When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont, she offers him a smoke and is smoking herself:
“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.
“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau.
“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”
She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused.
“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes… Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw - smiling - through everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him…
Well, Cue - they all called him Cue
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence… took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name - Duk Duk Ranch - you know just plain silly - but it did not matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the red-haired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a coronation ceremony and then - a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
“Go on, please.”
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his - Golden Guts - and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.
“Where is the hog now?”
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out.
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)
“What things exactly?”
“Oh, things… Oh, I really I” - she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
“It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushing with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she hadoh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch - and it just was not there any more - it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange. (2.29)
"Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible" brings to mind Dozvoleno kurit' na ulitsakh (It is permitted to smoke on the streets) in Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937):
Дозволено курить на улицах. Можно не брить бороды. При всяком музыкальном случае жарят увертюру из «Вильгельма Теля». Ходят слухи, что столица переносится в Москву; что старый стиль календаря меняется на новый. Под этот шумок Россия деятельно готовит материал для немудреной, но сочной салтыковской сатиры. «Каким это новым духом повеяло, желал бы я знать, – говорил генерал Зубатов, – только лакеи стали грубить, а то все осталось по-старому». Помещикам и особливо помещицам снились страшные сны, в сонниках не указанные. Появилась новая ересь: нигилизм. «Безобразное и безнравственное учение, отвергающее все, чего нельзя ощупать», – содрогаясь, толкует Даль это странное слово (в котором «ничто» как бы соответствует «материи»). Лицам духовного звания было видение: по Невскому проспекту шагает громадный Чернышевский в широкополой шляпе, с дубиной в руках.
The fifties are now in full fan. It is permitted to smoke on the streets. One may wear a beard. The overture to William Tell is thundered out on every musical occasion. Rumors spread that the capital is being moved to Moscow; that the old calendar is going to be replaced by the new. Under this cover Russia is busily gathering material for Saltikov’s primitive but juicy satire. “What is this talk of a new spirit in the air, I’d like to know,” said General Zubatov, “only the flunkeys have grown rude, otherwise everything has stayed the way it was.” Landowners and notably their wives began to dream terrible dreams not listed in dream books. A new heresy appeared: Nihilism. “A scandalous and immoral doctrine rejecting everything that cannot be palpated,” says Dahl with a shudder, in his definition of this strange word (in which “nihil,” nothing, corresponds as it were to “material”). Persons in holy orders had a vision: an enormous Chernyshevski strides along the Nevsky Prospect wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a cudgel.
William Tell (1829) is a French-language opera in four acts by Italian composer Cioachino Rossini (1792-1868) to a libretto by Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy and L. F. Bis, based on Friedrich Schiller's five-act drama Wilhelm Tell (1804), which, in turn, drew on the William Tell legend. In "The Fragments of Onegin's Journey" Pushkin compares Rossini to Orpheus (a legendary musician, prophet and poet):
Но уж темнеет вечер синий,
Пора нам в оперу скорей:
Там упоительный Россини,
Европы баловень ― Орфей.
Не внемля критике суровой,
Он вечно тот же, вечно новый,
Он звуки льёт ― они кипят,
Они текут, они горят,
Как поцелуи молодые,
Все в неге, в пламени любви,
Как зашипевшего аи
Струя и брызги золотые...
Но, господа, позволено ль
С вином равнять dо-rе-mi-sоl?
But darker grows already the blue evening.
Time to the opera we sped:
there 'tis the ravishing Rossini,
the pet of Europe, Orpheus.
Not harking to harsh criticism,
he is ever selfsame, ever new;
he pours out melodies, they seethe,
they flow, they burn
like youthful kisses,
all sensuousness, in flames of love,
like, at the fuzzing point, Ay's
stream and gold spurtles...
but, gentlemen, is it permitted
to equalize do-re-mi-sol with wine?
In his poem My ("We," 1927) Vladislav Hodasevich mentions pevets Orfey (the bard Orpheus) who ruled stones and says that "we" (the poets) first hatched out of the stone and animal darkness when tigers and elephants started to sob over the charms of Eurydice (the beautiful nymph and wife of Orpheus):
Не мудростью умышленных речей
Камням повелевал певец Орфей.
