According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he picked Rita up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tiger-moth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did – and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband – and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant – the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was – and no doubt still is – a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
In J. D. Salinger's story De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952) John Smith (the narrator and main character who falsely claims to be a descendant of Honoré Daumier and a confidant of Pablo Picasso) moves from Manhattan to Montreal to work as an instructor at a Montreal correspondence art academy, "Les Amis des Vieux Maîtres" ("Friends of the Old Masters") operated by Monsieur I. Yoshoto. De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period brings to mind Dr. Blue, the chief phisician at the Elphinstone hospital. A French painter (1808-1879), Honoré Daumier is the author of The Chess Players, an oil-on-wood painting created in the 1860s. Humbert's chess partner in Beardsley, Gaston Godin is an amateur painter. The two Frenchmen, Gaston Godin and Humbert Humbert bring to mind Alphonse and Gaston, an American comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper, featuring a bumbling pair of Frenchmen with a penchant for politeness. In J. D. Salinger's story, the "exceptionally unpleasant" Smith and his "live-and-let-live" widower stepfather are incompatible as housemates developing an Alphonse and Gaston relationship.
In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian Knight dies in a sanatorium in St Damier (near Paris, the city where Humbert Humbert was born in 1910). Damier is French for “chess board:”
Would I never get to Sebastian? Who were those idle idiots who wrote on the wall 'Death to the Jews' or 'Vive le front populaire', or left obscene drawings? Some anonymous artist had begun blacking squares a chess board, ein Schachbrett, un damier…. There was a flash in my brain and the word settled on my tongue: St Damier! (chapter 20)
In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde compares Keats (who died and was buried in Rome) to St. Sebastian:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
One of John Keats's most famous poems is his ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819). Describing his visits to to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions un belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch who will appear to visionary nurse Mary Lore next time:
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However - likewise for reasons of show - regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. (2.22)
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert (who died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) 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:
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.). The surname Ray brings to mind J. D. Salinger's coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The Russian title of Salinger's novel, Lovets vo rzhi or (more commonly) Nad propast'yu vo rzhi, makes one think of A vsyo prochee rzha i roy zvyozdnyi (And the rest is rust and stardust), the last line of Humbert's poem "Wanted" (composed in a madhouse near Quebec) in the Russian Lolita (1967):
Ищут, ищут Долорес Гейз:
Взор дымчатый тверд. Девяносто
Фунтов всего лишь весит она
При шестидесяти дюймах роста.
Икар мой хромает, Долорес Гейз,
Путь последний тяжел. Уже поздно.
Скоро свалят меня в придорожный бурьян,
А все прочее - ржа и рой звездный.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust. (2.25)
One of Smith's three correspondence students in J. D. Salinger's De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, Sister Irma (a gifted nun whose paintings delight Smith), has the same name as a character in VN's novel Camera Obscura (1933), translated into English by the author as Laughter in the Dark (1938), Kretschmar's eight-year-old daughter who dies of influenza. Albus being Latin for "white," Albinus (Kretschmar's name in the novel's English version) brings to mind Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann mentioned by John Ray, Jr. in his foreword to Humbert's manuscript and by Humbert Humbert in his pocket diary and explorer and psychoanalist Melanie Weiss, whose infolio de lux Bagration Island is an item in Clare Quilty's collection of erotica. In Camera Obscura, Cheepy (a touching guinea pig created by Robert Horn, a gifted but unprincipled cartoonist) sunbathes do polnogo melanizma (to full melanism).
Приблизительно в 1925 году размножилось по всему свету милое, забавное существо – существо теперь уже почти забытое, но в свое время, т. е. в течение трех-четырех лет, бывшее вездесущим, – от Аляски до Патагонии, от Маньчжурии до Новой Зеландии, от Лапландии до мыса Доброй Надежды, словом, всюду, куда проникают цветные открытки, – существо, носившее симпатичное имя: Cheepy.
