Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock (Red Rock in Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains) which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl:
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap - two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. (2.22)
Nirvana (1895) is a poem by Dmitri Merezhkovski (a Russian writer and poet, 1865-1941):
И вновь, как в первый день созданья,
Лазурь небесная тиха,
Как будто в мире нет страданья,
Как будто в сердце нет греха.
Не надо мне любви и славы:
В молчаньи утренних полей
Дышу, как дышат эти травы…
Ни прошлых, ни грядущих дней
Я не хочу пытать и числить.
Я только чувствую опять,
Какое счастие — не мыслить,
Какая нега — не желать!
In a letter of February 5, 1893, to Suvorin Anton Chekhov criticizes Merezhkovski's play Groza proshla ("The Storm is Over," 1893):
В янв<арской> книжке «Труда» напечатана пьеса Мережковского «Прошла гроза». Если не хватит времени и охоты прочесть всю пьесу, то вкусите один только конец, где Мережковский перещеголял даже Жана Щеглова. Литературное ханжество самое скверное ханжество.
According to Chekhov, literaturnoe khanzhestvo (literary hypocrisy) is the worst kind of hypocrisy. The title of Merezhkovski's play brings to mind Alexander Ostrovski's play Groza ("The Thunderstorm," 1859). At the end of Groza Katerina (who asks "why don't people fly like birds?") commits suicide, jumping from a cliff into the Volga River. Nikolay Dobrolyubov's article on Ostrovski's play, Luch sveta v tyomnom tsarstve ("A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom," 1860), makes one think of 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:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows 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 published 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.
The capital town of the book, Gray Star brings to mind "Slishkom star, chtoby rabotat', i slishkom beden, chtoby zhit' (Too old to work, and too poor to live)," the last words written by Konstantin Merezhkovski (Dmitri's elder brother, a zoologist, 1855-1921), the author of Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island. Humbert asks big Frank to tell Mary Lore (a Basque nurse at the Elphinstone hospital) that he will get into touch with Lolita tomorrow if I feels probably Polynesian:
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars - had been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically - and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating owner - that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is neurotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false move - and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man - free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)
On 9 January 1921 Constantine Mereschkowski (as he spelt his name) was found dead in his hotel room (in Hotel des Families in Geneva), having tied himself up in his bed with a mask which was supplied with an asphyxiating gas from a metal container. It appears that his suicide was directly connected to his paedophilic utoian beliefs (reflected in his novel) as well as his view that he was becoming too old and frail to continue his history of child abuse.