Что прелесть мудрости камням земным?
Он мудрой прелестью был сладок им.
Не поучал Орфей, но чаровал —
И камень дикий на дыбы вставал
И шел — блаженно лечь у белых ног.
Из груди мшистой рвался первый вздох.
…………………………………………………
…………………………………………………
Когда взрыдали тигры и слоны
О [прелестях] Орфеевой жены —
Из каменной и из звериной тьмы
Тогда впервые вылупились — мы.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his life in Berlin in the 1920s and in Paris in the late 1930s and mentions Hodasevich smoking a Caporal Vert cigarette:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
Hodasevich’s collection Tyazhyolaya lira (Heavy Lyre, 1923) brings to mind VN’s story Tyazhyolyi dym (“Torpid Smoke,” 1935). According to Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), un Caporal est une cigarette:
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. (2.35)
In the penultimate couplet of his poem The Betrothed (1886) Kipling says:
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
The Betrothed (“I Promessi sposi,” 1827) is a historical novel in three volumes by Alessandro Manzoni (an Italian writer, 1785-1873). In Chapter Eight (XXXV: 3) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions Manzoni (one of the authors whom Onegin reads):
Стал вновь читать он без разбора.
Прочел он Гиббона, Руссо,
Манзони, Гердера, Шамфора,
Madame de Stael, Биша, Тиссо,
Прочел скептического Беля,
Прочел творенья Фонтенеля,
Прочел из наших кой-кого,
Не отвергая ничего:
И альманахи, и журналы,
Где поученья нам твердят,
Где нынче так меня бранят,
А где такие мадригалы
Себе встречал я иногда:
Е sempre bene, господа.
Again, without discrimination,
he started reading. He read Gibbon,
Rousseau, Manzoni, Herder,
Chamfort, Mme de Staël, Bichat, Tissot.
He read the skeptic Bayle,
he read the works of Fontenelle,
he read some [authors] of our own,
without rejecting anything —
the “almanacs” and the reviews
where sermons into us are drummed,
where I'm today abused so much
but where such madrigals addressed tome
I used to meet with now and then:
e sempre bene, gentlemen.
A German philosopher, J. G. von Herder (1744-1803) is the author of Erlkönigs Tochter ("Erlkönig's Daughter," 1779), a ballad. Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone, Humbert compares a little old woman whom Mrs. Hays had lent him, to a portable witch, perhaps Erlkönig's daughter:
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperatureeven exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebraeand I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyesof Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas - que sais-je! - or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangual shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 a. m., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was somehow the development of a themethat it had the same taste and tone as the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital - and Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender say in the country of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stoolless, in despair. (2.22)
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), 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 (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). Humbert's visit to Coalmont (a town where Lolita lives with her husband, "a brilliant young mining engineer") can be compared to Orpheus's descent to the land of the dead in an attempt to bring Eurydice back to life.
The characters in Lolita include Dr. Byron (the Haze family physician who gives Humbert Papa's Prurple Pills with which he drugs Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters). In a footnote to his parodic Ode to Count Khvostov (1825) Pushkin mentions goryachka (fever, ague) that killed Byron:
Султан ярится?1. Кровь Эллады
И peзвocкачет2, и кипит.
Открылись грекам древни клады3,
Трепещет в Стиксе лютый Пит4.
И се — летит продерзко судно
И мещет громы обоюдно.
Се Бейрон, Феба образец.
Притек, но недуг быстропарный5,
Строптивый и неблагодарный
Взнес смерти на него резец.
Певец бессмертный и маститый,
Тебя Эллада днесь зовет
На место тени знаменитой,
Пред коей Цербер днесь ревет.
Как здесь, ты будешь там сенатор,
Как здесь, почтенный литератор,
Но новый лавр тебя ждет там,
Где от крови земля промокла:
Перикла лавр, лавр Фемистокла;
Лети туда, Хвостов наш! сам.
Вам с Бейроном шипела злоба,
Гремела и правдива лесть.
Он лорд — граф ты! Поэты оба!
