The name of the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. (a character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), and the narrator's double pseudonym bring to mind Rayon de Rayonne, a cycle of ten poems by Georgiy Ivanov (1894-1858). In his poem Kak nad stikhami sily sredney… (“As over not quite first-rate verses,” 1956), the first one in Sem’ stikhotvoreniy (“Seven Poems”), VN quotes André Chénier’s last poem Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre (1794):
Как над стихами силы средней
эпиграф из Шенье,
как луч последний, как последний
зефир... comme un dernier
rayon, так над простором голым
моих нелучших лет
каким-то райским ореолом
горит нерусский свет!
As over not quite first-rate verses,
the epigraph from Chénier,
like the last ray, like the last
zephyr… comme un dernier
rayon, thus over the bare expanse
of my not best years
a non-Russian light burns
with some heavenly halo!
By the “not quite first-rate verses” VN means Pushkin’s elegy Andrey Shen’ye (“André Chénier,” 1825). Chénier is the author of an ode to Charlotte Corday (Marat's murderer). Describing his life in Paris with Valeria (Humbert's first wife), Humbert compares himself to Marat:
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe - a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. (1.8)
The narrator and main character of Garshin's novella Nadezhda Nikolaevna (1885), the painter Lopatin uses the face of Nadezhda Nikolaevna (a prostitute) for his portrait of Charlotte Corday. Portret bez skhodstva ("A Portrait without Resemblance") is a collection of poetry by G. Ivanov. A writer who committed suicide by throwing himself into a stairwell, Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888) is the author of Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1877). According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita:
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)
Only fifty-two days pass between Sept. 25, 1952 (the day of Quilty's murder and Humbert's arrest), and Nov. 16, 1952 (the day of Humbert's death in prison). 52 + 4 = 56. Either Humbert began writing Lolita before Sept. 22, 1952 (the day on which he receives a letter from Dolly Schiller), or he died after Nov. 16, 1952 (contrary to what John Ray, Jr. says in his Foreword). It seems that the murder of Clare Quilty takes place only in Humbert's imagination and that Humbert Humbert and John Ray, Jr. are one and the same person.