At the end of his manuscript Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that the only immortality Lolita and he may share is the refuge of art and mentions prophetic sonnets:
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)
In his unfinished article O Mil'tone i Shatobrianovom perevode poteryannogo raya ("On Milton and Chateaubriand's Translation of Paradise Lost," 1836) Pushkin criticizes Victor Hugo's play Cromwell (1827) and mentions slavnyi prorocheskiy sonet (the famous prophetic sonnet) that Milton wrote to Cromwell:
Нет, г. Юго! Не таков был Джон Мильтон, друг и сподвижник Кромвеля, суровый фанатик, строгий творец <Иконокласта> и книги Defensio populi! Не таким языком изъяснялся бы с Кромвелем тот, который написал ему свой славный пророческий сонет
"Cromwel, our chief, etс."
Не мог быть посмешищем развратного Рочестера и придворных шутов тот, кто в злые дни, жертва злых языков, в бедности, в гонении и в слепоте сохранил непреклонность души и продиктовал «Потерянный рай».
The author of Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton (1608-74) brings to mind Milton Pinski, a local schoolboy mentioned by Eva Rosen (Lolita's friend at Beardsley):
There was the day, during our first trip - our first circle of paradise - when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn - to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on - a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration - and every limit presupposes something beyond it - hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)
A displaced little person from France, Eva Rosen reminds one of Baron Rosen (1800-1860), one of the authors of the libretto of Mikhail Glinka's opera Zhizn' za tsarya ("A Life for the Tsar," 1836). In a letter of October/first part of November, 1831, to Baron Rosen Pushkin says that he is sending Rosen Pir vo vremya chumy (“A Feast in Time of Plague,” 1830) from Wilson’s tragedy ["The City of the Plague," 1816] à effet:
Вот Вам, любезный барон, «Пир во время чумы» из Вильсоновой трагедии à effet; предприняв издание 3-го тома моих мелких стихотворений, не посылаю Вам некоторых из них, ибо, вероятно, они явятся прежде вашей «Альционы». Горю нетерпением прочитать Ваше предисловие к «Борису», думаю для второго издания написать к Вам письмо, если позволите, и в нем изложить свои мысли и правила, коими руководствовался, сочиняя мою трагедию.
Весь ваш А. П.
In his Gimn v chest' chumy ("A Hymn in Honor of the Plague") Walsingham (in Pushkin's little tragedy, the Chairman of the Feast) mentions bessmert'ye (immortality):
Есть упоение в бою,
И бездны мрачной на краю,
И в разъярённом океане,
Средь грозных волн и бурной тьмы,
И в аравийском урагане,
И в дуновении Чумы.
Всё, всё, что гибелью грозит,
Для сердца смертного таит
Неизъяснимы наслажденья —
Бессмертья, может быть, залог!
И счастлив тот, кто средь волненья
Их обретать и ведать мог.
There is a certain thrill in battle,
And on the edge of a dark abyss,
And in the raging ocean,
Amidst the terrible waves and stormy dark,
And in the Arabian sandstorm,
And in the breath of the Plague.
Everything, everything that threatens us with ruin
Harbors for the heart of mortal men
Inexplicable delights —
The pledge, perhaps, of immortality!
And happy is he who, amidst unrest,
Managed to find them and know them.
(tr. M. Pettus)
Lord Protector from 1653 until his death (September 3, 1658), Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) died suddenly at age 59. His physicians diagnosed his fatal disorder as "bastard tertian ague." Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains), Humbert mentions the “ague” of the ancients:
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 eyesof 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 way 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. (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:
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.
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, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).
P S. John Milton sought refuge from the Great Plague of London in 1665 by moving to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire. This small cottage served as his sanctuary, where he finished writing his epic poem, Paradise Lost. It is now a preserved museum dedicated to the poet.