At the end of VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) mentions the only immortality that he and Lolita may share:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
A few moments before his death, Alexander Ivanovich Braun, the main character in Mark Aldanov’s trilogy Klyuch (“The Key,” 1929), Begstvo (“The Escape,” 1932) and Peshchera (“The Cave,” 1936), looks up bessmertie (immortality) in an encyclopedia. A professional chemist (Aldanov published serious research papers in chemistry; Humbert's and Lolita's landlord, Professor Chem, teaches chemistry at Beardsley University), Braun commits suicide by inhaling "une forte dose d’acide cyanhydrique qu’il a fait dégager dans un curieux appareil de sa construction." In his review of Aldanov's Peshchera in Sovremennye Zapiski (“Contemporary Notes,” # 61) VN says that Braun's death is impeccable and that one feels a shiver when Braun looks up "immortality" in an encyclopedia:
Смерть Брауна безукоризненна. Холодок пробегает, когда он ищет «бессмертие» в энциклопедическом словаре.
Aldanov's Braun has the same name and patronymic as Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin, the hero of VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930), the mad chess maestro who commits suicide by falling to his death from the bathroom window. The manner of Braun's death is similar to that of Konstantin Sergeyevich Merezhkovski (1855-1921), a professor of biology at Kazan University who in February 1914 fled Russia after a newspaper scandal. On 9 January 1921 Mereschkowski (as he spelt his surname) was found dead in his hotel room (in Hotel des Families 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 The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream) as well as his view that he was becoming too old and frail to continue his history of child abuse. As an atheist, his dreamed-of utopia was to be scientifically based, involving the evolution of a perfect human race of paedophiles held aloft by the enslavement of Africans, Asians, and others. The Earthly Paradise describes specially-bred castes of human including one of neotenized, sexualizing children prolonged into adult age - still displaying child-like features and behaviour - who were put to death at the age of 35, as they could not be happy in old age. Merezhkovski actively assisted the far-right Black Hundredist organisation the Kazan Department of the Union of Russian People, and provided secret assistance to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in hunting down Jews and supposed traitors.
The original Russian title of Merezhkovski's novel (it came out in 1903 in Berlin, in two languages: Russian and German), Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript). According to John Ray, Jr., 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:
“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 the 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 mask - through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow - had 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 come under my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “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 shadows 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 published 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.
The capital town of the book, Gray Star brings to mind "Slishkom star, chtoby rabotat', i slishkom beden, chtoby zhit' (Too old to work, and too poor to live)," the last words written by Konstantin Merezhkovski. On the other hand, one is reminded of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In Oscar Wilde's play Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880) Prince Paul Maraloffski (Prime Minister of Russia) says that the only immortality he desires is to invent a new sauce:
Prince Paul. I see your father did not hold the same opinion, Baron. But, believe me, you are wrong to run down cookery. For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce. I have never had time enough to think seriously about it, but I feel it is in me, I feel it is in me.
Czarevich. You have certainly missed your metier, Prince Paul; the cordon bleu would have suited you much better than the Grand Cross of Honour. But you know you could never have worn your white apron well; you would have soiled it too soon, your hands are not clean enough.
Prince Paul (bowing). Que voulez vous? I manage your father's business.
Czarevich (bitterly). You mismanage my father's business, you mean! Evil genius of his life that you are! Before you came there was some love left in him. It is you who have embittered his nature, poured into his ear the poison of treacherous counsel, made him hated by the whole people, made him what he is – a tyrant! (Act II)
According to Humbert Humbert, his trying to improve on Charlotte's sauces resulted in an upset stomach:
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A Guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters!
“Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love,
Dolly.”
