, threw the keys into the rainbow water, and went home to Astrakhan. That same summer four of his poems appeared in The Messenger of Europe; they show a gleam of talent:
If life’s hours appear to you bitter,
Do not rail against life, for it’s best
To admit it’s your fault you’ve been born with
An affectionate heart in your breast.
And if you do not wish to acknowledge
Even such a self-evident fault…
(Incidentally, let us note the ghost of an additional syllable in “life’s hou-urs” matching zhiz-en’, instead of zhizn’ which is extremely characteristic of unbalanced Russian poets of the woebegone sort: a flaw corresponding, it would seem, to something lacking in their lives, something that might have turned life into song. The last line quoted has however an authentic poetic ring.) (Chapter Four)
In his book Fyodor mentions the fire in which the house where Sasha Chernyshevski was living burned own:
Совместное житье отца и сына было совместным адом. Чернышевский доводил Сашу до мучительных бессониц нескончаемыми своими наставлениями (как "материалист" он имел изуверскую смелость полагать, что главная причина сашиного расстройства -- "жалкое материальное положение"), и сам так страдал, как даже не страдал в Сибири. Обоим вздохнулось легче, когда зимой Саша уехал, -- сперва, кажется, в Гейдельберг с семьей ученика, потом в Петербург "по надобности посоветоваться с медиками". Мелкие, ложно-смешные несчастья продолжали сыпаться на него. Так, из письма матери (88 год) узнаем, что покамест "Саша изволил прогуливаться, дом, в котором он жил, сгорел", при чем сгорело и всё, что было у него; и уже совершенным бобылем он переселился на дачу Страннолюбского (отца критика?).
The joint domicile of father and son was a joint hell. Chernyshevski drove Sasha to agonizing insomnia with his endless admonitions (as a “materialist” he had the fanatic effrontery to suppose that the main cause of Sasha’s disorder was his “pitiful material condition”), and he himself suffered in a way that he had not done even in Siberia. They both breathed easier when that winter Sasha went away—at first to Heidelberg with the family in which he was tutor and then to St. Petersburg “because of the need to get medical advice.” Petty, falsely funny misfortunes continued to spatter him. Thus we learn from a letter of his mother’s (1888) that while “Sasha was pleased to go out for a stroll, the house in which he was living burned down,” and everything that he possessed burned with it; and, by now utterly destitute, he moved to the country house of Strannolyubski (the critic’s father?). (Chapter Four)
A fictitious authority on Chernyshevski, Strannolyubski ("Mr. Strangelove") brings to mind "It was so strange, so strange" (Lolita's words to Humbert when he visits her in Coalmont on Sept. 23, 1952):
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau.
“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”
She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused.
“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes… Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw -smiling - through everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him…
Well, Cue - they all called him Cue.
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence… took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name - Duk Duk Ranch you know just plain silly but it did not matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the red-haired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a coronation ceremony and then a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
“Go on, please.”
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his Golden Guts and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.
“Where is the hog now?”
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out.
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)
“What things exactly?”
“Oh, things… Oh, I - really I” - she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
“It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushing with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she had - oh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch - and it just was not there any more - it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange. (2.29)