The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert would have never met Lolita, if on the eve the fire had not destroyed McCoo's house:
Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me again – I mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.
One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion. (1.10)
McCoo and Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) bring to mind Clarisse McClellan, a character (Guy Montag's seventeen-year-old eccentric neighbor whose death spurs Montag into becoming a radical) in Ray Bradbury dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953). At 451° paper catches fire and burns. Bradbury first wrote a 25,000-word version of the story under the title The Fireman, which was published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748) is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson (an English writer, 1689-1761). Charlotte's Ramsdale friends, the Farlows (John and Jean), make one think of Clarissa Harlowe (the heroine of Richardson's novel). A character in Richardson's novel, Robert Lovelace (an aristocratic libertine whose name became a household word in Russian, lovelas) makes one think of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (an American writer of horror stories, 1890-1937). Lolita's classmate at Beardsley College, Opal Something brings to mind The Opalescent Parrot (1929), a collection of essays by Alfred Noyes (an English poet and critic, 1880-1958). In Alfred Noyes's poem The Parrot (1927) the bird repeats the words of a dead language (noone knows what they mean): "Farlo — Merillo — Rozace, Farlo – Merillo – Geray!" Geroy means in Russian "hero." On the other hand, in Geray there is ray. John Ray, Jr. is the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript (and Humbert Humbert's "real" name, as it transpires). In a 1934 letter to H. P. Lovecraft Robert Ervin Howard (an American writer of pulp fiction, 1906-1936) discussed his use of a seemingly prescient parrot in the Conan story "Iron Shadows on the Moon." His recollections, and the reconstruction, appear as follows:
I'm afraid I can't claim originality in regard to the parrot and his repetition of the god's invocation [in “Iron Shadows on the Moon”]. I got the idea from a poem of Noyes', entitled, I believe, 'The Parrot". As I remember, it goes something like this:
When the king and his folk lay dead,
And the murderous horde was gone,
He gnawed through his cage and fled
To the sheltering woods alone.
But after an endless age,
He was taken by man once more;
And swung in a sturdier cage
By a white-washed ale-house door.
Through the long hot afternoon,
From his place by the blistered wall,
He whistled a dark old tune,
And called as a ghost might call:
"Farlo, merillo, geray!"
And the wondering people heard
The voice of the dead that day
Talking again in a bird.
The poem ends on what seems to me a powerful and shuddersome note
And once, oh dreadful and wild,
In the blaze of the noonday sun,
It shrieked like a frightened child
That into the dark has gone.
"In the blaze of the noonday sun" brings to mind the Blazes ("I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes") mentioned by Humbert Humbert. Alfred Noyes makes one think of Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1918), a novel by Erich Maria Remarque (a German writer, 1898-1970). In an attmpt to save his life Clare Quilty tries to seduce Humbert Humbert with his collection of erotica and mentions the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work:
"Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next playI have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow -” (2.35)
Humbert Humbert murders Clare Quilty on September 25, 1952. Ray Bradbury's science fiction story The Veldt originally appeared as The World the Children Made in the September 23, 1950, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The characters in the story include the psychiatrist David McClean. A most reliable and bribable charwoman, Mrs. Vibrissa brings to mind Richardson's Clarissa and wild animals (the lions) in Ray Bradbury's story The Veldt. General Peter Bagration (1765-1812) was felled in the Battle of Borodino (Sept. 7, 1812). Rotmistr Chernoknizhnikov, ili Moskva v 1812 godu ("Captain Blacksorcerer, or Moscow in 1812") is a 1837 novel by Alexander Fomich Veltman (a Russian writer and poet of Swedish descent, 1800-1870). In Veltman's novel Aleksandr Fillipovich Makedonski (1836), the hero and narrator (modeled on the character of Napoleon) travels in time on a hippogryph and in IV century BC talks to Alexander the Great. Veltman's patronymic, Fomich makes one think of Apostol Foma (Thomas the Apostle) mentioned by Humbert Humbert:
he rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill, and presently found myself going at the same lazy pace in a direction opposite to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the boudoir and Chum in the bathroom. No, it was not a house I would have liked to live in. I wondered idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. Not that I cared; on the whole I wished to forget the whole mess - and when I did learn he was dead, the only satisfaction it gave me, was the relief of knowing I need not mentally accompany for months a painful and disgusting convalescence interrupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and relapses, and perhaps an actual visit from him, with trouble on my part to rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something. It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moment our main, if not only, handle to reality. I was all covered with Quilty - with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. (2.36)
According to Humbert Humbert, Thomas had something. In his French fragment Le Dualisme, c'est la monarchie (1854) Alexander Herzen (a Russian writer and thinker, 1812-1870) says that Thomas the Apostle had every reason to doubt the physical resurrection of Jesus:
Jésus-Christ ne sauve aussi que l'esprit. Le corps, il le terrasse; la chair, il l'enchaîne. L'apôtre Thomas avait bien raison de douter de la résurrection du corps.
Herzen was born on April 6, 1812, in Moscow, a few months before Napoleon's invasion of Russia ans brief occupation of the city. In Byloe i dumy ("Bygone and Meditations," 1870) Herzen tells an episode from his father's life: on September 20, 1812, Napoleon asked Ivan Yakovlev (Herzen's father, a retired guard captain) to deliver a peace-offer letter to Emperor Alexander I from occupied and destroyed by fire Moscow. Humbert Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) on September 22, 1952.