Among the things that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) and Lolita cannot discuss are stippled Hopkins and shorn Baudelaire:
There was the day, during our first trip - our first circle of paradise - when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn - to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on - a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration - and every limit presupposes something beyond it - hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)
In Drugie berega ("Other Shores," 1954), the Russian version of his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951), VN pairs Gerard Manley Hopkins (an English poet and Jesuit priest, 1844-1889) with John Donne (an English poet and Anglican cleric, 1572-1631):
Говорят, что в ленинскую пору сочувствие большевизму со стороны английских и американских передовых кругов основано было на соображениях внутренней политики. Мне кажется, что в значительной мере оно зависело от простого невежества. То немногое, что мой Бомстон и его друзья знали о России, пришло на Запад из коммунистических мутных источников. Когда я допытывался у гуманнейшего Бомстона, как же он оправдывает презренный и мерзостный террор, установленный Лениным, пытки и расстрелы, и всякую другую полоумную расправу, — Бомстон выбивал трубку о чугун очага, менял положение громадных скрещенных ног и говорил, что не будь союзной блокады, не было бы и террора. Всех русских эмигрантов, всех врагов Советов от меньшевика до монархиста, он преспокойно сбивал в кучу «царистских элементов», и что бы я ни кричал, полагал, что князь Львов родственник государя, а Милюков бывший царский министр. Ему никогда не приходило в голову, что если бы он и другие иностранные идеалисты были русскими в России, их бы ленинский режим истребил немедленно. По его мнению, то, что он довольно жеманно называл «некоторое единообразие политических убеждений» при большевиках, было следствием «отсутствия всякой традиции свободомыслия» в России. Особенно меня раздражало отношение Бомстона к самому Ильичу, который, как известно всякому образованному русскому, был совершенный мещанин в своем отношении к искусству, знал Пушкина по Чайковскому и Белинскому и «не одобрял модернистов», причем под «модернистами» понимал Луначарского и каких-то шумных итальянцев; но для Бомстона и его друзей, столь тонко судивших о Донне и Хопкинсе, столь хорошо понимавших разные прелестные подробности в только что появившейся главе об искусе Леопольда Блума, наш убогий Ленин был чувствительнейшим, проницательнейшим знатоком и поборником новейших течений в литературе, и Бомстон только снисходительно улыбался, когда я, продолжая кричать, доказывал ему, что связь между передовым в политике и передовым в поэтике, связь чисто словесная (чем, конечно, радостно пользовалась советская пропаганда), и что на самом деле, чем радикальнее русский человек в своих политических взглядах, тем обыкновенно консервативнее он в художественных. (Chapter Twelve, 2)
It is probably true, as some have argued, that sympathy for Leninism on the part of English and American liberal opinion in the twenties was swung by consideration of home politics. But it was also due to simple misinformation. My friend knew little of Russia’s past and this little had come to him through polluted Communist channels. When challenged to justify the bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin—the torture-house, the blood-bespattered wall—Nesbit would tap the ashes out of his pipe against the fender knob, recross sinistrally his huge, heavily shod, dextrally crossed legs, and murmur something about the “Allied Blockade.” He lumped together as “Czarist elements” Russian émigrés of all hues, from peasant Socialist to White general—much as today Soviet writers wield the term “Fascist.” He never realized that had he and other foreign idealists been Russians in Russia, he and they would have been destroyed by Lenin’s regime as naturally as rabbits are by ferrets and farmers. He maintained that the reason for what he demurely called “less variety of opinion” under the Bolsheviks than in the darkest Tsarist days was “the want of any tradition of free speech in Russia,” a statement he got, I believe, from the sort of fatuous “Dawn in Russia” stuff that eloquent English and American Leninists wrote in those years. But the thing that irritated me perhaps most was Nesbit’s attitude toward Lenin himself. All cultured and discriminating Russians knew that this astute politician had about as much taste and interest in aesthetic matters as an ordinary Russian bourgeois of the Flaubertian épicier sort (the type that admired Pushkin on the strength of Chaykovski’s vile librettos, wept at the Italian opera, and was allured by any painting that told a story); but Nesbit and his highbrow friends saw in him a kind of sensitive, poetic-minded patron and promoter of the newest trends in art and would smile a superior smile when I tried to explain that the connection between advanced politics and advanced art was a purely verbal one (gleefully exploited by Soviet propaganda), and that the more radical a Russian was in politics, the more conservative he was on the artistic side. (Chapter Thirteen, 3)
