According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), he spent the period from September 1951 to June 1952 in Cantrip College, four hundred miles away from New York:
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze - dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat - the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we ewer in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!
I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started a chain of ideas that resulted in my publishing in the Cantrip Review an essay on “Mimir and Memory,” in which I suggested among other things that seemed original and important to that splendid review’s benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind’s being conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus creating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past). In result of this venture - and in culmination of the impression made by my previous travaux I was called from New York, where Rita and I were living in a little flat with a view of gleaming children taking shower baths far below in a fountainous arbor of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four hundred miles away, for one year. I lodged there, in special apartments for poets and philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita whom I preferred not to display vegetated - somewhat indecorously, I am afraid - in a roadside inn where I visited her twice a week. Then she vanished - more humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the local jail. She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards we drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few hours the year before. (2.26)
Cantrip is a word of Scots origin to mean a magical spell of any kind, or one which reads the same forwards and backwards. It can also be a witch's trick, or a sham. It is possibly derived from the Gaelic canntaireachd, a piper's mnemonic chant. The Piped Piper of Hamelin (1842) is a narrative poem by Robert Browning. The word cantrip was used by Robert Burns in his poem Address to the Deil (1785):
Thence mystic knots mak great abuse
On young guidmen, fond, keen an' crouse,
When the best wark-lume i' the house,
By cantrip wit,
Is instant made no worth a louse,
Just at the bit.
and by Robert Lewis Stevenson in his story Thrawn Janet (1881) written in Scots:
"God forgive us all!" thocht Mr. Soulis, "poor Janet's dead."
He cam' a step nearer to the corp; an' then his heart fair whammled in his inside. For--by what cantrip it wad ill beseem a man to judge--she was hingin' frae a single nail an' by a single wursted thread for darnin' hose.
Robert Browning, Robert Burns and Robert L. Stevenson make one think of "Robert Robert, Molbert, Alberta," in the Russian Lolita (1967) Clare Quilty's alias that hints at Hubert Robert (1733-1806), a French painter in the school of Romanticism, and at Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert Humbert in Russian spelling):
У меня тут отмечено на листочке: между 5-ым июля и 18-ым ноября, т. е. до моего возвращения на несколько дней в Бердслей, я расписался (далеко не всегда, впрочем, останавливаясь на ночь) в 342 гостиницах и мотелях. Эта цифра включает несколько заведений между Касбимом и Бердслеем, из которых одно подарило мне несомненную тень беса: "Роберт Роберт, Мольберт, Альберта". Мне приходилось очень осторожно распределять свои розыски во времени и пространстве, дабы не возбуждать подозрений; и было, вероятно, по крайней мере пятьдесят мест, где я просто справлялся, не расписываясь сам, но это ни к чему -не приводило, и я предпочитал сооружать платформу правдоподобия и доброжелательства тем, что первым делом платил за ненужную мне комнату. Мой обзор показал, что из трехсот, примерно, книг не менее двадцати содержало им оставленный след: неспешивший бес или останавливался даже чаще нас, или же - на это он был вполне способен - расписался кое-где лишний раз с целью обильно снабдить меня издевательскими намеками. Только раз стоял он там же иногда же, как и мы, - и спал в нескольких шагах от Лолитиной подушки. В нескольких случаях он ночевал в том же или соседнем квартале; нередко он ждал в засаде в промежуточном пункте между двумя условленными стоянками. Как живо помнил я Лолиту, перед самым отьездом из Бердслея, лежащей ничком на ковре в гостиной с грудой путеводителей и карт, на которых она отмечала этапы и остановки своим губным карандашом!
I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the deskbut that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or elsehe was quite capable of thathe had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick! (2.23)
A shadow of the fiend, Robert Robert, Molbert, Alberta corresponds to "N. Petit, Larousse, Ill." in the English version. Le Petit Larousse Illustré, commonly known simply as Le Petit Larousse, is a French-language encyclopedic dictionary published by Éditions Larousse. Mol'bert is Russian for "easel" and brings to mind palitra klyonov (the palette of maples) in the verses that, in the Russian Lolita, Gumbert composes for Rita:
Поразительный паразит пошел за Ритой в бар. С той грустной улыбкой, которая появлялась у нее на лице от избытка алкоголя, она представила меня агрессивно-пьяному старику, говоря, что он - запамятовала вашу фамилию, дорогуша - учился с ней в одной школе. Он дерзко попробовал задержать ее, и в последовавшей потасовке я больно ушиб большой палец об его весьма твердую голову. Затем мне пришлось некоторое время прогуливать и проветривать Риту в раскрашенном осенью парке Зачарованных Охотников. Она всхлипывала и повторяла, что скоро, скоро я брошу ее, как все в жизни ее бросали, и я спел ей вполголоса задумчивую французскую балладу и сочинил альбомный стишок ей в забаву:
Палитра кленов в озере, как рана,
Отражена. Ведет их на убой
В багряном одеянии Диана
Перед гостиницею голубой.
