Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland, a small town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) quotes his uncle Gustave's words sicher ist sicher (better safe than sorry):
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties - she had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in - after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes - say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
342 Lawn Street is the Haze house address in Ramsdale. Sicher ist sicher seems to hint at "Mein Kohl ist sicher!" ("My cabbage is safe!"), the Bauer's exclamation in Wilhelm Busch's illustrated poem for children (collected in "Six Poems for Nephews and Nieces," 1870) Das Häschen ("The Little Hare"):
Das Häschen saß im Kohl
Und fraß und war ihm wohl.
Nicht weit auf einem Rasen
Geht ganz gemütlich grasen
Ein Lämmlein weiß und schön.
Da ist der böse Wolf gekommen
Und hat das Lämmlein mitgenommen;
Das Häslein hat's gesehn.
Das Häschen sprang und lief
Zum Bauer hin und rief:
"O weh, o weh!
He, Bauer, he!
Grad ist der böse Wolf gekommen
Und hat dein Lämmlein mitgenommen!"
Da nahm der Bauer Rüppel
Den dicken harten Knüppel,
Sprach: "Danke, lieber Hase!"
Und schlug ihn auf die Nase.
Dann spricht er mit Gekicher:
"Mein Kohl ist sicher!"
Und wer noch fragt,
Was dies besagt,
Ist offenbar
So klug, als wie das Häschen war.
Rasen (lawn) and Lämmlein (little lamb) bring to mind Lawn Street and Ramsdale (a small town in New England where Dolores Haze lives with her mother Charlotte). A German humorist poet and cartoonist who had a younger brother named Gustav (1836-1888), Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) is the author of Max und Moritz - Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (an early example of comic strips, 1865). Lolita is an avid reader of comic strips. In his essay Problems of Translation: Onegin in English (1955) VN mentions Adolf Friedrich Seubert's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin with its Max-und-Moritz tang:
V Onegin has been mistranslated into many languages. I have checked only the French and English versions, and some of the rhymed German ones. The three complete German concoctions I have seen are the worst of the lot. Of these Lippert's (1840) which changes Tatiana into Johanna, and Seubert's (1873) with its Max-und-Moritz tang, are beneath contempt; but Bodenstedt's fluffy product (1854) has been so much praised by German critics that it is necessary to warn the reader that it, too, despite a more laudable attempt at understanding if not expression, bristles with incredible blunders and ridiculous interpolations.
Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz brings to mind St. Moritz, a high Alpine resort town in the Engadine in Switzerland. Gustave Trapp is Humbert's Swiss uncle. A chief rabbi of Prague (the city where VN's mother Elena Ivanovna and his sisters Elena and Olga lived), Gustav Sicher (1880-1960) produced the first translation of the Torah into Chekh which he started in 1932-1939 with Isidor Hirsch and did not complete until 1950. In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), it is Busch (a Riga-based writer) who helps Fyodor to find a publisher for his book on Chernyshevski (a radical critic, 1828-1889).
Wilhelm Busch's poem Das Häschen makes one think of a classic river-crossing riddle, when one must transport the items across the river in a specific order without leaving the goat alone with the cabbage or the wolf alone with the goat (one can only take a single item at a time in the boat). German for "peasant" and "pawn," Bauer brings to mind Prokhodnaya peshka (The Passed Pawn), the name for a future fashionable hotel in Vasyuki (a fictitious town on the Volga) suggested by Ostap Bender in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928):
Автомобили конвейером двигались среди мраморных отелей. Но вот — все остановилось. Из фешенебельной гостиницы «Проходная пешка» вышел чемпион мира Хозе-Рауль Капабланка-и-Граупера. Его окружали дамы. Милиционер, одетый в специальную шахматную форму (галифе в клетку и слоны на петлицах), вежливо откозырял. К чемпиону с достоинством подошел одноглазый председатель васюкинского «Клуба четырех коней».
Lines of cars moved in between the marble hotels. Then suddenly everything stopped. From out of the fashionable Passed Pawn Hotel came the world champion Capablanca. He was surrounded by women. A militiaman dressed in special chess uniform (check breeches and bishops in his lapels) saluted smartly. The one-eyed president of the "Four Knights Club" of Vasyuki approached the champion in a dignified manner. (Chapter 34 "The Interplanetary Chess Tournament")
Ostap Bender promises the local chess enthusiasts to organize the first Interplanetary Chess Tournament in Vasyuki:
— Не беспокойтесь, — сказал Остап, — мой проект гарантирует вашему городу неслыханный расцвет производительных сил. Подумайте, что будет, когда турнир окончится и когда уедут все гости. Жители Москвы, стесненные жилищным кризисом, бросятся в ваш великолепный город. Столица автоматически переходит в Васюки. Сюда приезжает правительство. Васюки переименовываются в Нью-Москву, Москва — в Старые Васюки. Ленинградцы и харьковчане скрежещут зубами, но ничего не могут поделать. Нью-Москва становится элегантнейшим центром Европы, а скоро и всего мира.
— Всего мира!!! — застонали оглушенные васюкинцы.
— Да! А впоследствии и вселенной. Шахматная мысль, превратившая уездный город в столицу земного шара, превратится в прикладную науку и изобретет способы междупланетного сообщения. Из Васюков полетят сигналы на Марс, Юпитер и Нептун. Сообщение с Венерой сделается таким же легким, как переезд из Рыбинска в Ярославль. А там, как знать, может быть, лет через восемь в Васюках состоится первый в истории мироздания междупланетный шахматный конгресс!
"Don't worry," continued Ostap, "my scheme will guarantee the town an unprecedented boom in your production forces. Just think what will happen when the tournament is over and the visitors have left. The citizens of Moscow, crowded together on account of the housing shortage, will come flocking to your beautiful town. The capital will be automatically transferred to Vasyuki. The government will move here. Vasyuki will be renamed New Moscow, and Moscow will become Old Vasyuki. The people of Leningrad and Kharkov will gnash their teeth in fury but won't be able to do a thing about it. New Moscow will soon become the most elegant city in Europe and, soon afterwards, in the whole world."
"The whole world!! I" gasped the citizens of Vasyuki in a daze.
"Yes, and, later on, in the universe. Chess thinking-which has turned a regional centre into the capital of the world-will become an applied science and will invent ways of interplanetary communication. Signals will be sent from Vasyuki to Mars, Jupiter and Neptune. Communications with Venus will be as easy as going from Rybinsk to Yaroslavl. And then who knows what may happen? In maybe eight or so years the first interplanetary chess tournament in the history of the world will be held in Vasyuki." (ibid.)
The number 342 that reappears in Lolita three times (342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale; 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters; between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert registers, if not actually stays, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes) seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth, and the second planets of the Solar System).
A luxury hotel in Briceland, The Enchanted Hunters brings to mind the Sorbonne, a boarding house where the three diamond hunters in The Twelve Chairs, Ostap Bender, Ippolit Matveyevich ("Kisa") Vorobyaninov and Father Fyodor Vostrikov, put up in Stargorod (a fictitious town). A priest, Father Fyodor makes one think of Dr. Boyd (a pastor) and Mr. Braddock, the man for whom the hostess in The Enchanted Hunters mistakes Humbert:
I drifted to the Men’s Room. There, a person in the clerical black - a “hearty party” comme on dit - checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward. Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if we decided to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters’ Hall came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little tables and a large one with “refreshments,” was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte’s manner of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. “What a name for a woman,” I said and strolled away. (1.28)