Describing his travels with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions some investigation that Rita undertook on her own, around San Humbertino:
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 Tigermoth, 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.”
She had a natty little coupe; and in it we traveled to California so as to give my venerable vehicle a rest. Her natural speed was ninety. Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952, and she was the sweetest, simplest, gentles, dumbest Rita imaginable. In comparison to her, Valechka was a Schlegel, and Charlotte a Hegel. There is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita - wherever you are, drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most soothing, the most comprehending companion that I ever had, and certainly saved me from the madhouse. I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl’s bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan - and in the course of some investigation she undertook on her own (without really knowing a thing), around San Humbertino, got entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I had the devil of a time retrieving her - used and bruised but still cocky. Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with my sacred automatic; I said you couldn’t, it was not a revolver, and we struggled for it, until at last it went off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it made in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her shrieks of laughter. (2.26)
San Humbertino may hint at San Bernardino (a city in Southern California), but it also brings to mind Buratino, the title character of Alexey Tolstoy's fairy tale Zolotoy klyuchik, ili Priklyucheniya Buratino (The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino, 1936), a retelling of Carlo Collodi's children's fantasy novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). Tolstoy dedicated the book to his future fourth and last wife, Lyudmila Krestinskaya. According to Humbert Humbert, in comparison to Rita, Valechka (Humbert Humbert's first wife Valeria) was a Schlegel, and Charlotte (Humbert Humbert's second wife, Lolita's mother) a Hegel. Gegel', frak, metel' ("Hegel, a Tailcoat, a Blizzard," 1850) is a memoir essay by Ivan Bunin (a Russian writer, 1870-1953), a close friend of Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy (a Russian and Soviet writer, 1883-1945). At the beginning of his memoir essay Tretiy Tolstoy ("The Third Tolstoy," 1949) Bunin mentions Count Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (a Russian poet and writer, 1817-1875), the author of Prince Serebryanyi (1862), a novel from the times of Ivan the Terrible:
«Третий Толстой» - так нередко называют в Москве недавно умершего там автора романов «Петр Первый», «Хождение по мукам», многих комедий, повестей и рассказов, известного под именем графа Алексея Николаевича Толстого: называют так потому, что были в русской литературе еще два Толстых - граф Алексей Константинович Толстой, поэт и автор романа из времен царя Ивана Грозного «Князь Серебряный», и граф Лев Николаевич Толстой. Я довольно близко знал этого Третьего Толстого в России и в эмиграции. Это был человек во многих отношениях замечательный. Он был даже удивителен сочетанием в нем редкой личной безнравственности (ни чуть не уступавшей, после его возвращения в Россию из эмиграции, безнравственности его крупнейших соратников на поприще служения советскому Кремлю) с редкой талантливостью всей его натуры, наделенной к тому же большим художественным даром. Написал он в этой «советской» России, где только чекисты друг с другом советуются, особенно много и во всех родах, начавши с площадных сценариев о Распутине, об интимной жизни убиенных царя и царицы, написал вообще не мало такого, что просто ужасно по низости, пошлости, но даже и в ужасном оставаясь талантливым. Что до большевиков, то они чрезвычайно гордятся им не только как самым крупным «советским» писателем, но еще и тем, что был он все-таки граф, да еще Толстой. Недаром «сам» Молотов сказал на каком-то «Чрезвычайном восьмом съезде Советов»:
Товарищи! Передо мной выступал здесь всем известный писатель Алексей Николаевич Толстой. Кто не знает, что это бывший граф Толстой! А теперь? Теперь он товарищ Толстой, один из лучших и самых популярных писателей земли советской!»
Последние слова Молотов сказал тоже недаром: ведь когда-то Тургенев назвал Льва Толстого «великим писателем земли русской».
A historical princely surname, Serebryanyi means Silver and brings to mind John Silver, the one-legged pirate (and ship cook) in R. L. Stevenson's 1883 novel Treasure Island (its copy is used by Lolita as one of her hiding places at Beardsley), and the Silver Spur Court in Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized on Tuesday, June 28, 1949. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“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.
