In "Wanted," a poem composed by Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him, there is a French stanza:
L’autre soir un air froid d’opéra m’alita:
Son félé - bien fol est qui s’y fie!
Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu’ai-je fait de ta vie? (2.25)
Souvent femme varie, bien fol est qui s’y fie! (Woman is fickle, who trusts her is a fool!) is a quote from Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse ("The King Amuses Himself," 1832, IV, 2). The Italian libretto (written by Francesco Maria Piave) of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851) is based on Le Roi s'amuse. La donna è mobile ("Woman is fickle") is the Duke of Mantua's canzone from the beginning of Act 3 of Rigoletto. Verdi is the author of Aïda (1871). In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's stepfather, Fyodor's landlord) sometimes calls his stepdaughter Aïda:
"Поешь, Аида", сказал Борис Иванович, вытягивая мокрые губы. Ничего не ответив, словно его не было, - только вздрогнули ноздри узкого носа, - она повернулась на стуле, легко и естественно изогнула длинный стан, достала с буфета сзади пепельницу, поставила у тарелки, сбросила пепел. Марианна Николаевна с мрачно-обиженным выражением на полном, кустарно накрашенном лице вернулась с кухни. Дочь положила левый локоть на стол и, слегка на него опираясь, медленно принялась за суп.
“Come on, eat, Aïda,” said Shchyogolev, thrusting out his wet lips. Without a word of reply, as if he was not there—only the nostrils of her narrow nose quivered—she turned in her chair, easily and naturally twisted her long body, obtained an ashtray from the sideboard behind her, placed it by her plate and flicked some ash into it. Marianna Nikolavna, with a hurt look beglooming her ample crudely madeup face, returned from the kitchen. The daughter placed her left elbow on the table and slightly leaning on it slowly began her soup. (Chapter Three)
When Humbert was a child, his father read to him Don Quixote and Les Miserables (a novel by Victor Hugo):
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa , took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables , and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness. (1.2)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert Gumbert mentions Victor Hugo, the author of L'Art d'être grand-père ("The Art of Being a Grandfather," 1877):
Мне теперь думается, что было большой ошибкой вернуться на восток и отдать ее в частную гимназию в Бердслее, вместо того чтобы каким-нибудь образом перебраться через мексиканскую границу, благо было так близко, и притаиться годика на два в субтропическом парадизе, после чего я мог бы преспокойно жениться на маленькой моей креолке; ибо, признаюсь, смотря по состоянию моих гланд и ганглий, я переходил в течение того же дня от одного полюса сумасшествия к другому - от мысли, что около 1950-ro года мне придется тем или иным способом отделаться от трудного подростка, чьё волшебное нимфетство к тому времени испарится, - к мысли, что при некотором прилежании и везении мне, может быть, удастся в недалеком будущем заставить ее произвести изящнейшую нимфетку с моей кровью в жилах, Лолиту Вторую, которой было бы восемь или девять лет в 1960-ом году, когда я еще был бы dans la force de l'age; больше скажу - у подзорной трубы моего ума или безумия, хватало силы различить в отдалении лет un vieillard encore vert (или это зелёненькое - просто гниль?), странноватого, нежного, слюнявого д-ра Гумберта, упражняющегося на бесконечно прелестной Лолите Третьей в "искусстве быть дедом", воспетом Виктором Гюго.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporatedto the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert - or was it green rot? - bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. (2.3)
A vieillard encore vert brings to mind "an old perfume called Soleil Vert" mentioned by Humbert in the preceding stanza of his poem "Wanted:"
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair ,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister? (2.25)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN speaks of his life in Paris in the late 1930s and mentions the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
Hodasevich’s collection Tyazhyolaya lira (Heavy Lyre, 1923) brings to mind VN’s story Tyazhyolyi dym (“Torpid Smoke,” 1935). A playwright who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty tells Humbert that un Caporal est une cigarette:
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. (2.35)
In the penultimate couplet of his poem The Betrothed (1886) Kipling says:
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
Pegasus im Joche ("Pegasus in Yoke," 1795) is a poem by Friedrich Schiller. Lolita's married name is Mrs. Richard F. Schiller.
Btw., In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of The Gift, Fyodor says that Verdi's opera La Traviata (1853) made Lenin weep:
У Ленина "Травиата" исторгала рыдания; так и Чернышевский признавался, что поэзия сердца всё же милее ему поэзии мысли, и обливался слезами над иными стихами Некрасова (даже ямбами!), высказывающими всё, что он сам испытал, все терзания его молодости, все фазы его любви к жене. И то сказать: пятистопный ямб Некрасова особенно чарует нас своей увещевательной, просительной, пророчущей силой и этой своеродной цезурой на второй стопе, цезурой, которая у Пушкина, скажем, является в смысле пения стиха органом рудиментарным, но которая у Некрасова становится действительно органом дыхания, словно из перегородки она превратилась в провал, или словно обе части строки растянулись, так что после второй стопы образовался промежуток, полный музыки. Вслушиваясь в эти впалые строки, в этот гортанный, рыдающий говорок: "Не говори, что дни твои унылы, тюремщиком больного не зови: передо мной холодный мрак могилы, перед тобой - объятия любви! Я знаю, ты другого полюбила, щадить и ждать (слышите клекот!) наскучило тебе... О погоди! близка моя могила - - ", вслушиваясь в это, Чернышевский не мог не думать о том, что напрасно жена торопится ему изменять, а близостью могилы была та тень крепости, которая уже протягивалась к нему. Мало того: повидимому, чувствовал это, - не в разумном, а орфеическом смысле, - и поэт, написавший эти строки, ибо именно их ритм ("Не говори...") со странной навязчивостью перекликается с ритмом стихов, впоследствии посвященных им Чернышевскому: "Не говори, забыл он осторожность, он будет сам судьбы своей виной" и т. д.
La Traviata made Lenin weep; similarly, Chernyshevski, who confessed that poetry of the heart was even dearer to him than poetry of ideas, used to burst into tears over those of Nekrasov’s verses (even iambic ones!) which expressed everything he himself had experienced, all the torments of his youth, all the phases of his love for his wife. And no wonder: Nekrasov’s iambic pentameter enchants us particularly by its hortatory, supplicatory and prophetic force and by a very individual caesura after the second foot, a caesura which in Pushkin, say, is a rudimentary organ insofar as it controls the melody of the line, but which in Nekrasov becomes a genuine organ of breathing, as if it had turned from a partition into a pit, or as if the two-foot part of the line and the three-foot part had moved asunder, leaving after the second foot an interval full of music. As he listened to these hollow-chested verses, to this guttural, sobbing articulation—
Oh, do not say the life you lead is dismal,
And do not call a jailer one half-dead!
Before me Night yawns chilly and abysmal.
The arms of Love before you are outspread.
I know, to you another is now dearer,
It irks you now to spare me and to wait.
Oh, bear with me! My end is drawing nearer,
Let Fate complete what was begun by Fate!
—Chernyshevski could not help thinking that his wife should not hasten to deceive him; could not help identifying the nearness of the end with the shadow of the prison already stretching out toward him. And that was not all: evidently this connection was felt—not in the rational but in the Orphic sense—also by the poet who wrote these lines, for it is precisely their rhythm (“Oh, do not say”) that was echoed with a bizarre haunting quality in the poem he subsequently wrote about Chernyshevski:
Oh, do not say he has forgotten caution,
For his own Fate himself he’ll be to blame…
In his poem "Wanted" Humbert mentions gnarled McFate:
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life. (2.25)