Describing Dietrich (a young German whose hobby was capital punishment and who hoped some day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions) in Drugie berega, VN mentions Dietrich's svetlye forelevye glaza (light trout eyes):
Американские мои друзья явно не верят мне, когда я рассказываю, что за пятнадцать лет жизни в Германии я не познакомился близко ни с одним немцем, не прочел ни одной немецкой газеты или книги и никогда не чувствовал ни малейшего неудобства от незнания немецкого языка. Перебирая в памяти мои очень немногие и совершенно случайные встречи с берлинскими туземцами, я выделил в английской версии этих заметок немецкого студента, которому я кажется исправлял какие-то письма, посылавшиеся им кузине в Америку. Это был тихий, приличный, благополучный молодой человек в очках, изучавший гуманитарные науки в университете. Кто только ни измывался в Эпоху Разума над собирателями бабочек — тут и Лабрюйер в шестом издании (1691) своих «Характеров», презрительно отмечающий, что иной модник любит насекомых и рыдает над умершей гусеницей, тут и пудреные англичане Гей и Поп, небрежно упоминающие в стихах о глуповатых философах, доводящих науку до абсурда тем, что гоняются за красивыми насекомыми, которых столь ценят любознательные немцы. И вот интересно, что бы сказали эти моралисты о коньке молодого немца моего улова в 1930-ом году: он коллекционировал фотографические снимки казней. Уже при второй встрече он показал мне купленную им серию («Einbischen retouchiert»), - грустно сказал он, наморщив веснушчатый нос), изображавшую разные моменты заурядной декапитации в Китае; он с большим знанием дела указывал на красоту роковой сабли и на прекрасную атмосферу той полной кооперативности между палачом и пациентом, которая, на очень ясном снимке, заканчивалась феноменальным гейзером дымчато-серой крови. Небольшое состояние позволяло молодому собирателю довольно много разъезжать. Он жаловался, впрочем, что ему не везет. На Балканах он присутствовал при двух-трех посредственных повешениях, а на Бульваре Араго в пленительном Париже на широко рекламированной, но оказавшейся весьма убогой и механической «гильотинаде» (как он выражался, думая, что это по-французски); как-то всегда так выходило, что ему было плохо видно, пропадали детали, и не удавалось ничего интересного снять дорогим аппаратиком, спрятанным в рукаве макинтоша. Несмотря на сильнейшую простуду, он недавно ездил в Регенсбург, где казнь совершалась по старинке, при помощи топора; он ожидал многого от этого зрелища, но, к величайшему разочарованию, осужденному по-видимому дали наркотическое средство, вследствие чего дурень едва реагировал, только вяло шлепался об землю, борясь с неловкими, падающими на него, помощниками палача. Дитрих, так звали молодого любителя, надеялся когда-нибудь попасть в Америку, чтобы посмотреть электрокуцию, и, мечтательно хмурясь, спрашивал себя, неужели правда, что во время этой операции сенсационные облачки дыма выходят из природных отверстий содрогающегося тела. При третьей и к сожалению последней встрече (сколько еще было штрихов в этом Дитрихе, которые мне хотелось добрать и сохранить для писательских нужд!) он, не сердясь - хотя было на что сердиться, - а напротив, с кроткой печалью, рассказал, что недавно провел целую ночь, терпеливо наблюдая за приятелем, который решил покончить с собой и после некоторых уговоров согласился проделать это в присутствии Дитриха, но увы, приятель оказался бесчестным обманщиком и, вместо того, чтобы выстрелить себе в рот, как было обещано, грубо напился и к утру был в самом наглом настроении — хохотал и брился. Я давно потерял из виду милого Дитриха, но вполне ясно представляю себе выражение совершенного удовлетворения и облегчения («…наконец-то..,») в его светлых форелевых глазах, когда он нынче, в гемютном немецком городке, избежавшем бомбежки, в кругу других ветеранов гитлеровских походов и опытов, демонстрирует друзьям, которые с гоготом добродушного восхищения («Дизер Дитрих!») бьют себя ладонью по ляжке, те абсолютно вундербар фотографии, которые так неожиданно, и дешево, ему за те годы посчастливилось снять. (Chapter Thirteen, 2)
