Describing the first night after the death of his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to the vulture and Lolita to a precious lamb:
My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that “…and you had better find it because I cannot buy…” came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such strong talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as “…after a year of separation we may…” “…oh, my dearest, oh my…” “…worse than if it had been a woman you kept…” “…or, maybe, I shall die…” But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte’s head. (1.23)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) VN renders "the vulture" as korshun (the kite):
В первую ночь моего вдовства я был так пьян, что спал столь же крепко, как то дитя, которое бывало спало в этой постели. На другое утро я первым делом обследовал клочки писем, оставшиеся у меня в кармане. Они слишком основательно перемешались, чтобы их можно было разделить на три законченных текста. Думаю, что 116 слова «...и ты потрудись найти его, так как я не могу покупать...» были из письма к Ло. Некоторые обрывки как-будто указывали на намерение Шарлотты бежать с Ло в Паркингтон или даже обратно в Писки, дабы коршун не схватил ее драгоценного ягненка. Другие клочки и лоскутья (вот уж не предполагал я, чтобы у меня были такие сильные когти) явно относились к просьбе принять девочку не в пансионат Св. Алгебры, а в другую, тоже закрытую, школу, о которой говорили, что ее воспитательные приемы так суровы, скучны и сухи (хотя в проспекте упоминался крокет под ильмами), что заслужили школе кличку Исправительное Заведение для Благородных Девиц. Третье, наконец, послание было несомненно адресовано мне. Я разобрал такие кусочки фраз, как «...может быть, после года разлуки мы с тобой...», «...о, мой любимый, о, мой...», «...или, может быть, я умру...» Но в общем то, что я наскреб, было не очень содержательно: различные фрагменты этих торопливых посланий были так же спутаны у меня в ладонях, как основные их части у бедной Шарлотты в голове.
Korshun ("The Kite," 1916) is a poem by Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921):
Чертя за кругом плавный круг,
Над сонным лугом коршун кружит
И смотрит на пустынный луг. —
В избушке мать над сыном тужит:
«На́ хлеба, на́, на́ грудь, соси,
Расти, покорствуй, крест неси».
Идут века, шумит война,
Встаёт мятеж, горят деревни,
А ты всё та ж, моя страна,
В красе заплаканной и древней. —
Доколе матери тужить?
Доколе коршуну кружить?
High up, above the sleepy world,
The kite flies round drawing circles
And watching the deserted wold.
At home the mom her sunny suckles:
«Now take it, suck the breast, be good,
Grow, bear your cross of babyhood».
The years fly over, full of drama,
With wars and villages aflame,
But you, my land, are much the same
In all antiquity and glamour.
When will the mother stop deploring?
When will the kite give over hov'ring?
(tr. Alec Vagapov)
In the Russian Lolita the name of Clare Quilty's coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) becomes Vivivan Damor-Blok:
В угоду старомодным читателям, интересующимся дальнейшей судьбой «живых образцов» за горизонтом «правдивой повести», могу привести некоторые указания, полученные от г-на «Виндмюллера» из «Рамздэля», который пожелал остаться неназванным, дабы «длинная тень прискорбной и грязной истории» не дотянулась до того городка, в котором он имеет честь проживать. Его дочь «Луиза» сейчас студентка-второкурсница. «Мона Даль» учится в университете в Париже. «Рита» недавно вышла замуж за хозяина гостиницы во Флориде. Жена «Ричарда Скиллера» умерла от родов, разрешившись мертвой девочкой, 25-го декабря 1952 г., в далеком северо-западном поселении Серой Звезде. Г-жа Вивиан Дамор-Блок (Дамор — по сцене, Блок — по одному из первых мужей) написала биографию бывшего товарища под каламбурным заглавием «Кумир мой», которая скоро должна выйти в свет; критики, уже ознакомившиеся с манускриптом, говорят, что это лучшая ее вещь. Сторожа кладбищ, так или иначе упомянутых в мемуарах «Г. Г.», не сообщают, встает ли кто из могилы.
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. (John Ray's Foreword)
The author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel by Konstantin Merezhkovski (a Russian botanist and zoologist, 1855-1921) set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island. In 1905 Merezhkovski (then a professor of biology at Kazan University) bought Kaleria Korshunov, a girl of six, from her impoverished mother, and lived with her until February 1914 (when he was esposed by his own housekeeper). On 9 January 1921 Mereschkowski (as he spelt his surname) 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. "Slishkom star chtoby rabotat', slishkom beden chtoby zhit' (Too old to work, too poor to live)," the last words written by Konstantin Merezhkovski, bring to mind Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where, according to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbirth. When Humbert visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont, Lolita calls her husband "a lamb:"
She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course?
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible - and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary - fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood. (2.29)
The Pet-Lamb (1800) is a pastoral poem by William Wordsworth (an English Lake poet, 1770-1850). A child of beauty rare who feeds a mountain lamb, little Barbara Lewthwaite (the girl's name in Wordsworth's poem) is a namesake of Barbara Burke, Lolita's companion in Camp Q:
Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the camp’s best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo “because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island” (some swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning - mark, reader, every blessed morning - Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress’ son, aged thirteen and the only human male for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel, while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush.
At first, Lo had refused “to try what it was like,” but curiosity and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third nearby lake, a considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the booming young factory town of that name. Although conceding it was “sort of fun” and “fine for the complexion,” Lolita, I am glad to say, held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it, despite the “fun.” (1.32)
Lolita's first lover, Charlie Holmes is the son of Shirley Holmes, the campmistress whose name hints at Sherlock Holmes (the private detective in Conan Doyle's stories). John McAlister Ray, senior (a medical student) is the narrator in Conan Doyle's story The Captain of the Pole-Star (1890). According to John Ray, Jr., Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. November 16 is the birthday of Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist, 1717-1783). Alexander Blok was born on November 16, 1880 (OS). Blok died on August 7, 1921. In the Russian Lolita John Ray's Foreword to Humbert's manuscript is dated "August 5, 1955." It seems that John Ray, Jr. is Humbert Humbert's "real" name.