Describing his plans to marry Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls himself "Humbert the Cubus" (a play on "incubus," a word used by Humbert at the end of the preceding paragraph):
Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now ready to make a further “statement” (quel mot!) as he turns his conscience inside out and rips off its innermost lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like that; but a delicately allied, pharmacopoeial thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain. Why limit myself to the modest masked caress I had tried already? Other visions of venery presented themselves to me swaying and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of Charlotte’s snore, while Lolita hardly breathed in her sleep, as still as a painted girl-child. “Mother, I swear Kenny never even touched me.” “You either lie, Dolores Haze, or it was an incubus.” No, I would not go that far.
So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed - and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. Then, figuratively speaking, I shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how eventually I might blackmail - no, that it too strong a word - mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with the little Haze by gently threatening the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me from playing with my legal stepdaughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard. (1.17)
Humbert the Cubus brings to mind a tiger cub in the Persian saying quoted by Sherlock Holmes at the end of Conan Doyle's story A Case of Identity (1891):
'I cannot completely follow your reasoning in this case,' I said.
'Well, it was clear from the first, that Mr Hosmer Angel had a very good reason for his actions, and that the only man who could really profit from the situation was the stepfather: he wanted to keep the hundred pounds a year. Then it was very suggestive that Mr Windibank and Mr Hosmer Angel were never together, and so were the dark glasses, the soft voice and the moustache; they all suggested a disguise. The final point was the typed signature. This made me think that the handwriting of the man must be very familiar to Miss Sutherland, and that if she saw even a small portion of it, she would recognise it.'
'And how did you verify these ideas?' I asked.
'First I wrote to Mr Windibank's firm. 'In the letter I described Mr Angel after I had eliminated everything that could be a disguise, like the glasses, the moustache and the voice, and I asked them if they had an employee like that. They wrote back to me and said that I had described Mr James Windibank. Then I wrote to Mr Windibank to invite him here, and as I expected he typed his reply to me. Then I compared his letter with the letters of Mr Angel. Voila tout!'
'And Miss Sutherland?' I asked.
'If I tell her, she will not believe me,' replied Holmes. 'Maybe you remember this Persian saying, "It is dangerous to take a tiger cub from its mother, and it is dangerous to take a delusion from a woman.'" (Part II)
On the pillared porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a stranger (who seems to be Clare Quilty) tells Humbert that his child needs a lot of sleep and that sleep is a rose, as the Persians say:
Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie - she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels - and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus. (1.28)
A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty "quotes" Kipling:
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. (2.35)
In his poem The Betrothed (1886) Kipling says: “And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.” In the first and penultimate lines of his poem Kipling mentions a Cuba:
Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout
For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out…
Light me another Cuba -- I hold to my first-sworn vows.
If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for Spouse!
“A Cuba stout” and “another Cuba” bring to mind “Humbert the Cubus.” In the Russian Lolita (1967), VN renders “Humbert the Cubus” as Gumbert Vyvoroten’ (a play on oboroten’, an incubus):
Гумберт Гумберт, обливаясь потом в луче безжалостно белого света и подвергаясь окрикам и пинкам обливающихся потом полицейских, готов теперь еще кое-что "показать" (quel mot!), по мере того как он выворачивает наизнанку совесть и выдирает из нее сокровеннейшую подкладку. Я не для того намеревался жениться на бедной Шарлотте, чтобы уничтожить ее каким-нибудь пошлым, гнусным и рискованным способом, как, например, убийство при помощи пяти сулемовых таблеток, растворенных в рюмке предобеденного хереса или чего-либо в этом роде; но в моем гулком и мутном мозгу все же позвякивала мысль, состоявшая в тонком родстве с фармацевтикой. Почему ограничивать себя тем скромно прикрытым наслаждением, которое я уже однажды испробовал? Передо мной другие образы любострастия выходили на сцену, покачиваясь и улыбаясь. Я видел себя дающим сильное снотворное средство и матери и дочери одновременно, для того чтобы ласкать вторую всю ночь безвозбранно. Дом полнился храпом Шарлотты, Лолита едва дышала во сне, неподвижная, как будто написанный маслом портрет отроковицы. "Мама, клянусь, что Кенни ко мне никогда не притронулся!" "Ты или лжешь, Долорес, или это был ночной оборотень". Впрочем, я постарался бы не обрюхатить малютки.
Так Гумберт Выворотень грезил и волхвовал - и алое солнце желания и решимости (из этих двух и создается живой мир!) поднималось все выше, между тем как на чередующихся балконах чередующиеся сибариты поднимали бокал за прошлые и будущие ночи. Затем, говоря метафорически, я разбил бокал вдребезги и смело представил себе (ибо к тому времени я был пьян от видений и уже недооценивал природной своей кротости), как постепенно я перейду на шантаж - о, совсем легкий, дымчатый шантажик - и заставлю большую Гейзиху позволить мне общаться с маленькой, пригрозив бедной обожающей меня даме, что брошу ее, коли она запретит мне играть с моей законной падчерицей. Словом, перед этакой сенсационной офертой (как выражаются коммерсанты), перед столь широкими и разнообразными перспективами я был податлив, как Адам при предварительном просмотре малоазиатской истории, заснятой ввиде миража в известном плодовом саду. (1.17)
Luch being Russian for "ray," v luche bezzhalostnogo belogo sveta (as in the Russian Lolita VN renders "in the fierce white light") brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). The characters in Conan Doyle's story The Captain of the Pole-Star (1883) include Dr. John M'Alister Ray, senior (the author of the note appended to the story). According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H. H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this maskthrough which two hypnotic eyes seem to glowhad to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H. H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to remain a complete mystery, had not this memoir been permitted to come under my reading lamp.
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,” of “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 on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, the murder of Clare Quilty and Humbert's death in prison) was invented by John Ray, Jr. (Humbert Humbert's "real" name).