The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband, veteran of a remote war who is hard of hearing):
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing.
Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dilly plied me with marshmallows and potato chips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux , diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount.
They were under the impression I had come to stay, and Dick with a great wrinkling of brows that denoted difficult thought, suggested Dolly and he might sleep in the kitchen on a spare mattress. I waved a light hand and told Dolly who transmitted it by means of a special shout to Dick that I had merely dropped in on my way to Readsburg where I was to be entertained by some friends and admirers. It was then noticed that one of the few thumbs remaining to Bill was bleeding (not such a wonder-worker after all). How womanish and somehow never seen that way before was the shadowy division between her pale breasts when she bent down over the man’s hand! She took him for repairs to the kitchen. For a few minutes, three or four little eternities which positively welled with artificial warmth, Dick and I remained alone. He sat on a hard chair rubbing his forelimbs and frowning. I had an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads on the wings of his perspiring nose with my long agate claws. He had nice sad eyes with beautiful lashes, and very white teeth. His Adam’s apple was large and hairy. Why don’t they shave better, those young brawny chaps? He and his Dolly had had unrestrained intercourse on that couch there, at least a hundred and eighty times, probably much more; and before thathow long had she known him? No grudge. Funny - no grudge at all, nothing except grief and nausea. He was now rubbing his nose. I was sure that when finally he would open his mouth, he would say (slightly shaking his head): “Aw, she’s a swell kid, Mr. Haze. She sure is. And she’s going to make a swell mother.” He opened his mouthand took a sip of beer. This gave him countenanceand he went on sipping till he frothed at the mouth. He was a lamb. He had cupped her Florentine breasts. His fingernails were black and broken, but the phalanges, the whole carpus, the strong shapely wrist were far, far finer than mine: I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands to be proud of them. French epithets, a Dorset yokel’s knuckles, an Austrian tailor’s flat finger tips - that’s Humbert Humbert.
Good. If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast’s lair wasand then pulled the pistol’s foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger: I was always a good little follower of the Viennese medicine man. But presently I became sorry for poor Dick whom, in some hypnotoid way, I was horribly preventing from making the only remark he could think up (“She’s a swell kid…”).
“And so,” I said, “you are going to Canada?”
In the kitchen, Dolly was laughing at something Bill had said or done.
“And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada” - I re-shouted - "I mean Alaska, of course.”
He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he cut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy.”
Lovely mauve almond trees in bloom. A blown-off surrealistic arm hanging up there in the pointillistic mauve. A flowergirl tattoo on the hand. Dolly and band-aided Bill reappeared. It occurred to me that her ambiguous, brown and pale beauty excited the cripple. Dick, with a grin of relief stood up. He guessed Bill and he would be going back to fix those wires. He guessed Mr. Haze and Dolly had loads of things to say to each other. He guessed he would be seeing me before I left. Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids? (2.29)
Schiller and Hoffmann are characters in Gogol's story Nevsky Prospect (1835):
Перед ним сидел Шиллер, — не тот Шиллер, который написал «Вильгельма Телля» и «Историю Тридцатилетней войны», но известный Шиллер, жестяных дел мастер в Мещанской улице. Возле Шиллера стоял Гофман, — не писатель Гофман, но довольно хороший сапожник с Офицерской улицы, большой приятель Шиллера. Шиллер был пьян и сидел на стуле, топая ногою и говоря что-то с жаром. Все это еще бы не удивило Пирогова, но удивило его чрезвычайно странное положение фигур. Шиллер сидел, выставив свой довольно толстый нос и поднявши вверх голову; а Гофман держал его за этот нос двумя пальцами и вертел лезвием своего сапожнического ножа на самой его поверхности. Обе особы говорили на немецком языке, и потому поручик Пирогов, который знал по-немецки только «гут морген», ничего не мог понять из всей этой истории. Впрочем, слова Шиллера заключались вот в чем.
«Я не хочу, мне не нужен нос! — говорил он, размахивая руками.- У меня на один нос выходит три фунта табаку в месяц. И я плачу в русский скверный магазин, потому что немецкий магазин не держит русского табаку, я плачу в русский скверный магазин за каждый фунт по сорок копеек; это будет рубль двадцать копеек; двенадцать раз рубль двадцать копеек — это будет четырнадцать рублей сорок копеек. Слышишь, друг мой Гофман? на один нос четырнадцать рублей сорок копеек! Да по праздникам я нюхаю рапе, потому что я не хочу нюхать по праздникам русский скверный табак. В год я нюхаю два фунта рапе, по два рубля фунт. Шесть да четырнадцать — двадцать рублей сорок копеек на один табак. Это разбой! Я спрашиваю тебя, мой друг Гофман, не так ли? — Гофман, который сам был пьян, отвечал утвердительно.- Двадцать рублей сорок копеек! Я швабский немец; у меня есть король в Германии. Я не хочу носа! режь мне нос! вот мой нос!»
И если бы не внезапное появление поручика Пирогова, то, без всякого сомнения, Гофман отрезал бы ни за что ни про что Шиллеру нос, потому что он уже привел нож свой в такое положение, как бы хотел кроить подошву.
