Among the books that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) brings Lolita (who fell ill and was hospitalized in Elphinstone) to the hospital are The History of Dancing and The Russian Ballet:
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning’s Dramatic Works, The History of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of the Rockies, the Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis - by Helen Wills, who had won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was staggering up to the door of my daughter’s thirteen-dollar-a day private room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot back into the room - probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly slept at all that fateful week). (2.22)
The History of Dancing and The Russian Ballet make one think of Serov's portraits of Ida Rubinstein (a Russian dancer and actress, 1885-1960) and Sergei Diaghilev (a Russian ballet impressario, 1872-1929). Valentin Serov (1865-1911) is the author of the 1903 portrait of Felix Yusupov, which also features Yusupov's French bulldog, Clown. The dog's name brings to mind Clowns and Columbines, a book that Humbert brings Lolita. To fetch Lolita from the hospital, Clare Quilty ("Mr. Gustave") calls for her with a cocker spaniel pup:
“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)
John Elphinstone (1722-85) was a senior British naval officer who worked closely with the Russian Navy after 1770, during the period of naval reform under Russian Empress Catherine II. On the other hand, Elphinstone seems to hint at Felix Elston (Felix Yusupov's grandfather). In his Memoirs (1952) Felix Yusupov (whose full name was Prince Felix Yusupov Count Sumarokov-Elston) says that, according to rumors, the surname of his paternal grandfather Felix Elston (who might be a son of King of Prussia Friedrich Wilhelm IV) was derived from the French phrase elle s’étonne (she is surprised):
По отцовской линии знал я только бабку. Дед – Феликс Эльстон умер задолго до моего рожденья. Говорят, отец его был прусский король Фридрих Вильгельм IV, а мать – фрейлина сестры его, императрицы Александры Федоровны. Та, поехав навестить брата, взяла с собой фрейлину. Прусский король так влюбился в сию девицу, что даже хотел жениться. Одни говорят, что он и женился морганатическим браком. Другие утверждают, что девица отказала, не желая расставаться с государыней, но короля всё же любила, и что плодом их тайной любви и был Феликс Эльстон. Тогдашние злые языки уверяли, что фамилия Эльстон – от французского «эль с'этон» (elle s'étonne – она удивляется), что, дескать, выразило чувство юной матери. (Chapter Three)
Elle s’étonne allegedly expressed the feelings of a young mother who unexpectedly gave birth to a child. 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 Lolita dies on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital, and the rest (Lolita's escape, her marriage to Dick Schiller and pregnancy, the murder of Quilty) was invented by Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). July 4 is American Independence Day. On the other hand, on July 4, 1908, Nikolay Yusupov (Felix's elder brother whose portrait was also painted by Serov) died in a pistol duel with Count Arvid Manteufel. The surname Serov comes from seryi (gray). Describing the murder of Quilty, Humbert compares his victim to old, gray, mad Nijinski (a Russian ballet dancer, 1889-1950):
Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s - my bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all life content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed, as he rent the air - still shaking with the rich black music - head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the hall. (2.35)
One of Rasputin's murderers, Felix Yusupov (1887-1967) was an ardent admirer of Oscar Wilde (an Anglo-Irish writer, 1854-1900), the author of De Profundis (a work written in prison and published posthumously in 1905). The hero of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) stabs his portrait and meets his death. In E. A. Poe's story William Wilson (1839), the Double is the hero’s conscience. He kills it and dies.
According to Oscar Wilde, "man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." The pseudonym Humbert Humbert is John Ray's mask. Oscar Wilde is the author of The Grave of Keats (1877), a sonnet. In a letter of Jan. 5, 1818, to his brothers George and Tom John Keats mentions a very nice Covent Garden Pantomime:
The Covent Garden Pantomime is a very nice one, but they have a middling Harlequin, a bad Pantaloon, a worse Clown and a shocking Columbine who is one of the Miss Dennets. I suppose you will see my Critique on the new Tragedy in the next Week’s Champion.
In Keats' ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) the lady takes the knight to her Elfin grot:
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
Describing his visits to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions une belle dame toute en bleu:
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However - likewise for reasons of show - regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning… She did not remember where the various things she wanted were… “Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary… No doubt, I was a little delirious - and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle - but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine
which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two p.m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. (2.22)