Се, мнится, явно сходство есть. —
Никак! Ты с верною супругой6
Под бременем Судьбы упругой
Живешь в любви — и наконец
Глубок он, но единобразен,
А ты глубок, игрив и разен,
И в шалостях ты впрям певец.
А я, неведомый Пиита,
В восторге новом воспою
Во след Пиита знаменита
Правдиву похвалу свою,
Моляся кораблю бегущу,
Да Бейрона он узрит кущу7,
И да блюдут твой мирный сон8
Нептун, Плутон, Зевс, Цитерея,
Гебея, Псиша, Крон, Астрея,
Феб, Игры, Смехи, Вакх, Харон.
1. Подражание г. Петрову, знаменитому нашему лирику.
2. Слово, употребленное весьма счастливо Вильгельмом Карловичем Кюхельбекером в стихотворном его письме к г. Грибоедову.
3. Под словом клады должно разуметь правдивую ненависть нынешних Леонидов, Ахиллесов и Мильтиадов к жестоким чалмоносцам.
4. Г. Питт, знаменитый английский министр и известный противник Свободы.
5. Горячка.
6. Графиня Хвостова, урожденная княжна Горчакова, достойная супруга маститого нашего Певца. Во многочисленных своих стихотворениях везде называет он ее Темирою (см. последн. замеч. в оде «Заздравный кубок»).
7. Подражание его высокопр. действ. тайн. сов. Ив. Ив. Дмитриеву, знаменитому другу гр. Хвостова:
К тебе я руки простирал
Уже из отческия кущи,
Взирая на суда бегущи.
8. Здесь поэт, увлекаясь воображением, видит уже Великого нашего лирика, погруженного в сладкий сон и приближающегося к берегам благословенной Эллады. Нептун усмиряет пред ним продерзкие волны; Плутон исходит из преисподней бездны, дабы узреть того, кто ниспошлет ему в непродолжительном времени богатую жатву теней поклонников Лжепророка; Зевес улыбается ему с небес; Цитерея (Венера) осыпает цветами своего любимого певца; Геба подъемлет кубок за здравие его; Псиша, в образе Иполита Богдановича, ему завидует; Крон удерживает косу, готовую разить; Астрея предчувствует возврат своего царствования; Феб ликует; Игры, Смехи, Вакх и Харон веселою толпою следуют за судном нашего бессмертного Пииты.
Papa's Purple Pills bring to mind "Kholery ne lyubya pilyul', / Ya pel pri starosti iyul' (Not loving the pills of cholera, / in my old age I sang of July)," the lines in Khvostov's epistle to Pushkin. In a letter of January 18, 1831, to Yazykov Pushkin alludes to Delvig’s recent death and quotes Khvostov’s recent epistle to him in which Khvostov tryakhnul starinoy (shook off the rust):
Мы правим тризну по Дельвиге. А вот как наших поминают! и кто же? друзья его! ей-богу, стыдно. Хвостов написал мне послание, где он помолодел и тряхнул стариной. Он говорит:
Приближася похода к знаку,
Я стал союзник Зодиаку;
Холеры не любя пилюль,
Я пел при старости июль
и проч. в том же виде. Собираюсь достойно отвечать союзнику Водолея, Рака и Козерога. В прочем всё у нас благополучно.
According to Pushkin, he is going to respond to the ally of Aquarius, Cancer and Capricorn (in his epistle to Pushkin Khvostov calls himself soyuznik Zodiaku, an ally of the Zodiac). Ramsdale (a small town in New England where thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her) seems to hint at the Ram, a zodiacal constellation also known as Aries. A town where Lolita was born (on January 1, 1935), Pisky hints at Pisces, the twelfth and final zodiac sign.
In his poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1912) composed in Cafe des Westens, Berlin, Rupert Brook (an English poet, 1887-1915) uses the phrase das Betreten's not verboten (entering is not forbidden):
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; -- and there the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.
The poem's next stanza begins with the Greek phrase Εἴθε γένοιμην ("Oh, if only," "Would that"):
ειθε γενοιμην... would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! --
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low:
... But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester....
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by...
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean...
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.
"His ghostly Lordship" seems to be Lord Byron.