When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont, she tells him about her life after her escape from the Elphinstone hospital with Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer) and calls Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains) "Elephant:"
“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)
In his poem My ("We," 1927) Vladislav Hodasevich says that "we" (the poets) first hatched out of the stone and animal darkness when tigers and elephants started to sob over the charms of Eurydice (the beautiful nymph and wife of the legendary musician Orpheus):
Не мудростью умышленных речей
Камням повелевал певец Орфей.
Что прелесть мудрости камням земным?
Он мудрой прелестью был сладок им.
Не поучал Орфей, но чаровал —
И камень дикий на дыбы вставал
И шел — блаженно лечь у белых ног.
Из груди мшистой рвался первый вздох.
…………………………………………………
…………………………………………………
Когда взрыдали тигры и слоны
О [прелестях] Орфеевой жены —
Из каменной и из звериной тьмы
Тогда впервые вылупились — мы.
Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck (an Austrian composer, 1814-1887, who is mentioned by Salieri in Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri, 1830), based on the myth of Orpheus and set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. Ritter Gluck (1809) is a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann (a German writer, composer and music critic, 1776-1822). E. T. A. Hoffmann 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. The group formed during their studies at the seminars of Yuri Tynyanov, Yevgeni Zamyatin (whose 1922 essay "The Serapion Brethren" gives insight into the early style of several members), and Korney Chukovski at the Petrogradsky Dom Iskusstv (Petrograd House of Arts known as DISK). My ("We") is a famous dystopian novel (written in 1920, first published in English: N.Y., 1925) by Yevgeni Zamyatin. Among the members of the Serapion Brothers was Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958), the author of Golubaya kniga ("The Blue Book," 1935). Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone, Humbert mentions Doctor Blue:
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.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like the darling she was to some “serum” (sparrow’s sperm or dugong’s dung), she was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be “skipping” again. (2.22)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) "dugong’s dung" becomes slyuna slona (elephant's saliva). "Sparrow’s sperm" is turned into sperma spruta (octopus's sperm). Perhaps, the changes were made to keep alliteration (which otherwise would be lost in translation).
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)
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. But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens 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.). Humbert's visit to Coalmont (a town where Lolita lives with her husband, "a brilliant young mining engineer") can be compared to Orpheus's descent to the land of the dead in an attempt to bring Eurydice back to life.
Btw., tigry i slony (tigers and elephants) in Hodasevich's poem My ("We") also bring to mind Felis tigris goldsmithi mentioned by Humbert:
I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned - Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska - ah, that first whiff of the West! We traveled very leisurely, having more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to see he Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo. (2.16)
and a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth where Rita (a girl whom Humbert picks up in May 1950) was amiably drunk:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did - and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband - and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was - and no doubt still is - a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
Rita's brother seems to be a cross between Khlestakov (a boaster whom everybody mistakes for an inspector traveling incognito) and the Town Mayor, the characters in Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836). The characters in Gogol's story Nevsky Prospect (1835) include Schiller (the tinsmith) and Hoffmann (a rather good cobbler, a great friend and fellow reveller of Schiller's).