When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) in Coalmont, she tells him that Clare Quilty (the playwright with whom Lolita escaped from the Elphinstone hospital) took her to the Duk Duk Ranch:
“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.
“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”
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 hadoh, 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)
According to Dieter Zimmer, 'Duk Duk Ranch' is a private joke of Nabokov's, referring to the little old Duck Ranch north of West Yellowstone, Montana, where he had spent a happy summer in 1951 and which in its quiet solitude is just about the opposite of Quilty's obscene hide-out. Duk (the Duke) is a character in Pushkin's partly dramatic and partly narrative poem Angelo (1834) based on Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure. There is Duk in Paduk, the dictator of Padukgrad in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947). The name Paduk rhymes with pauk (Russian for 'spider'), but it also brings to mind Padu li ya, streloy pronzyonnyi (Whether I fall, struck by an arrow), a line in Lenski's last poem in Chapter Six (XXI, XXII) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Стихи на случай сохранились;
Я их имею; вот они:
«Куда, куда вы удалились,
Весны моей златые дни?
Что день грядущий мне готовит?
Его мой взор напрасно ловит,
В глубокой мгле таится он.
Нет нужды; прав судьбы закон.
Паду ли я, стрелой пронзенный,
Иль мимо пролетит она,
Все благо: бдения и сна
Приходит час определенный;
Благословен и день забот,
Благословен и тьмы приход!
Блеснет заутра луч денницы
И заиграет яркий день;
А я, быть может, я гробницы
Сойду в таинственную сень,
И память юного поэта
Поглотит медленная Лета,
Забудет мир меня; но ты
Придешь ли, дева красоты,
Слезу пролить над ранней урной
И думать: он меня любил,
Он мне единой посвятил
Рассвет печальный жизни бурной!..
Сердечный друг, желанный друг,
Приди, приди: я твой супруг!..»
The verses chanced to be preserved;
I have them; here they are:
"Whither, ah! whither are ye fled,
my springtime's golden days?
What has the coming day in store for me?
In vain my gaze attempts to grasp it;
in deep gloom it lies hidden.
It matters not; fate's law is just.
Whether I fall, pierced by the dart, or whether
it flies by — all is right:
of waking and of sleep
comes the determined hour;
blest is the day of cares,
blest, too, is the advent of darkness!
The ray of dawn will gleam tomorrow,
and brilliant day will scintillate;
whilst I, perhaps — I shall descend
into the tomb's mysterious shelter,
and the young poet's memory
slow Lethe will engulf;
the world will forget me; but thou,
wilt thou come, maid of beauty,
to shed a tear over the early urn
and think: he loved me,
to me alone he consecrated
the doleful daybreak of a stormy life!...
Friend of my heart, desired friend, come,
come: I'm thy spouse!”
Kuda, kuda vy udalilis' ("Whither, ah! whither are ye fled," the beginning of Lenski's poem), brings to mind the Duk Duk Ranch. Lolita tells Humbert that Quilty's obscene hide-out was destroyed by fire. In his poem Domik v Kolomne ("The Little Cottage in Kolomna," 1830), a mock epic in octaves, Pushkin says that he would be glad, if fire engulfed the tall three storey house that was built on the spot where the old woman used to live with her daughter in their hut:
Дни три тому туда ходил я вместе
С одним знакомым перед вечерком.
Лачужки этой нет уж там. На месте
Ее построен трехэтажный дом.
Я вспомнил о старушке, о невесте,
Бывало, тут сидевших под окном,
О той поре, когда я был моложе,
Я думал: живы ли они? — И что же?
Мне стало грустно: на высокий дом
Глядел я косо. Если в эту пору
Пожар его бы охватил кругом,
То моему б озлобленному взору
Приятно было пламя. Странным сном
Бывает сердце полно; много вздору
Приходит нам на ум, когда бредем
Одни или с товарищем вдвоем. (X-XI)
Humbert was born in Paris, in 1910. In his Epistle to Vigel Pushkin compares Kishinev (the city where on May 9, 1823, Pushkin began to write Eugene Onegin) to Sodom and calls Sodom "the Paris of the Old Testament." In the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah were two sinful cities destroyed by 'sulfur and fire.' Sodome et Gomorrhe is the fourth volume of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). According to Humbert, one of the parts of his book might be called “Dolorés Disparue:”
This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called “Dolorés Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster. (2.25)
“Dolorés Disparue” hints at Albertine disparue, the sixth (penultimate) volume of Proust’s novel.