“The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.” (1.19)
Charlotte Becker was also the maiden name of Afanasiy Fet's mother. A Russian poet, Afanasiy Afanasievich Fet (born Shenshin, 1820-1892) is the author of More i zvyozdy (“The Sea and the Stars,” 1859), Sredi zvyozd ("Among the Stars," 1876) and Ugasshim zvyozdam ("To the Extinguished Stars," 1890). On December 3, 1892 (two days before his 72nd birthday), Fet died of a heart attack the moment he grabbed a paper knife from the table before him in order to stab himself. At the end of Wilde's play Vera; or, The Nihilists Vera stabs herself, telling Alexis (the young Tsar whom Vera was supposed to kill) that she has saved Russia:
Alexis: Vera, what have you done?
Vera: I have saved Russia. [dies] (Act IV)
According to Humbert Humbert (who dies in legal captivity on Nov. 16, 1952, and whose "real" name seems to be John Ray, Jr.), his purpose in writing Lolita was an attempt to save his soul. In his poem Khudozhnik ("The Artist," 1913) Alexander Blok (a poet who was born on November 16, 1880, OS, and who died on August 7, 1921) mentions the bird that flew to save the soul:
В жаркое лето и в зиму метельную,
В дни ваших свадеб, торжеств, похорон,
Жду, чтоб спугнул мою скуку смертельную
Лёгкий, доселе не слышанный звон.
Вот он — возник. И с холодным вниманием
Жду, чтоб понять, закрепить и убить.
И перед зорким моим ожиданием
Тянет он еле приметную нить.
С моря ли вихрь? Или сирины райские
В листьях поют? Или время стоит?
Или осыпали яблони майские
Снежный свой цвет? Или ангел летит?
Длятся часы, мировое несущие.
Ширятся звуки, движенье и свет.
Прошлое страстно глядится в грядущее.
Нет настоящего. Жалкого — нет.
И, наконец, у предела зачатия
Новой души, неизведанных сил,-
Душу сражает, как громом, проклятие:
Творческий разум осилил — убил.
И замыкаю я в клетку холодную
Лёгкую, добрую птицу свободную,
Птицу, хотевшую смерть унести,
Птицу, летевшую душу спасти.
Вот моя клетка — стальная, тяжёлая,
Как золотая, в вечернем огне.
Вот моя птица, когда-то весёлая,
Обруч качает, поет на окне.
Крылья подрезаны, песни заучены.
Любите вы под окном постоять?
Песни вам нравятся. Я же, измученный,
Нового жду — и скучаю опять.
Torpid summers, snow-choked winters,
at all your weddings, birthdays, funerals,
always I listen for a dim, unheard chime
to drive away my deadly boredom.
There . . . ! Now, with cold concentration, I wait
— to understand, to pin it down, to kill it.
And as I wait intently, a thread begins
to spin itself, half perceptibly, before me.
Is that a whirlwind blown from the sea? Or legendary birds
in chorus among the leaves? Does Time exist?
Was that an explosion of white petals, or light
springing in plumes from a divine shoulder?
Hours pass, bearing the weight of the whole world.
Sound, motion, light, are bursting. The past
gazes deep in the eyes of the future. There is no present.
There’s nothing left requiring pity.
And at last, as something new is thrusting toward birth,
some new soul, a mysterious energy,
creative reason strikes like a lightningbolt
and masters it, and kills it.
And I lock into a cold cage
the airy, wild, merciful feathers,
the bird that was flying to capture death,
the bird of salvation.
You see my cage, its thick steel bands
glittering coldly in the evening fires.
And here’s my bird, my tamed gypsy,
pleased with its hoop, swinging and singing.
The wings are clipped, the song’s by rote.
You like to listen, standing under the window.
But I, worn out with pain, am only waiting;
boredom sits on me like an aching scar.
(tr. A. Rich)
Siriny rayskie (the paradisical Sirins) in the third stanza of Blok's poem bring to mind VN's Russian nom de plume. In the Russian Lolita (1967) the name of Clare Quilty’s coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), becomes Vivian Damor-Blok. In the Russian Lolita John Ray's Foreword is dated "5 August 1955."