The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1952), Humbert Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) dated September 18, 1952, on September 22, 1952:
I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down - when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice:
Dear Dad:
How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we go there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship.
Yours expecting,
Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller) (2.27)
I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navelotherwise she might not have found it.
“Alone” did I say? Pas tout fait. I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.
The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.”and not Coalmont, anyway - I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley - the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor - and that he had got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller - the grossness and obscene bonhomie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six a. m. Then, with the stern and romantic care of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes - a waistcoat with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on.
I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only Schiller Paul, Furniture - to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door. (2.28)
Turgenev's address in Baden-Baden, a German spa where Ivan Turgenev (a Russian writer, 1818-1883) lived in his own villa, with the family of Pauline Viardot-García, a French opera singer of Spanish descent (1821-1910), in 1863-1870, was Schillerstrasse, 7. In a letter of September 22, 1867, to Vasiliy Botkin (a Russian writer, 1812-1869) Turgenev mentions his operetki (chamber operas, music by Pauline Viardot) Le dernier Sorcier ("The Last Sorcerer") and Trop de femmes ("Too Many Wives"):
Баден-Баден.
Schillerstrasse, 7.
22-го сент. 1867.
Милый В<асилий> П<етрович>, я давно должен бы был ответить на твою записку -- в этом я виноват,-- но насчет post restante распорядился тотчас, дал твой адресс - и ты, вероятно, уже давно получил те письма Фета, которые я видел собственными глазами. А сам не писал я оттого, что завален работою: мы тут предаемся всякого рода чудо действиям; вторая наша оперетка - "Le dernier Sorcier" - сошла еще благополучнее первой: "Trop de femmes" (о которой говорится даже в фельетоне "Journal de Débats") - завтра мы даем второе представление, на котором присутствуют король и королева прусские - rien que cela ça. Музыка действительно премилая, и я очень жалею, что ты ее не слышал.
Кроме опереток - у нас еще тут охота - так что времени остается мало. - Впрочем я здоров, чего и тебе желаю и дружески жму тебе руку.
Преданный тебе Ив. Тургенев.
P. S. Поклонись всем приятелям, также сделай одолжение, вышли мне через Galignani английский перевод "Отцов и детей" - "Fathers and Sons" - London, Sampsen Low, Son & Marster. При свидании я заплачу тебе, что будет стоить.
Among the audience during the second performance of the second chamber opera, Trop de femmes, were King and Queen of Prussia, no less. King of Prussia in 1867 was Wilhelm I (1797-1888). In 1817 he accompanied his sister Charlotte to Saint-Petersburg, when she married Grand Duke Nikolay Pavlovich (the future Emperor Nicholas I of Russia), becoming at first Grand Duchess and then Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. Charlotte is the name of Lolita's mother. Wilhelm I became Emperor of Germany in 1871 (after the Franco-Prussian war). Miss Emperor (as Humbert Humbert calls her) is Lolita's music teacher at Beardsley. The first chamber opera by the Turgenev-Viardot team, Le dernier Sorcier brings to mind the lines (cited by Pushkin in the first footnote to his 1825 elegy Andrey Shen'ye) in Les derniers vers d'André Chénier ("The Last Poem of André Chénier"): "Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre / Anime le soir d'un beau jour, / Au pied de l'échafaud j'essaie encor ma lyre." André Chénier's mistress Fanny (Madame Laurent Lecoulteux, born Françoise "Fanny" Picot), who is mentioned by Pushkin in his elegy Andrey Shen'ye, brings to mind Fanny Kaplan (born Feiga Haimovna Roytblat, 1890-1918), a Russian Socialist-Revolutionary who on August 30, 1918, attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in Moscow (on the same day Moisey Uritsky was assassinated in Petrograd by Leonid Kanegisser). A French poet who was executed on July 25, 1794, in the last days of the Reign of Terror, André Chénier (1762-1794) is the author of an ode (composed in prison) to Charlotte Corday (Marat's murderer). Describing his life in Paris with Valeria (Humbert Humbert's first wife), Humbert 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)
Valeria is a character (a beautiful young girl with whom Fabio and Muzio are in love and who marries Fabio) in Turgenev's story Pesn' torzhestvuyushchey lyubvi ("The Song of Triumphant Love," 1881). A painter in Ferrara of the 15th century, Fabio brings to mind Miss Fabian, Miss Lester's partner at Beardsley:
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East – or to explode her incognito, Miss Finton Lebone – had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.