Before him sat Schiller—not the Schiller who wrote Wilhelm Tell and the History of the Thirty Years War, but the well-known Schiller, the tinsmith of the Meshchanskaya Street. Next to Schiller stood Hoffmann—not the writer Hoffmann, but a rather good cobbler from the Ofitserskaya Street, a great friend of Schiller’s. Schiller was drunk and sat on a chair stamping his foot and heatedly saying something'. All this would not have been so surprising to Pirogov, but what did surprise him was the extremely strange posture of the figures. Schiller was sitting, his rather fat nose stuck out and his head raised, while Hoffmann was hplding him by this nose with two fingers and waggling the blade of his cobbler’s knife justabpve the surface of it. Both personages were speaking in German, and therefore Lieutenant Pirogov, whose only German was “Gut Morgen,” was able to understand nothing of this whole story. Schiller’s words, however, consisted of the following:
“I don’t want; I have no need, of a nose!” he said, waving his arms. “For this one nose I need three pounds of snuff a month. And I pay in the Russian vile shop, because the German shop doesn’t have Russian snuff, I pay in the Russian vile shop forty kopecks for each pound; that makes one rouble twenty kopecks; twelve times one rouble twenty kopecks makes fourteen roubles forty kopecks. Do you hear, Hoffmann my friend? For this one nose, fourteen roubles forty kopecks! Yes, and on feast days I snuff Rapé, because I don’t want to snuff Russian vile tobacco on feast days. I snuff two pounds of Rapé a year, two roubles a pound. Six plus fourteen—twenty roubles forty kopecks on snuff alone. That’s highway robbery! I ask you, Hoffmann my friend, is it not so?’ Hoffmann, who was drunk himself, answered in the affirmative. “Twenty roubles forty kopecks! I’m a Swabian German; I have a king in Germany. I don’t want a nose! Cut my nose off! Here’s my nose!”
And had it not been for the sudden appearance of Lieutenant Pirogov there is no doubt that Hoffmann would have cut Schiller’s nose off just like that, because he was already holding his knife in such a position as if he were about to cut out a shoe sole.
(tr. R. Pevear & L. Volkhonsky)
A German writer, composer and music critic, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) is the author of Die Serapionsbrüder ("The Serapion Brethren," 1819-1821), a four-volume collection of novellas and fairy-tales. Serapionovy brat'ya (The Serapion Brothers) was a group of young Russian writers formed in Petrograd (St. Petersburg's name in 1914-1924) in 1921. One of the group's founders and leading members, Veniamin Kaverin (born Silber, 1902-1989) nicknamed in the group "Brother Alchemist," is the author of Dva kapitana ("The Two Captains," 1937-46), a novel whose heroes' motto is "Borot'sya i iskat', nayti i ne sdavat'sya (To strive and to seek, to find and not to yield)." Alfred Tennyson's poem Ulysses (1842) ends in the line (inscribed on the cross at Observation Hill, commemorating Robert Scott's heroic, albeit tragic, pursuit of the South Pole) "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." In Tennyson's poem, Ulysses mentions "this gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star:"
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) 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 the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow 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 publshed 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.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happened after her death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, 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.). As he takes leave of Lolita, Humbert mentally calls her "my American sweet immortal dead love:"
“Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities.
Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up.
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears. (2.29)
A flowergirl tattoo (imagined by Humbert) on the hand of one-armed Bill (the Schillers' neighbor who lost his arm in Italy) brings to mind a naked girl charmingly tattoed on big Frank's crippled hand:
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars - had been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically - and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating owner - that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is neurotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false move - and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man - free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)
Btw., Veniamin Kaverin took his pseudonym after Pyotr Kaverin (1794-1855), a hero of the anti-Napoleon wars who is mentioned in Chapter One (XVI: 6) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Уж тёмно: в санки он садится.
"Пади, пади!" - раздался крик;
Морозной пылью серебрится
Его бобровый воротник.
К Talon4 помчался: он уверен,
Что там уж ждёт его Каверин.
Вошёл: и пробка в потолок,
Вина кометы брызнул ток,
Пред ним roast-beef окровавленный,
И трюфли, роскошь юных лет,
Французской кухни лучший цвет,
И Стразбурга пирог нетленный
Меж сыром Лимбургским живым
И ананасом золотым.
It’s already dark. He gets into a sleigh.
The cry “Way, way!” resounds.
With frostdust silvers
his beaver collar.
To Talon's4 he has dashed off: he is certain
that there already waits for him [Kaverin];
has entered and the cork goes ceilingward,
the flow of comet wine has spurted,
a bloody roast beef is before him,
and truffles, luxury of youthful years,
the best flower of French cookery,
and a decayless Strasbourg pie
between a living Limburg cheese
and a golden ananas.
4: Well-known restaurateur. (Pushkin’s note)
In Chapter Two (IX: 6) of EO Pushkin mentions nebo Shillera i Gyote (the sky of Schiller and of Goethe):
Негодованье, сожаленье,
Ко благу чистая любовь
И славы сладкое мученье
В нем рано волновали кровь.
Он с лирой странствовал на свете;
Под небом Шиллера и Гете
Их поэтическим огнём
Душа воспламенилась в нём;
И муз возвышенных искусства,
Счастливец, он не постыдил:
Он в песнях гордо сохранил
Всегда возвышенные чувства,
Порывы девственной мечты
И прелесть важной простоты.
Indignation, compassion,
pure love of Good,
and fame's delicious torment
early had stirred his blood.
He wandered with a lyre on earth.
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe,
with their poetic fire
his soul had kindled;
and the exalted Muses of the art
he, happy one, did not disgrace:
he proudly in his songs retained
always exalted sentiments,
the surgings of a virgin fancy, and the charm
of grave simplicity.
J. W. von Goethe is the author of Der Erlkönig (1782). Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone, Humbert mentions a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperatureeven exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebraeand I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyes - of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas - que sais-je! - or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangual shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 a. m., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was somehow the development of a theme - that it had the same taste and tone as the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital - and Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender say in the country of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stoolless, in despair. (2.22)