Describing the murder of Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck:
I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two - oh, nothing of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your common criminal enacts; on the contrary, I want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed drop of his bubbleblood; but a kind of momentary shift occurred as if I were in the connubial bedroom, and Charlotte were sick in bed. Quilty was a very sick man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol - I was sitting on the pistol. Then I made myself a little more comfortable in the chair near the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. The crystal was gone but it ticked. The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. My hands were hardly in better condition than his. I washed up as best I could in the adjacent bathroom. Now I could leave. As I emerged on the landing, I was amazed to discover that a vivacious buzz I had just been dismissing as a mere singing in my ears was really a medley of voices and radio music coming from the downstairs drawing room. (2.35)
In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) quotes the words of Ivan Turgenev, "they descended like flies on carrion," about the audience who applauded Chernyshevski when he was defending his dissertation:
Итак: 10 мая 55 года Чернышевский защищал в университете уже знакомую нам диссертацию, "Отношения искусства к действительности", написанную в три августовские ночи, в 53 году, т. е. именно в ту пору, когда "смутные лирические чувства, подсказавшие ему в юности взгляд на искусство, как на снимок с красотки, окончательно вызрели, дав пухлый плод в естественном соответствии с апофеозом супружеской страсти" (Страннолюбский). На этом публичном диспуте было в первый раз провозглашено "умственное направление шестидесятых годов", как потом вспоминал старик Шелгунов, с обескураживающей простотой отмечая, что Плетнев не был тронут речью молодого ученого, не угадал таланта... Слушатели зато были в восхищении. Народу навалило так много, что стояли на окнах. "Налетели, как мухи на падаль", фыркал Тургенев, который должно быть чувствовал себя задетым, в качестве "поклонника прекрасного", -- хотя сам был не прочь мухам угождать.
Как часто бывает с идеями порочными, от плоти не освободившимися или обросшими ею, можно в эстетических воззрениях "молодого ученого" расслышать его физический стиль, самый звук его тонкого наставительного голоса. "Прекрасное есть жизнь. Милое нам есть прекрасное; жизнь нам мила в добрых своих проявлениях... Говорите же о жизни, и только о жизни (так продолжает этот звук, столь охотно воспринятый акустикой века), а если человеки не живут по-человечески, -- что ж, учите их жить, живописуйте им портреты жизни примерных людей и благоустроенных обществ". Искусство таким образом есть замена, или приговор, но отнюдь не ровня жизни, точно так же как "гравюра в художественном отношении гораздо хуже картины", с которой она снята (особенно прелестная мысль). "Единственное, впрочем, -- ясно проговорил диссертант, -- чем поэзия может стоять выше действительности, это украшение событий прибавкой эффектных аксессуаров и согласованием характера описываемых лиц с теми событиями, в которых они участвуют".
Таким образом, борясь с чистым искусством, шестидесятники, и за ними хорошие русские люди вплоть до девяностых годов, боролись, по неведению своему, с собственным ложным понятием о нем, ибо точно также как двадцать лет спустя Гаршин видел "чистого художника" в Семирадском(!), -- или как аскету снится пир, от которого бы чревоугодника стошнило, -- так и Чернышевский, будучи лишен малейшего понятия об истинной сущности искусства, видел его венец в искусстве условном, прилизанном (т. е. в антиискусстве), с которым и воевал, -- поражая пустоту. При этом не следует забывать, что другой лагерь, лагерь "художников", -- Дружинин с его педантизмом и дурного тона небесностью, Тургенев с его чересчур стройными видениями и злоупотреблением Италией, -- часто давал врагу как раз ту вербную халву, которую легко было хаять.