“…This racket… lacks all sense of…” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically…”
I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know - and cradled the next quack and a half.
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark - hub of bicycle wheel - moved, shivered, and she was gone.
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed - no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on. (2.14)
In R. L. Stevenson's novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Edward Hyde is Henry Jekyll's evil alter ego. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” 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 “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows 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 published 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, and 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.). John Ray, Jr. represents, as it were, the Jekyll part of Humbert Humbert's personality.
The author of Zapiski okhotnika ("A Hunter's Notes," 1851), Turgenev mentions okhota (hunting) in his letter to Botkin. Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland). Turgenev is the author of Kazn' Tropmana ("The Execution of Tropmann," 1870). In the Russian Lolita (1967), Gumbert Gumbert substitutes Tropman (a murderer who was publicly guillotined on January 19, 1870, outside La Roquette Prison in Paris) for Laqueue (as Humbert Humbert calls Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital):
До конторы Виндмюллера было всего два блока. Рукопожатье его оказалось очень медленным, очень обстоятельным, очень крепким, но как бы вопросительным. Он думал, что я живу в Калифорнии. Не преподавал ли я одно время в Бердслейском университете? Туда только что поступила его дочь. А как поживает? Я дал полный отчет о миссис Скиллер. Деловой разговор оказался приятнейшим. Я перевел все свое имущество на ее имя и вышел в сентябрьский зной беззаботным нищим. Теперь, когда я покончил с делами, я мог посвятить себя главной цели поездки в Рамздэль. До сих пор, придерживаясь той методичности, которой недаром горжусь, я не снимал маски с лица Клэра Куильти; он сидел у меня в подземелье, ожидая моего прихода со служителем культа и брадобреем: "Reveillez-vous, Tropman, il est temps de mourir!" Мне сейчас недосуг заниматься вопросом, как запоминаются физиономии (нахожусь на пути к его дядюшке и иду скорым шагом); но позволю себе отчеркнуть следующее: в спирту мутной памяти я сохранял чье-то жабье лицо. Я видал это лицо мельком несколько раз и заметил в нем некоторое сходство с жизнерадостным и довольно противным родственником моим, жившим и умершим в Швейцарии. Помню его гантели, вонючее трико, толстые волосатые руки, и плешь, и свиноподобную горничную-наложницу, - но в общем этот паршивец был довольно безобидный; слишком безобидный, добавлю, чтобы сойти за мою добычу. В странном состоянии ума, в котором я сейчас находился, я как-то потерял связь с образом Густава Траппа: его полностью поглотило лицо драматурга Клэра Куильти, таким, каким он был представлен, с художественной точностью, на рекламах папирос "Дромадер" и на кабинетной фотографии, стоявшей у его дядюшки на письменном столе. (2.33)
Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could dedicate myself freely to the main object of my visit to Ramsdale. In the methodical manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come with barber and priest: “Réveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de mourir! ” I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of physiognomization - I am on my way to his uncle and walking fast - but let me jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a clouded memory the toad of a face. In the course of a few glimpses, I had noticed its slight resemblance to a cheery and rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine in Switzerland. With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy arms, and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the whole a harmless old rascal. Too harmless, in fact, to be confused with my prey. In the state of mind I now found myself, I had lost contact with Trapp’s image. It had become completely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty - as represented, with artistic precision, by an easeled photograph of him that stood on his uncle’s desk. (2.33)
Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale and finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor, the Ramsdale dentist on Wednesday, September 24, 1952. On the previous day, September 23, he visited Lolita in Coalmont and found out the name of her abductor. The second performance of Turgenev's and Viardot's chamber opera Trop de femmes, at which King and Queen of Prussia were present, took place on September 23, 1867. A portrait of Turgenev was painted (in 1874 in Paris) by Ilya Repin:
A Russian realist painter, Ilya Repin (1844-1830) is the author of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, a painting made between 1883 and 1885. According to John Ray, Jr., 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.