Describing his childhood, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the splendid Hotel Mirana that revolved around him as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects – paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity - the fatal rigidity - of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness. (1.2)
The hotel's name seems to hint at "Udaleny ot mira na kladbishche (Removed from the world to a cemetery)," the first line of Alexander Blok's poem Na mogile druga ("At the Grave of a Friend," 1902):
Удалены от мира на кладбище,
Мы вновь с тобой, негаданный мертвец.
Ты перешел в последнее жилище,
Я всё в пыли, но вижу свой конец.
Там, в синеве, мы встретим наши зори,
Все наши сны продлятся наяву.
Я за тобой, поверь, мой милый, вскоре
За тем же сном в безбрежность уплыву.
In Blok's poem, kladbishche (cemetery) rhymes with zhilishche (abode). The rhyme zhilishche - kladbishche occurs in Pushkin's poem K vel'mozhe ("To a Grandee," 1830):
Всё изменилося. Ты видел вихорь бури,
Падение всего, союз ума и фурий,
Свободой грозною воздвигнутый закон,
Под гильотиною Версаль и Трианон
И мрачным ужасом смененные забавы.
Преобразился мир при громах новой славы.
Давно Ферней умолк. Приятель твой Вольтер,
Превратности судеб разительный пример,
Не успокоившись и в гробовом жилище,
Доныне странствует с кладбища на кладбище.
Барон д’Ольбах, Морле, Гальяни, Дидерот,
Энциклопедии скептической причет,
И колкой Бомарше, и твой безносый Касти,
Все, все уже прошли. Их мненья, толки, страсти
Забыты для других. Смотри: вокруг тебя
Всё новое кипит, былое истребя.
Свидетелями быв вчерашнего паденья,
Едва опомнились младые поколенья.
Жестоких опытов сбирая поздний плод,
Они торопятся с расходом свесть приход.
Им некогда шутить, обедать у Темиры,
Иль спорить о стихах. Звук новой, чудной лиры,
Звук лиры Байрона развлечь едва их мог.
Zvuk liry Bayrona (the sound of Byron's lyre) brings to mind Dr Byron, the Haze family physician who gives Humbert "Papa's Purple Pills" with which he drugs Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). Harold Haze (Lolita's father) makes one think of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812-18), a narrative long poem by Lord Byron. The first two cantos of Byron's poem are dedicated to "lanthe" (Lady Charlotte Mary Bacon, née Harley, 1801-80), a daughter of Jane Elizabeth Harley (née Scott; 1774-1824), Byron's mistress.
In his epistle to Prince Yusupov, To a Grandee, Pushkin says that Voltaire did not find rest even in his grave (grobovoe zhilishche) and still wanders from cemetery to cemetery (s klabishcha na kladbishche). Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, a French writer and philosopher, 1694-1778) is the author of La Pucelle d'Orléans ("The Maid of Orleans," 1752), a satirical poem about Joan of Arc (c. 1412 - May 30, 1431, a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronation of Charles VII of France during the Hundred Years' War). In a performance that Humbert and Lolita saw at the Beardsley theater Vivian Darkbloom (Clare Quilty's coauthor, anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) played Joan of Arc:
The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves ground, and a number of other repairs and improvements were paid for by not very mechanically-minded but prudent papa Humbert, so that the late Mrs. Humbert’s car was in respectable shape when ready to undertake a new journey.
We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley School, that we would be back as soon as my Hollywood engagement came to an end (inventive Humbert was to be, I hinted, chief consultant in the production of a film dealing with “existentialism,” still a hot thing at the time). Actually I was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border - I was braver now than last year - and there deciding what to do with my little concubine who was now sixty inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. We had dug out our tour books and maps. She had traced our route with immense zest. Was it thanks to those theatricals that she had now outgrown her juvenile jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality? I experienced the queer lightness of dreams that pale but warm Sunday morning when we abandoned Professor Chem’s puzzled house and sped along Main Street toward the four-lane highway. My Love’s striped, black-and-white cotton frock, jauntry blue with the large beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet, which gemmed her throat: a spring rain gift from me. We passed the New Hotel, and she laughed. “A penny for your thoughts,” I said and she stretched out her palm at once, but at that moment I had to apply the breaks rather abruptly at a red light. As we pulled up, another car came to a gliding stop alongside, and a very striking looking, athletically lean young woman (where had I seen her?) with a high complexion and shoulder-length brilliant bronze hair, greeted Lo with a ringing “Hi!” - and then, addressing me, effusively, edusively (placed!), stressing certain words, said: “What a shame it was to tear Dolly away from the play - you should have heard the author raving about her after that rehearsal - ” “Green light, you dope,” said Lo under her breath, and simultaneously, waving in bright adieu a bangled arm, Joan of Arc (in a performance we saw at the local theatre) violently outdistanced us to swerve into Campus Avenue. (2.15)
The name Clare Quilty (of the playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) seems to hint at the phrase "clearly guilty." Voltaire is attributed the dictum "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." A poem that Humbert makes Quilty read out loud before his death ends in the lines "because of all you did /because of all I did not / you have to die:"
I decided to inspect the pistol - our sweat might have spoiled something - and regain my wind before proceeding to the main item in the program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence - in the poetical form I had given it. The term “poetical justice” is one that may be most happily used in this respect. I handed him a neat typescript.