The Russian word Bog (God) is pronounced Bokh, with the soft final consonant. Duk in the ranch's name sounds as if it were a blasphemous mockery of Dukh (the Holy Spirit). The Duk Duk Ranch that had burned to the ground makes one think of Dukhov den' (Whit Monday) and a conflagration mentioned by Fyodor in Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Part Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937):
А события шибко пошли той ветреной весной. Пожары! И вдруг, - на этом оранжево-черном фоне - видение: бегом, держась за шляпу, несется Достоевский: куда?
Духов день (28 мая 1862 г.), дует сильный ветер; пожар начался на Лиговке, а затем мазурики подожгли Апраксин Двор. Бежит Достоевский, мчатся пожарные, "и на окнах аптек в разноцветных шарах вверх ногами на миг отразились". А там, густой дым повалил через Фонтанку по направлению к Чернышеву переулку, откуда вскоре поднялся новый черный столб... Между тем Достоевский прибежал. Прибежал к сердцу черноты, к Чернышевскому, и стал истерически его умолять приостановить всё это. Тут занятны два момента: вера в адское могущество Николая Гавриловича и слухи о том, что поджоги велись по тому самому плану, который был составлен еще в 1849 году петрашевцами.
Events went very fast that windy spring. Fires broke out here and there. And suddenly—against this orange-and-black background—a vision. Running and holding on to his hat, Dostoevski sweeps by: where to?
Whit Monday (May 28, 1862), a strong wind is blowing; a conflagration has begun on the Ligovka and then the desperadoes set fire to the Apraxin Market. Dostoevski is running, firemen are galloping "and in pharmacy windows, in gaudy glass globes, upside down are in passing reflected" (as seen by Nekrasov). And over there, thick smoke billows over the Fontanka canal in the direction of Chernyshyov Street, where presently a new, black column arises…. Meanwhile Dostoevski has arrived. He has arrived at the heart of the blackness, at Chernyshevski's place, and starts to beg him hysterically to put a stop to all this. Two aspects are interesting here: the belief in Nikolay Gavrilovich's satanic powers, and the rumors that the arson was being carried out according to the same plan which the Petrashevskians had drawn up as early as 1849.
Note the word kuda (where to) used by Fyodor. Jetzt wohin? ("Where to Now?", 1830) is a poem by Heinrich Heine (a poet who is mentioned by Fyodor in "The Life of Chernyshevski"). Like Heinrich Heine, Humbert Humbert is a double-H name. It seems that the Duk Duk Ranch influenced Humbert's choice of his pseudonym. Heinrich Mann (Thomas Mann's elder brother) is the author of the Foreword to Hitlers „Mein Kampf". Dichtung und Wahrheit (Paris, 1936), a book by Manuel Humbert (pseudonym of Kurt Michael Caro, a German publicist, 1905-79). Dichtung und Wahrheit ("Poetry and Truth") is the title of Goethe's autobiography. In Chapter Three of The Gift Fyodor mentions the fact that Goethe used to point with his cane at the starry sky and say: "This is my conscience!" In Chapter Two of The Gift Fyodor mentions Pushkin's Angelo. In one of his poems (in Chapter One of The Gift) Fyodor mentions the Dux bicycle. On Lolita's fourteenth birthday (Saturday, January 1, 1949) Humbert gives her a bicycle as a birthday present:
January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather. Other presents came tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her a bicycle, the doe-like and altogether charming machine already mentioned - and added to this a History of Modern American Painting: her bicycle manner, I mean her approach to it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me supreme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not understand why I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful. (2.12)
Lolita escapes from the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949 (the Independence Day). I think it not unlikely that the Duk Duk Ranch burns to the ground on May 29, 1950 (Whit Monday). The ranch's name may also hint at Duce, the title (from Latin dux, leader) of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator in 1922-45.