In a little poem that he composed for Rita Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) "the blue hotel:"
I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this was - what 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 park 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
endorse 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 Cantrip, 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)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert's poem ends in the line Pered gostiniteyu goluboy (Before the blue hotel):
Поразительный паразит пошёл за Ритой в бар. С той грустной улыбкой, которая появлялась у неё 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 её, и в последовавшей потасовке я больно ушиб большой палец об его весьма твёрдую 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 её, как все в жизни её бросали, и я спел ей вполголоса задумчивую французскую балладу и сочинил альбомный стишок ей в забаву:
Палитра клёнов в озере, как рана,
Отражена. Ведёт 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 повёл её 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 безнадёжно спутались два разных эпизода — моё 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.
Pered gostiniteyu goluboy brings to mind Po golubomu potolku (On the blue ceiling), a line in Bunin's poem Nastanet den' - ischeznu ya ("A day will come - I shall vanish," 1916):
Настанет день — исчезну я,
А в этой комнате пустой
Все то же будет: стол, скамья
Да образ, древний и простой.
И так же будет залетать
Цветная бабочка в шелку,
Порхать, шуршать и трепетать
По голубому потолку.
И так же будет неба дно
Смотреть в открытое окно
и море ровной синевой
манить в простор пустынный свой.
The day will come; I’ll disappear,
While in this selfsame empty room,
That table, bench, icon austere
The same contours of space consume.
And just as now will flutter in
That silken butterfly serene,
To rustle, palpitate and ding
Against the ceiling’s bluish-green.
And the sky’s horizon, cerulean glow
Will peer in, gaze through this window,
While the steady unruffled blue of the sea
Beckons toward emptiness: “Come. Follow me.”
(tr. U. R. Bowie)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN quotes the second stanza of Bunin's poem in his accurate literal translation:
In the works of major Russian poets I can discover only two lepidopteral images of genuinely sensuous quality: Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell:
And there will fly into the room
A colored butterfly in silk
To flutter, rustle and pit-pat
On the blue ceiling …
and Fet’s “Butterfly” soliloquizing:
Whence have I come and whither am I hasting
Do not inquire;
Now on a graceful flower I have settled
And now respire. (Chapter Six, 3)
According to Humbert, he picked up Rita (who compares herself to a God-damn mulberry moth) at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tiger-moth:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tiger-moth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did – and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband – and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant – the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was – and no doubt still is – a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
William Blake's poem The Tyger was translated into Russian by Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942). In his diary (the entry of July 10, 1933) Bunin says that Balmont had sent him a sonnet in which Balmont compares Bunin and himself to a lion and a tiger:
Бальмонт прислал мне сонет, в котором сравнивает себя и меня с львом и тигром.
ДВА ПОЭТА
Ив. Бунину
Мы - тигр и лев, мы - два царя земные.
Кто лев, кто тигр, не знаю, право, я.
В обоих - блеск и роскошь бытия,
И наш наряд - узоры расписные.
Мы оба пред врагом не склоним выи,
И в нас не кровь, а пламенней струя.
Пусть в львиной гриве молвь,- вся власть моя,-
В прыжке тигрином метче когти злые.
Не тигр и лев. Любой то лев, то тигр.
Но розны, от начала дней доныне,
Державы наши, царские пустыни.
И лучше, чем весь блеск звериных игр,-
Что оба слышим зов мы благостыни,
Призыв Звезды Единой в бездне синей.
Кламар, 1933, 5 июня К. Бальмонт.]
Я написал в ответ:
Милый! Пусть мы только псы
Все равно: как много шавок,
У которых только навык
Заменяет все красы.
In reply to Balmont Bunin wrote what seems to be the beginning of a sonnet: "My dear! Though we are only dogs, etc." Describing his scuffle with Quilty, Humbert compares himself and his victim to the cowman and the sheepman:
In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A. D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. (1.35)
In the Russian Lolita the cowman and the sheepman become korol' korov and baron baranov, respectively:
В напечатанном виде эта книга читается, думаю, только в начале двадцать первого века (прибавляю к 1935-ти девяносто лет, живи долго, моя любовь); и пожилые читатели, наверное, вспомнят в этом месте "обязательную" сцену в ковбойских фильмах, которые они видели в раннем детстве. Нашей потасовке, впрочем, недоставало кулачных ударов, могущих сокрушить быка, и летающей мебели. Он и я были двумя крупными куклами, набитыми грязной ватой и тряпками. Все сводилось к безмолвной, бесформенной возне двух литераторов, из которых один разваливался от наркотиков, а другой страдал неврозом сердца и к тому же был пьян. Когда, наконец, мне удалось овладеть своим драгоценным оружием и усадить опять сценариста в его глубокое кресло, мы оба пыхтели, как королю коров и барону баранов никогда не случается пыхтеть после схватки.
In the Russian Lolita Rita's question "why blue for heaven’s sake?" becomes "Pochemu [golubaya] - Gospodi Bozhe moy?" "Gospodi!", skazal ya po oshibke ("My Goodness!" - I said by mistake) is a line in Osip Mandelshtam's poem Obraz tvoy, muchitel'nyi i zybkiy ("Your image, painful and unsteady," 1912):
Образ твой, мучительный и зыбкий,
Я не мог в тумане осязать.
«Господи!», сказал я по ошибке,
Сам того не думая сказать.
Божье имя, как большая птица,
Вылетело из моей груди...
Впереди густой туман клубится,
И пустая клетка позади...
Oh your image, haunting me yet blurred,
In the fog I could not touch or feel.
«Goodness me» by error slipped the word
Unawares, yet heeding its appeal.
Name of god, like a large bird, so intensely,
Took a flight right out of my chest.
Straight ahead the fog is steaming densely
And behind me, cage's emptiness.
(tr. I. Shambat)
Mandelshtam compares God's name that flew out of his chest to bol'shaya ptitsa (a big bird). In his recent note in The Nabokovian, "Lolita, Blue Birds and Ovid," Gerard de Vries argues that, after her death in childbed in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest, Lolita is turned into a bird (namely, into a bluebird).
Btw., Balmont translated into Russian E. A. Poe's poems The Raven and Annabel Lee. Rakhmaninov (the composer) asked VN to re-English Balmont's Russian version of E. A. Poe's poem The Bells. Mandelshtam is the author of Ode to Beethoven (1914). Humbert's and Lolita's address at Beardsley, 14 Thayer Street, seems to hint at Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817-97), the author The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, the first scholarly biography of Beethoven (a German composer and pianist, 1770-1827). The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked Quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2, is a piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven, completed in 1801 and dedicated in 1802 to his pupil Countess Julie "Giulietta" Guiccardi. Although known throughout the world as the Moonlight Sonata (Mondscheinsonate), it was not Beethoven who named it so. The name grew popular later, likely long after Beethoven's death. Quasi una fantasia (1855) is a poem by Fet. It brings to mind Stella Fantasia (Lolita’s classmate who marries Murphy):
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was - ? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen -
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)