“Yes,” he said, “splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading glasses” (he attempted to rise).
“No.”
“Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?”
“Yes.”
“Here goes. I see it’s in verse.
Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage…
“That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.”
…when I stood Adam-naked
before a federal law and all its stinging stars
“Oh, grand stuff!”
…Because you took advantage of a sin
when I was helpless moulting moist and tender
hoping for the best
dreaming of marriage in a mountain state
aye of a litter of Lolitas…
“Didn’t get that.”
Because you took advantage of my inner
essential innocence
because you cheated me
“A little repetitious, what? Where was I?”
Because you cheated me of my redemption
because you took
her at the age when lads
play with erector sets
“Getting smutty, eh?”
a little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the colored gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
“Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I’m concerned.”
He folded and handed it back to me. (2.35)
In his Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations (1756) Voltaire mentions Gilles de Rais (Baron de Rais, also spelt Retz; c. 1405 - 26 Oct. 1440), Joan of Arc's comrade-in-arms, Marshal of France and confessed child murderer, whom folklore transfigured into Bluebeard (a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives). Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains), Humbert (a White Widowed Male) mentions poor Bluebeard:
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever – and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room – all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that "snow" and "joy juice"). (2.22)
Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais bring to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. 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.). In his Foreword John Ray, Jr. mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved:
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.
In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor compares Chernyshevski to Voltaire:
Он любил читать календари, отмечая для общего сведения подписчиков "Современника" (1855): Гинея -- 6 руб. 47 с пол. коп.; северо-американский доллар -- 1 руб 31 коп. серебром: или сообщал, что "между Одессой и Очаковым построены на счет пожертвований телеграфические башни". Истинный энциклопедист, своего рода Вольтер, с ударением, правда, на первом слоге, он исписал, не скупясь, тьму страниц (всегда готовый обхватить как свернутый ковер и развернуть перед читателем всю историю затронутого вопроса), перевел целую библиотеку, использовал все жанры вплоть до стихов и до конца жизни мечтал составить "критический словарь идей и фактов" (что напоминает флоберовскую карикатуру, тот "Dictionnaire des idées reçues", иронический эпиграф к которому -- "большинство всегда право" -- Чернышевский выставил бы всерьез). Об этом то он пишет жене из крепости, со страстью, с горестью, с ожесточением рассказывая о тех титанических трудах, которые он еще совершит. Далее, все двадцать лет сибирского одиночества, он лечился этой мечтой: но, познакомившись за год до смерти со словарем Брокгауза, увидел в нем ее воплощение. Тогда он возжаждал Брокгауза перевести (а то "напихают туда всякой дряни, вроде мелких немецких художников"), почитая такой труд венцом всей своей жизни; оказалось, что и это уже предпринято.
He loved to read almanacs, noting for the general information of the Contemporary subscribers (1855): “A guinea is 6 rubles and 47½ kopecks; the North American dollar is 1 silver ruble and 31 kopecks”; or else he would inform them that “telegraph towers between Odessa and Ochakov have been built from donations.” A genuine encyclopedist, a kind of Voltaire—with the stress, true, on the first syllable—he unstintingly copied out thousands of pages (he was always ready to embrace the rolled-up carpet of any chance subject and unfold the whole of it before the reader), translated a whole library, cultivated all genres right down to poetry, and dreamed to the end of his life of composing “a critical dictionary of ideas and facts” (which recalls Flaubert’s caricature, that “Dictionnaire des idées reçues” whose ironic epigraph—“the majority is always right”—Chernyshevski would have adopted in all seriousness). On this subject he writes to his wife from the fortress, telling her with passion, sorrow, bitterness, about all the titanic works which he will still complete. Later, during all the twenty years of his Siberian isolation, he sought solace in this dream; but then, one year before his death, when he learned of Brockhaus’s dictionary, he saw in it its realization. Then he yearned to translate it (otherwise “they would stuff it with all sorts of rubbish, such as minor German artists”), deeming that such a work would be the crown of his entire life; it turned out that this, too, had been already undertaken.
In his book Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski repeated Count Vorontsov’s words about Pushkin, "a poor imitator of Lord Byron:"
Говоря, что Пушкин был «только слабым подражателем Байрона», Чернышевский чудовищно точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронцова: «Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона». Излюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что «у Пушкина недостаток прочного, глубокого образования» – дружеское аукание с замечанием того же Воронцова: «Нельзя быть истинным поэтом, не работая постоянно для расширения своих познаний, а их у него недостаточно». «Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евгения Онегина», – писал Надеждин, сравнивая Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетных узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Уваровым, министром народного просвещения, сказавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: «Писать стишки не значит ещё проходить великое поприще».
When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”