Describing his arrest, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions a kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis that linked up two dead women (actually, three dead women: Humbert Humbert's very photogenic mother who was killed by a lightning during a picnic, Lolita's mother Charlotte who was killed by a truck because of a neighbor's hysterical dog and Dorothy Grammar, a lady who was murdered by her husband):
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that 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)
Dve zhenshchiny ("Two Women") was one of the working titles of Ivan Turgenev's play Mesyats v derevne ("A Month in the Country," 1850). Tri sestry ("The Three Sisters," 1901) is a play by Anton Chekhov (a Russian writer, 1860-1904), the author of Tri goda ("Three Years," 1895), the longest of Chekhov's stories. In July 1904 Chekhov died in Badenweiler, a German spa. Describing his visit to Ramsdale on September 24, 1952, Humbert Humbert (who murders Clare Quilty on the next day, September 25, 1952) mentions a Turgenev story, in which a torrent of Italian music comes from an open window:
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 arrayed 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.
I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church and the enormous elms. Forgetting that in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist, I left the car in the avenue to walk unobtrusively past 342 Lawn Street. Before the great bloodshed, I was entitled to a little relief, to a cathartic spasm of mental regurgitation. Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and somebody had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk. No dog barked. No gardener telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat on the vined porchwhere to the lone pedestrian’s annoyance two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted pinafores stopped doing whatever they were doing to stare at him: she was long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces from Philadelphia.
Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open windowthat of the living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? All at once I noticed that from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes. Without saying a word, I turned and plodded back the way I had come. An aster-like anemic flower grew out of a remembered chink in the sidewalk. Quietly resurrected, Miss Opposite was being wheeled out by her nieces, onto her porch, as if it were a stage and I the star performer. Praying she would not call to me, I hurried to my car. What a steep little street. What a profound avenue. A red ticket showed between wiper and windshield; I carefully tore it into two, four, eight pieces. (2.33)
Humbert Humbert has in mind Turgenev's story Tri vstrechi ("Three Meetings," 1852). A small town in New England where Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) lives with her mother Charlotte, Ramsdale brings to mind Ovech'yi Vody (Sheep's Springs), Chulkaturin's village in Turgenev's story Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka ("The Diary of a Superfluous Man," 1850). "Three Meetings," "Four Days" (Chetyre Dnya, a 1877 story by Vsevolod Garshin), and "Two Women" bring to mind 342 Lawn Street, the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. The number 342 reappears in Lolita two more times: 342 is Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel in Briceland where they spend their first night together; between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert Humbert registers, if not actually stays, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. On July 4, 1949, Lolita escapes from (or, more likely, dies in) the Elphinstone hospital with Clare Quilty. It seems that on November 18, 1949, Humbert Humbert is hospitalized and spends some time in a mental asylum near Quebec (where he writes his poem "Wanted"). According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Ilya Repin made between 1883 and 1885. A Russian writer, Vsevolod Garshin (1850-1888) was the the model of the younger Ivan. A Russian realist painter, Ilya Repin (1844-1930) is the author of Ivan Turgenev's portrait (painted in Paris in 1874) and of Garshin's portrait (painted in 1883 in St. Petersburg). Turgenev died in Bougival (near Paris) on August 22, 1883, and was buried in St. Petersburg on Sept. 27, 1883 (OS). Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name seems to be John Ray, Jr.) was born in 1910, in Paris. In the Russian Lolita (1967), John Ray's foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript is dated August 5, 1955:
Джон Рэй, д-р философии
Видворт, Массачусетс
5 августа 1955 года
Exactly a hundred years before, on August 5, 1855, Turgenev in Spasskoe-Lutovinovo (the writer's family estate in the Province of Oryol) finished his first novel Rudin. In the epilogue of Rudin, the protagonist meets his end during the June Days uprising in Paris in 1848. Standing atop a barricade in the Faubourg St Antoine holding a red flag and a notched sabre, Rudin is fatally shot by a line soldier and dies a characteristically quixotic, romantic death. In Turgenev's novel Dym ("Smoke," 1867), the action begins on August 10, 1862, in Baden-Baden (a German spa):
10 августа 1862 года, в четыре часа пополудни, в Баден-Бадене, перед известною "Соnvеrsаtion" толпилось множество народа. Погода стояла прелестная; все кругом – зеленые деревья, светлые дома уютного города, волнистые горы, все празднично, полною чашей раскинулось под лучами благосклонного солнца; все улыбалось как-то слепо, доверчиво и мило, и та же неопределенная, но хорошая улыбка бродила на человечьих лицах, старых и молодых, безобразных и красивых. Самые даже насурьмленные, набеленные фигуры парижских лореток не нарушали общего впечатления ясного довольства и ликования, а пестрые ленты, перья, золотые и стальные искры на шляпках и вуалях невольно напоминали взору оживленный блеск и легкую игру весенних цветов и радужных крыл; одна лишь повсюду рассыпавшаяся сухая, гортанная трескотня французского жаргона не могла ни заменить птичьего щебетанья, ни сравниться с ним.
On the 10th of August 1862, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a great number of people were thronging before the well-known Konversation in Baden-Baden. The weather was lovely; everything around—the green trees, the bright houses of the gay city, and the undulating outline of the mountains—everything was in holiday mood, basking in the rays of the kindly sunshine; everything seemed smiling with a sort of blind, confiding delight; and the same glad, vague smile strayed over the human faces too, old and young, ugly and beautiful alike. Even the blackened and whitened visages of the Parisian demi-monde could not destroy the general impression of bright content and elation, while their many-coloured ribbons and feathers and the sparks of gold and steel on their hats and veils involuntarily recalled the intensified brilliance and light fluttering of birds in spring, with their rainbow-tinted wings. But the dry, guttural snapping of the French jargon, heard on all sides could not equal the song of birds, nor be compared with it. (Chapter I)