Рассказывают, что его (или вернее: ее) происхождение связано с вопросом о вивисекции. Художник Роберт Горн, проживавший в Нью-Йорке, однажды завтракал со случайным знакомым – молодым физиологом. Разговор коснулся опытов над живыми зверьми. Физиолог, человек впечатлительный, еще не привыкший к лабораторным кошмарам, выразил мысль, что наука не только допускает изощренную жестокость к тем самым животным, которые в иное время возбуждают в человеке умиление своей пухлостью, теплотой, ужимками, – но еще входит как бы в азарт – распинает живьем и кромсает куда больше особей, чем в действительности ей необходимо. «Знаете что, – сказал он Горну, – вот вы так славно рисуете всякие занятные штучки для журналов; возьмите-ка и пустите, так сказать, на волны моды какого-нибудь многострадального маленького зверя, например морскую свинку. Придумайте к этим картинкам шуточные надписи, где бы этак вскользь, легко упоминалось о трагической связи между свинкой и лабораторией. Удалось бы, я думаю, не только создать очень своеобразный и забавный тип, но и окружить свинку некоторым ореолом модной ласки, что и обратило бы общее внимание на несчастную долю этой, в сущности, милейшей твари». – «Не знаю, – ответил Горн, – они мне напоминают крыс. Бог с ними. Пускай пищат под скальпелем». Но как-то раз, спустя месяц после этой беседы, Горн, в поисках темы для серии картинок, которую просило у него издательство иллюстрированного журнала, вспомнил совет чувствительного физиолога, – и в тот же вечер легко и быстро родилась первая морская свинка Чипи. Публику сразу привлекло, мало что привлекло – очаровало, хитренькое выражение этих блестящих бисерных глаз, круглота форм, толстый задок и гладкое темя, манера сусликом стоять на задних лапках, прекрасный крап, черный, кофейный и золотой, а главное – неуловимое, прелестно-смешное нечто, фантастическая, но весьма определенная жизненность, – ибо Горну посчастливилось найти ту карикатурную линию в облике данного животного, которая, являя и подчеркивая все самое забавное в нем, вместе с тем как-то приближает его к образу человеческому. Вот и началось: Чипи, держащая в лапках череп грызуна (с этикеткой: Cavia cobaja) и восклицающая «Бедный Йорик!»; Чипи на лабораторном столе, лежащая брюшком вверх и пытающаяся делать модную гимнастику – ноги за голову (можно себе представить, сколь многого достигли ее короткие задние лапки); Чипи стоймя, беспечно обстригающая себе коготки подозрительно тонкими ножницами, – причем вокруг валяются: ланцет, вата, иголки, какая-то тесьма… Очень скоро, однако, нарочитые операционные намеки совершенно отпали, и Чипи начала появляться в другой обстановке и в самых неожиданных положениях, – откалывала чарльстон, загорала до полного меланизма на солнце и т. д. Горн живо стал богатеть, зарабатывая на репродукциях, на цветных открытках, на фильмовых рисунках, а также на изображениях Чипи в трех измерениях, ибо немедленно появился спрос на плюшевые, тряпичные, деревянные, глиняные подобия Чипи. Через год весь мир был в нее влюблен. Физиолог не раз в обществе рассказывал, что это он дал Горну идею морской свинки, но ему никто не верил, и он перестал об этом говорить. (Chapter I)
De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period also bings to mind the Pieridae, a large family of butterflies. In Russian, they are called belyanki (from belyi, "white").
Btw., the maiden name of Rita Rait-Kovaleva (J. D. Salinger's and Kurt Vonnegut's Russian translator, 1898-1988) was Chernomordik ("Miss Blackmuzzle"). In a letter to his wife (Olga Knipper, a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater) Chekhov says that he will put up in a Sevastopol hotel under the name Chernomordik. In the Russian Lolita Humbert calls Quilty Tolstomordik (Fatface).