Она спросила: "Но почему голубой, когда она белая? Почему - Господи Боже мой..." - и зарыдала снова. Я решительно повел ее к автомобилю. Мы продолжали наш путь в Нью-Йорк, и там она опять зажила в меру счастливо, прохлаждаясь под дымчатой синевой посреди нашей маленькой террасы на тридцатом этаже. Замечаю, что каким-то образом у меня безнадежно спутались два разных эпизода - мое посещение Брайсландской библиотеки на обратном пути в Нью-Йорк и прогулка в парке на переднем пути в Кантрип, но подобным смешением смазанных красок не должен брезговать художник-мнемозинист.
I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this waswhat was the name again, son? - a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain her, and in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his hard head. In the silent painted part where I walked her and aired her a little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had, and I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive rhymes to amuse her:
The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorses to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
She said: “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” and started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the little terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Carntrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection. (2.26)
The Hunt (previously known as Diana and her Nymphs, c. 1926) is a painting by Robert Burns, a Scottish artist (1869-1941).
The name Clare Quilty seems to hint at the phrase "clearly guilty." In his full statement of the case Henry Jekyll (a character in R. L. Stevenson's novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886) says that it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty:
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone, Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.
Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with, which my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a passer by, whom I recognised the other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name, of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate. (Chapter 10)
Describing his quarrel with Lolita, Humbert compares himself to Mr. Hyde:
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East – or to explode her incognito, Miss Finton Lebone – had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.
“…This racket… lacks all sense of…” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically…”
I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know - and cradled the next quack and a half.
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark - hub of bicycle wheel - moved, shivered, and she was gone.
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed - no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on. (2.14)
In the Russian Lolita Mr. Hyde becomes izverg v stivensonovskoy skazke (the monster in Stevenson's fairy tale):
С персонажами в кинофильмах я, по-видимому, разделяю зависимость от всесильной machina telephonica и ее внезапных вторжений в людские дела. На этот раз оказалось, что звонит разозленная соседка. Восточное окно гостиной оставалось широко открытым, - хотя штора по милости судьбы была опущена; и за этим окном сырая черная ночь кислой новоанглийской весны, затаив дыхание, подслушивала нашу ссору. Мне всегда думалось, что тип внутренне похабной старой девы, внешне похожей на соленую пикшу, - чисто литературный продукт скрещивания родством связанных лиц в современном американском романе; но теперь я убежден, что щепетильная и блудливая мисс Восток - или по-настоящему (вскроем это инкогнито) мисс Финтон Лебон - должно быть по крайней мере на три четверти высунулась из окна своей спальни, стараясь уловить суть нашей ссоры.
"Какой кавардак... какой галдеж...", квакала телефонная трубка. "Мы не живем тут в эмигрантском квартале. Этого нельзя никак -"
Я извинился за шум, поднятый дочерними гостями ("Знаете - молодежь...") и на пол-кваке повесил трубку.
Внизу хлопнула дверь. Лолита? Убежала из дому?
В лестничное оконце я увидел, как стремительный маленький призрак скользнул между садовыми кустами; серебристая точка в темноте - ступица велосипедного колеса - дрогнула, двинулась и исчезла.
Так случилось, что автомобиль проводил ночь в ремонтной мастерской на другом конце города. Мне приходилось пешком преследовать крылатую беглянку. Даже теперь, когда ухнуло в вечность больше трех лет с той поры, я не в силах вообразить эту улицу, эту весеннюю ночь без панического содрогания. Перед освещенным крыльцом их дома мисс Лестер прогуливала старую, разбухшую таксу мисс Фабиан. Как изверг в стивенсоновской сказке, я был готов всех раздавить на своем пути. Надо попеременно: три шага идти медленно, три - бежать. Тепловатый дождь забарабанил по листьям каштанов. На следующем углу, прижав Лолиту к чугунным перилам, смазанный темнотой юноша тискал и целовал ее - нет не ее, ошибка. С неизрасходованным зудом в когтях, я полетел дальше.