Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir:
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir. All I would doall I would dare dowould amount to such a trifle… Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lieshe’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotelsand his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell. If a violin string can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display any hurry. As I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash - and beaming Dr. Braddock, two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and the enchanted cleric, were immortalized - insofar as the texture and print of small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire escape. One could still - but the key was already in the lock, and then I was in the room. (1.28)
A lepidopterist, VN was a butterfly hunter. In the last line of Requiem (1887), his self-written epitaph, R. L. Stevenson compares himself to the hunter:
UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
Here may the winds about me blow,
Here the sea may come and go
Here lies peace forevermo'
And the heart for aye shall be still.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The wide and starry sky brings to mind Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest North-west where Lolita dies in childbed, giving birth to a still-born girl, on Christmas Day 1952. The epithet "enchanted" in The Enchanted Hunters seems to hint at Prodlis', prodlis', ocharovan'ye (enchantment, let me stay enchanted), a line in Tyutchev's poem (translated into English by VN) Poslednyaya lyubov' ("Last Love," 1851-54):
О, как на склоне наших лет
Нежней мы любим и суеверней...
Сияй, сияй, прощальный свет
Любви последней, зари вечерней!
Полнеба обхватила тень,
Лишь там, на западе, бродит сиянье,
Помедли, помедли, вечерний день,
Продлись, продлись, очарованье.
Пускай скудеет в жилах кровь,
Но в сердце не скудеет нежность...
О ты, последняя любовь!
Ты и блаженство, и безнадежность.
Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.
Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
О tarry, О tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.
The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
О last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.
Farewell rays (as VN renders Tyutchev's proshchal'nyi svet, "farewell light") remind one of John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). Lolita's married name, Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, seems to hint at Friedrich Schiller (a German poet, 1759-1805). Tyutchev translated into Russian (as Pominki, "The Wake," 1850-51) Schiller's poem Das Siegesfest ("The Victory Festival," 1803) and several other poems. Earlier (in 1829) Schiller's Siegesfest was translated by Zhukovski. Zhukovski's version famously ends in the lines:
Смертный, силе, нас гнетущей,
Покоряйся и терпи;
Спящий в гробе, мирно спи;
Жизнью пользуйся, живущий.
Beethoven used Schiller's poem An die Freude (Ode to Joy, 1785) for the fourth and final movement of his Ninth (and last) Symphony. When he composed the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was practically deaf. A veteran of the distant war, Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) is hard of hearing. Requiem is Mozart's last work. An Austrian composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) brings to mind the Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940).