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Ilya Repin (a Russian realist painter, 1844-1930) made between 1883 and 1885. In 1879 Repin painted a portrait of Count A. K. Tolstoy (who had died on September 28, 1875, as a result of morphine overdose). In a letter of November 25, 1892, to Alexey Suvorin (the publisher of Novoe Vremya newspaper, 1834-1912), the author of Tatiana Repin (1886), a play (in 1889 Chekhov wrote the last act of Suvorin's Tatiana Repin), Anton Chekhov (a Russian writer, 1860-1904) compares his story Palata №6 (Ward Six, 1892) to sweet lemonade and mentions the paintings of Repin and Shishkin:
Вас нетрудно понять, и Вы напрасно браните себя за то, что неясно выражаетесь. Вы горький пьяница, а я угостил Вас сладким лимонадом, и Вы, отдавая должное лимонаду, справедливо замечаете, что в нем нет спирта. В наших произведениях нет именно алкоголя, который бы пьянил и порабощал, и это Вы хорошо даете попять. Отчего нет? Оставляя в стороне "Палату No 6" и меня самого, будем говорить вообще, ибо это интересней. Будем говорить об общих причинах, коли Вам не скучно, и давайте захватим целую эпоху. Скажите по совести, кто из моих сверстников, т. е. людей в возрасте 30--45 лет, дал миру хотя одну каплю алкоголя? Разве Короленко, Надсон и все нынешние драматурги не лимонад? Разве картины Репина или Шишкина кружили Вам голову? Мило, талантливо, Вы восхищаетесь и в то же время никак не можете забыть, что Вам хочется курить. Наука и техника переживают теперь великое время, для нашего же брата это время рыхлое, кислое, скучное, сами мы кислы и скучны, умеем рождать только гуттаперчевых мальчиков, и не видит этого только Стасов, которому природа дала редкую способность пьянеть даже от помоев. Причины тут не в глупости нашей, не в бездарности и не в наглости, как думает Буренин, а в болезни, которая для художника хуже сифилиса и полового истощения. У нас нет "чего-то", это справедливо, и это значит, что поднимите подол нашей музе, и Вы увидите там плоское место. Вспомните, что писатели, которых мы называем вечными или просто хорошими и которые пьянят нас, имеют один общий и весьма важный признак: они куда-то идут и Вас зовут туда же, и Вы чувствуете не умом, а всем своим существом, что у них есть какая-то цель, как у тени отца Гамлета, которая недаром приходила и тревожила воображение. У одних, смотря по калибру, цели ближайшие -- крепостное право, освобождение родины, политика, красота или просто водка, как у Дениса Давыдова, у других цели отдалённые -- бог, загробная жизнь, счастье человечества и т. п. Лучшие из них реальны и пишут жизнь такою, какая она есть, но оттого, что каждая строчка пропитана, как соком, сознанием цели, Вы, кроме жизни, какая есть, чувствуете ещё ту жизнь, какая должна быть, и это пленяет Вас.
It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside "Ward No. 6" and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let ms discuss the general causes, if that won't bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.
At the end of his memoir essay "Hegel, a Tailcoat, a Blizzard" Bunin quotes Suvorin's sharp criticism of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-1877) and, in the last sentence, mentions Chekhov's high esteem of Suvorin's literary taste:
«Вронский действует быстро, натиском, заманивает девиц, втирается в знакомство к Каренину, нагло преследует его жену и, наконец, достигает своей цели. Анна, которую автор с таким блеском выводит на сцену, - как она умеет одеваться, как страстно увлекается «изяществом» Вронского, как нагло и мило обманывает мужа, Анна падает как весьма ординарная, пошлая женщина, без надобности, утешая себя тем, что теперь оба довольны - и муж, и любовник, ибо обоим она служит своим телом, «изящным, культурным» телом... Граф Толстой обольстительно рисует пошловатый мир Вронского и Анны... А ведь граф Толстой даровитый писатель...»
Что это такое? Это пример того, до чего договариваются некоторые в предреволюционные и революционные времена. В шестидесятых годах да и в семидесятых не один болван, ненавидевший «фрак», тоже договаривался до чудовищных нелепостей. Но был ли болваном тот, чьи строки я только что привел? Строки, которые мог написать лишь самый отчаянный болван, негодяй и лжец, которого мало было повесить на первой осине даже за одни только каверзные кавычки в этих строках? Это писал совсем не болван, это писал Алексей Сергеевич Суворин, ставший впоследствии столь известным, писал в семидесятых годах. Ведь даже злейшие враги считали его впоследствии большим умом, большим талантом. А Чехов писал ему о его литературном вкусе даже восторженно:
«У вас вкус литературный - превосходный, я верю ему как тому, что в небесах есть солнце».
According to Chekhov, his belief in Suvorin's literary taste is as strong, as in the fact that there is the sun in the sky. In a letter of November 16, 1900, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he learnt from the newspapers that Suvorin’s daughter Nastya (who was secretly in love with Chekhov) had married:
Из газет я узнал, что Настя вышла замуж. Поздравляю Вас, Анну Ивановну и Настю, желаю от души и от чистого сердца счастья. К Вашей семье я привязан почти как к своей, и в искренность моего пожелания Вы можете верить.
According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert Humbert 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 in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert 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 Garin Death Ray is the English title of Alexey Tolstoy's science fiction novel Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1927). In VN's novel Ada (1969), Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) is the son of Dedalus Veen and Irina Garin (who must have died in childbirth). The characters in Chekhov's story Volodya bolshoy i Volodya malenkiy ("The Two Volodyas," 1893) include Rita, a spinster who can drink any amount of wine and liquor without being drunk and who loves to tell scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way:
В санях, кроме Володи большого, Володи маленького и Софьи Львовны, находилась еще одна особа — Маргарита Александровна, или, как ее все звали, Рита, кузина госпожи Ягич, девушка уже за тридцать, очень бледная, с черными бровями, в pince-nez, курившая папиросы без передышки, даже на сильном морозе; всегда у нее на груди и на коленях был пепел. Она говорила в нос, растягивая каждое слово, была холодна, могла пить ликеры и коньяк, сколько угодно, и не пьянела, и двусмысленные анекдоты рассказывала вяло, безвкусно. Дома она от утра до вечера читала толстые журналы, обсыпая их пеплом, или кушала мороженые яблоки.
Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a fourth person in the sledge -- Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagich -- a very pale girl over thirty, with black eyebrows and a pince-nez, who was for ever smoking cigarettes, even in the bitterest frost, and who always had her knees and the front of her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke through her nose, drawling every word, was of a cold temperament, could drink any amount of wine and liquor without being drunk, and used to tell scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. At home she spent her days reading thick magazines, covering them with cigarette ash, or eating frozen apples.