Somehow, during my secluded years in Germany, I never came across those gentle musicians of yore who, in Turgenev’s novels, played their rhapsodies far into the summer night; or those happy old hunters with their captures pinned to the crown of their hats, of whom the Age of Reason made such fun: La Bruyère’s gentleman who sheds tears over a parasitized caterpillar, Gay’s “philosophers more grave than wise” who, if you please, “hunt science down in butterflies,” and, less insultingly, Pope’s “curious Germans,” who “hold so rare” those “insects fair”; or simply the so-called wholesome and kindly folks that during the last war homesick soldiers from the Middle West seem to have preferred so much to the cagey French farmer and to brisk Madelon II. On the contrary, the most vivid figure I find when sorting out in memory the meager stack of my non-Russian and non-Jewish acquaintances in the years between the two wars is the image of a young German university student, well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment. At our second meeting he showed me a collection of photographs among which was a purchased series (“Ein bischen retouchiert,” he said wrinkling his freckled nose) that depicted the successive stages of a routine execution in China; he commented, very expertly, on the splendor of the lethal sword and on the spirit of perfect cooperation between headsman and victim, which culminated in a veritable geyser of mist-gray blood spouting from the very clearly photographed neck of the decapitated party. Being pretty well off, this young collector could afford to travel, and travel he did, in between the humanities he studied for his Ph.D. He complained, however, of continuous ill luck and added that if he did not see something really good soon, he might not stand the strain. He had attended a few passable hangings in the Balkans and a well-advertised, although rather bleak and mechanical guillotinade (he liked to use what he thought was colloquial French) on the Boulevard Arago in Paris; but somehow he never was sufficiently close to observe everything in detail, and the highly expensive teeny-weeny camera in the sleeve of his raincoat did not work as well as he had hoped. Despite a bad cold, he had journeyed to Regensburg where beheading was violently performed with an axe; he had expected great things from that spectacle but, to his intense disappointment, the subject had apparently been drugged and had hardly reacted at all, beyond feebly flopping about on the ground while the masked executioner and his clumsy mate fell all over him. Dietrich (my acquaintance’s first name) hoped some day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions; from this word, in his innocence, he derived the adjective “cute,” which he had learned from a cousin of his who had been to America, and with a little frown of wistful worry Dietrich wondered if it were really true that, during the performance, sensational puffs of smoke issued from the natural orifices of the body. At our third and last encounter (there still remained bits of him I wanted to file for possible use) he related to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that he had once spent a whole night patiently watching a good friend of his who had decided to shoot himself and had agreed to do so, in the roof of the mouth, facing the hobbyist in a good light, but having no ambition or sense of honor, had got hopelessly tight instead. Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows, nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this), a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans—the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler’s reign. (Chapter Fourteen, 1)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) VN renders "stippled Hopkins" as tochechki na foreli Gopkinsa (little specks on Hopkin's trout):
Есть у меня и другие полузадушенные воспоминания, которые ныне встают недоразвитыми монстрами и терзают меня. Однажды, на бердслейской улице с закатом в пролете, она обратилась к маленькой Еве Розен (я сопровождал обеих нимфеток на концерт и, подвигаясь за ними, в толпе у кассы держался так близко, что тыкался в них), - и вот слышу, как моя Лолита, в ответ на слова Евы, что "лучше смерть, чем Мильтон Пинский (знакомый гимназист) и его рассуждения о музыке", говорит необыкновенно спокойно и серьезно: "Знаешь, ужасно в смерти то, что человек совсем предоставлен самому себе"; и меня тогда0 поразило, пока я, как автомат, передвигал ватные ноги, что я ровно ничего не знаю о происходившей у любимой моей в головке и что, может быть, где-то, за невыносимыми подростковыми штампами, в ней есть и цветущий сад, и сумерки, и ворота дворца, - дымчатая обворожительная область, доступ к которой запрещен мне, оскверняющему жалкой спазмой свои отрепья; ибо я часто замечал, что, живя, как мы с ней жили, в обособленном мире абсолютного зла, мы испытывали странное стеснение, когда я пытался заговорить с ней о чем-нибудь отвлеченном (о чем могли бы говорить она и старший друг, она и родитель, она и нормальный возлюбленный, я и Аннабелла, Лолита и сублимированый, вылизанный, анализированный, обожествленный Гарольд Гейз), об искусстве, о поэзии, о точечках на форели Гопкинса или бритой голове Бодлера, о Боге и Шекспире, о любом настоящем предмете. Не тут-то было! Она одевала свою уязвимость в броню дешевой наглости и нарочитой скуки, между тем как я, пользуясь для своих несчастных ученых комментариев искусственным тоном, от которого у меня самого ныли последние зубы, вызывал у своей аудитории такие взрывы грубости, что нельзя было продолжать, о, моя бедная, замученная девочка! (2.32)
In his poem Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins mentions rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
A brinded cow brings to mind surprised cows mentioned by Humbert when he describes his arrest:
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to menot by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experiencethat since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch. Gently, dreamily, not exceeding twenty miles an hour, I drove on that queer mirror side. Traffic was light. Cars that now and then passed me on the side I had abandoned to them, honked at me brutally. Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear. Presently I found myself approaching populated places. Passing through a red light was like a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was a child. Meanwhile complications were arising. I was being followed and escorted. Then in front of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women. (2.36)
By two dead women Humbert means his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother who died under the wheels of a truck) and Dorothy Grammar, the victim of a murder:
Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake. The sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my mud-flecked car, I could distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the far pines. I turned into the cemetery and walked among the long and short stone monuments. Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck - referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year-old New York office manager who had just been arraigned on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better. (2.33)
Poor Dorothy Grammar and her murderous husband bring to mind Ivan Bunin's stories Grammatika lyubvi ("The Grammar of Love," 1915), Petlistye ushi ("Loopy Ears," 1917) and Delo korneta Elagina ("The Case of Cornet Elagin," 1925). Describing his life in Berlin and in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s in Speak, Memory, VN mentions his meetings with Ivan Bunin (a Russian poet and writer, 1870-1953):
Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose (their interrelation, within the frame of his work, recalls Hardy’s case). At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older than I. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated. Subsequently we used to meet quite often, but always in the midst of other people, generally in the house of I. I. Fondaminski (a saintly and heroic soul who did more for Russian émigré literature than any other man and who died in a German prison). Somehow Bunin and I adopted a bantering and rather depressing mode of conversation, a Russian variety of American “kidding,” and this precluded any real commerce between us. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
At the beginning of Chapter Fourteen of his autobiography VN mentions Hegel's triadic series (so popular in old Russia):
THE spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time. Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We can call “thetic” the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; “antithetic” the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and “synthetic” the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on.
A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899–1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919–1940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940–1960) forms a synthesis—and a new thesis. For the moment I am concerned with my antithetic stage, and more particularly with my life in Continental Europe after I had graduated from Cambridge in 1922. (Chapter Fourteen, 1)