And so: on May 10, 1855, Chernyshevski was defending at the University of St. Petersburg the dissertation with which we are already familiar, “The Relations of Art to Reality,” written in three August nights in 1853; i.e., precisely at that time when “the vague, lyrical emotions of his youth that had suggested to him considering art in terms of a pretty girl’s portrait, had finally ripened and now produced this pulpy fruit in natural correlation with the apotheosis of his marital passion” (Strannolyubski). It was at this public debate that “the intellectual trend of the sixties” was first proclaimed, as old Shelgunov later recalled, noting with discouraging naïveté that the president of the University, Pletnyov, was not moved by the speech of the young scholar whose genius he failed to perceive…. The audience, on the other hand, was in ecstasy. So many people had piled in that some had to stand in the windows. “They descended like flies on carrion,” snorted Turgenev, who must have felt wounded in his capacity of professed aesthete, although he himself was not averse to pleasing the flies.
As often happens with unsound ideas which have not freed themselves of the flesh or have been overgrown by it, one can detect in the “young scholar’s” aesthetic notions his own physical style, the very sound of his shrill, didactic voice. “Beauty is life. That which pleases us is beautiful; life pleases us in its good manifestations…. Speak of life, and only of life [thus continues this sound, so willingly accepted by the acoustics of the century], and if humans do not live humanely—why, teach them to live, portray for them the lives of exemplary men and well-organized societies.” Art is thus a substitute or a verdict, but in no wise the equal of life, just as “an etching is artistically far inferior to the picture” from which it has been taken (a particularly charming thought). “The only thing, however,” pronounced the discourser clearly, “in which poetry can stand higher than reality is in the embellishment of events by the addition of accessory effects and by making the character of the personages described correspond with the events in which they take part.”
Thus in denouncing “pure art” the men of the sixties, and good Russian people after them right up to the nineties, were denouncing—in result of misinformation—their own false conception of it, for just as twenty years later the social writer Garshin saw “pure art” in the paintings of Semiradski (a rank academician)—or as an ascetic may dream of a feast that would make an epicurean sick—so Chernyshevski, having not the slightest notion of the true nature of art, saw its crown in conventional, slick art (i.e., anti-art), which he combated—lunging at nothing. At the same time one must not forget that the other camp, the camp of the “aesthetes”—the critic Druzhinin with his pedantry and tasteless lambency, or Turgenev with his much too elegant “visions” and misuse of Italy—often provided the enemy with exactly that cloying stuff which it was so easy to condemn.
Describing his visit to Ramsdale in September 1952, Humbert mentions a Turgenev story ("Three Meetings," 1852), in which a torrent of Italian music comes from an open window:
Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open window—that 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)
A writer who in March 1888 committed suicide by falling down a stairwell, Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88) is the author of Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1877) and To, chego ne bylo ("What Never Happened," 1882). It seems that there was no murder of Quilty after all. Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Richard F. Schiller and big with child) in New York on Sept. 22, 1952, visits her in Coalmont on the next day (Sept. 23), revisits Ramsdale (where he finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor, the dentist) on Sept. 24, and murders Quilty in Parkington on Sept. 25. Normally, fifty-two days pass between Sept. 25 (the day of HH’s arrest) and Nov. 16 (the day of HH’s death). But, according to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to 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 (a Russian realist painter, 1844-1930) made between 1883 and 1885. Repin used Grigoriy Myasoyedov, his friend and fellow artist, as the model for Ivan the Terrible, and writer Vsevolod Garshin for the Tsarevich. In 1884 Repin painted the portrait of Garshin. Ilya Repin was born on August 5, 1844. In the Russian Lolita (1967) John Ray's Foreword to Humbert's manuscript is dated August 5, 1955:
Джон Рэй, д-р философии
Видворт, Массачусетс
5 августа 1955 года
The surname Chernyshevski comes from chyornyi (black). In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions his colleague, Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann:
Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H. H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H. H.” describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
In his pocket diary that he kept in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger Humbert describes his dream and mentions Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann who would have paid him a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files:
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her - and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes - if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my many looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. “Mais allez-y, allez-y! ” Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonderand plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 a. m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air - one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of the dream agent. (1.11)
In an attempt to save his life Quilty offers Humbert the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss (whose name is a negative, as it were, of Blanche Schwarzmann):
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next playI have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thingyou are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow” (2.35)