Describing his visit to Coalmont (a small mining town where Lolita, now married to Dick Schiller and big with child, lives with her husband) on Tuesday, September 23, 1952, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says: "finis, my friends, finis, my fiends:"
Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden, and shack, and gray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I stopped at the last “house” - a clapboard shack, with two or three similar ones farther away from the road and a waste of withered weeds all around. Sounds of hammering came from behind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my old car, old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal, finis, my friends, finis, my fiends. The time was around two. My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle crepitated against the hood of the car. My gun had migrated to my right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and started good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy, and then walked about a little and woofed once more. (2.28)
Humbert's gray goal brings to mind Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where, 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:
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.
In his poem Finis (1923) VN mentions zvezda nad chernotoyu sada (a star above the blackness of a garden):
Не надо плакать. Видишь, там - звезда,
там - над листвою, справа. Ах, не надо,
прошу тебя! О чем я начал? Да,
- о той звезде над чернотою сада;
на ней живут, быть может... что же ты,
опять! Смотри же, я совсем спокоен,
совсем... Ты слушай дальше: день был зноен,
мы шли на холм, где красные цветы...
Не то. О чем я говорил? Есть слово:
любовь, - глухой глагол: любить... Цветы
какие-то мне помешали. Ты
должна простить. Ну вот - ты плачешь снова.
Не надо слез! Ах, кто так мучит нас?
Не надо помнить, ничего не надо...
Вон там - звезда над чернотою сада...
Скажи - а вдруг проснемся мы сейчас?
9. 1. 23.
VN's poem Finis is dated January 9, 1923. In the summer of 1923 Humbert had his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh (Lolita's precursor who died of typhus in Corfu at the beginning of 1924). On January 9, 1921, Konstantin Merezhkovski (a Russian biologist, 1855-1921), the author of Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel set in the 27th century, was found dead in his hotel room (in Hôtel des Familles in Geneva), having tied himself up in his bed with a mask which was supplied with an asphyxiating gas from a metal container. It appears that his suicide was directly connected to his paedophilic utoian beliefs (reflected in his novel) as well as his view that he was becoming too old and frail to continue his history of child abuse. Merezhkovski left the following suicide note: "Slishkom star chtoby rabotat', slishkom beden chtoby zhit' (Too old to work, too poor to live)." The title of his novel, Ray Zemnoy, brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (Humbert Humbert's "real" name, as it transpires). In the Russian Lolita (1967) John Ray's Foreword is dated August 5, 1955:
Джон Рэй, д-р философии
Видворт, Массачусетс
5 августа 1955 года
The infamous author of Ray Zemnoy, Konstantin Merezhkovski was born on August 4, 1855, in St. Petersburg (VN's home city). William Hogarth's last engraving, Tailpiece, or The Bathos (1764) is also known as Finis:
The sandglass in the drawing makes one think of Hourglass Lake, a woodlake near Ramsdale (a small town in New England where Dolores Haze lives with her mother Charlotte). Oblako, ozero, bashnya ("Cloud, Castle, Lake," 1937) is a story by VN set in Hitler's Germany ("under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe").