Describing his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) says that the same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into Annabel's house and his, in two widely separated countries:
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyse my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! (1.4)
Kanareyka ("The Canary," 1921) is a poem by Ivan Bunin (1870-1953):
На родине она зеленая... Брэм
Канарейку из-за моря
Привезли, и вот она
Золотая стала с горя,
Тесной клеткой пленена.
Птицей вольной, изумрудной
Уж не будешь, — как ни пой
Про далекий остров чудный
Над трактирную толпой!
In its homeland it is green... Brehm
The canary was brought
from overseas, and out of sheer grief
it became golden,
imprisoned in a small cage.
You will never be a free, emerald bird again,
however you may sing
of a distant wondrous island
over the tavern crowd!
Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh died in Corfu (a Greek island in the Ionian Sea):
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. (1.3)
A snapshot mentioned by Humbert was taken on August 31, 1923 (the last day of Humbert's and Annabel's fatal summer). In mid-August 1947 Lolita's mother Charlotte dies under the wheels of a truck because of a neighbor's hysterical dog. A stray canary that had fluttered into Annabel's and Humbert's houses, in two widely separated countries, also brings to mind Brodyachaya sobaka (the Stray Dog café in St. Petersburg), a meeting place for writers and poets between 1911 and 1915. As a young man, Humbert sat with uranists in the Deux Magots (a café in Paris):
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snowstorms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipesmoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
… Fräulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
A paper of mine entitled ‘The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey’ was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an ‘Histoire abrégée de la poesie anglaise’ for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the ‘forties – and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. (1.5)
A canary that flutters into a house brings to mind a colored butterfly in Bunin's poem Nastanet den' - ischeznu ya ("A day will come when I vanish," 1916) quoted by VN in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951):
In the works of major Russian poets I can discover only two lepidopteral images of genuinely sensuous quality: Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell:
And there will fly into the room
A colored butterfly in silk
To flutter, rustle and pit-pat
On the blue ceiling …
and Fet’s “Butterfly” soliloquizing:
Whence have I come and whither am I hasting
Do not inquire;
Now on a graceful flower I have settled
And now respire. (Chapter Six, 3)
Afanasiy Fet (a Russian poet, 1820-92) was the son of Afanasiy Shenshin (a Russian landowner) and Charlotte Becker. Charlotte Becker was the maiden name of Lolita's mother. Annabel Leigh's mother was born Vanessa van Ness:
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “think arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. (1.3)
Vanessa is a genus of brush-footed butterflies in the tribe Nymphalini. Vanessa atalanta is the butterfly commonly known as red admiral (or, as John Shade calls it, red admirable). The poet's daughter in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Hazel Shade becomes a red admirable after her tragic death. After her death in childbed in Gray Star, Lolita is turned into a bluebird.