According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), his very photogenic mother was a daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)
In the last stanza of his elegy Vecher ("The Evening," 1806) Zhukovski mentions sad Minvana and Alpin:
Так, петь есть мой удел... но долго ль?..
Как узнать?..
Ах! скоро, может быть, с Минваною унылой
Придет сюда Альпин в час вечера мечтать
Над тихой юноши могилой!
Humbert's grandfather, Jerome Dunn was an alpinist. In Zhukovski's ballad Eolova arfa ("The Aeolian Harp," 1814) the young girl's name is Minvana:
Младая Минвана
Красой озаряла родительский дом;
Как зыби тумана,
Зарею златимы над свежим холмом,
Так кудри густые
С главы молодой
На перси младые,
Вияся, бежали струей золотой.
Zhukovski's two Minvanas make one think of Vanessa van Ness, in Lolita the maiden name of Annabel's mother:
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “think arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. (1.3)
Btw., Jerome Dunn (Humbert's grandfather) seems to blend Jerome K. Jerome (an English humorist, 1859-1927) with dunno (I don't know). Humbert's mother is a granddaughter of two Dorset parsons. Charles Darwin (1809-82) aspired to be a parson-naturalist until his return from his voyage aboard Beagle. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was born in southern Wales but spent the later years of his life at a number of homes in Dorset and is sometimes called "Dorset's Darwin." In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev points out that Chernyshevski criticized Darwin and Wallace:
Когда однажды, в 55 году, расписавшись о Пушкине, он захотел дать пример "бессмысленного сочетания слов", то привел мимоходом тут же выдуманное "синий звук", - на свою голову напророчив пробивший через полвека блоковский "звонко-синий час". "Научный анализ показывает вздорность таких сочетаний", - писал он, - не зная о физиологическом факте "окрашенного слуха". "Не всё ли равно, - спрашивал он (у радостно соглашавшегося с ним бахмучанского или новомиргородского читателя), - голубоперая щука или щука с голубым пером (конечно второе, крикнули бы мы, - так оно выделяется лучше, в профиль!), ибо настоящему мыслителю некогда заниматься этим, особенно если он проводит на народной площади больше времени, чем в своей рабочей комнате". Другое дело - "общий план". Любовь к общему (к энциклопедии), презрительная ненависть к особому (к монографии) и заставляли его упрекать Дарвина в недельности, Уоллеса в нелепости ("... все эти ученые специальности от изучения крылышек бабочек до изучения наречий кафрского языка"). У самого Чернышевского был в этом смысле какой-то опасный размах, какое-то разудалое и самоуверенное "всё сойдет", бросающее сомнительную тень на достоинства как раз специальных его трудов. "Общий интерес" он понимал, однако, по-своему: исходил из мысли, что больше всего читателя интересует "производительность". Разбирая в 55 году какой-то журнал, он хвалит в нем статьи "Термометрическое состояние земли" и "Русские каменноугольные бассейны", решительно бракуя, как слишком специальную, ту единственную, которую хотелось бы прочесть: "Географическое распространение верблюда".
Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”
The narrator and main character in The Gift, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev sincerely admires the way Chernyshevski, an enemy of capital punishment, made deadly fun of the poet Zhukovski’s infamously benign and meanly sublime proposal to surround executions with a mystic secrecy:
Ему искренне нравилось, как Чернышевский, противник смертной казни, наповал высмеивал гнусно-благостное и подло-величественное предложение поэта Жуковского окружить смертную казнь мистической таинственностью, дабы присутствующие казни не видели (на людях, дескать, казнимый нагло храбрится, тем оскверняя закон), а только слышали из-за ограды торжественное церковное пение, ибо казнь должна умилять. И при этом Федор Константинович вспоминал, как его отец говорил, что в смертной казни есть какая-то непреодолимая неестественность, кровно чувствуемая человеком, странная и старинная обратность действия, как в зеркальном отражении превращающая любого в левшу: недаром для палача всё делается на оборот: хомут надевается верхом вниз, когда везут Разина на казнь, вино кату наливается не с руки, а через руку; и, если по швабскому кодексу, в случае оскорбления кем-либо шпильмана позволялось последнему в удовлетворение свое ударить тень обидчика, то в Китае именно актером, тенью, исполнялась обязанность палача, т. е. как бы снималась ответственность с человека, и всё переносилось в изнаночный, зеркальный мир.
He sincerely admired the way Chernyshevski, an enemy of capital punishment, made deadly fun of the poet Zhukovski’s infamously benign and meanly sublime proposal to surround executions with a mystic secrecy (since, in public, he said, the condemned man brazenly puts on a bold face, thus bringing the law into disrepute) so that those attending the hanging would not see but would only hear solemn church hymns from behind a curtain, for an execution should be moving. And while reading this Fyodor recalled his father saying that innate in every man is the feeling of something insuperably abnormal about the death penalty, something like the uncanny reversal of action in a looking glass that makes everyone left-handed: not for nothing is everything reversed for the executioner: the horse-collar is put on upside down when the robber Razin is taken to the scaffold; wine is poured for the headsman not with a natural turn of the wrist but backhandedly; and if, according to the Swabian code, an insulted actor was permitted to seek satisfaction by striking the shadow of the offender, in China it was precisely an actor—a shadow—who fulfilled the duties of the executioner, all responsibility being as it were lifted from the world of men and transformed into the inside-out one of mirrors. (Chapter Three)
Btw., Alpin and Minvana in Zhukovski's elegy The Evening bring to mind King Alfin (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, the father of Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and minnamin ("my darling" in Zemblan). In Canto Two and in Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in Pale Fire) mentions the butterfly vanessa atalanta.
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) dies in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. In 1802 Zhukovski translated into Russian Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries. John Ray (1627-1705) was a Christian English naturalist, widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists.
Aeolian Harp was the nickname of Zhukovski's life-long friend Alexander Turgenev (1784-1845). It was Alexander Turgenev who in 1811 helped to enroll Pushkin in the Lyceum and who in February, 1837, accompanied Pushkin’s coffin to the Svyatye Gory monastery where the poet was buried. Turgenev was nicknamed Aeolian Harp presumably because of the gurgling sounds in his stomach. According to Humbert, a great French doctor once told his father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same “voice:”
The “studio bed” in my former room had long been converted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into a regular “writer’s den.” A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in. How different were her movements from those of my Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened. Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness of little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a trickle of shy life ran that tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same “voice.” (1.21)