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) calls Lolita die Kleine (Germ., the little one) and mentions her grimace, a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young frailty:
She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an “ugh!” basis: jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young frailty. (1.32)
Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major) is a 1787 composition for a chamber ensemble by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri says that he cut up music like a corpse and measured harmony by algebra. Humbert is afraid that Charlotte (Lolita's mother) will bundle off her daughter to St. Algebra:
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake - not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday.
“The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.”
“That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), “I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron.”
Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an old school report).
The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.
“Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,” pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head - shy of that dream – and communing with the tawny ground. “I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.”
“No room,” I said.
“Come,” she said with her quizzical smile, “surely, chéri, you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in Lo’s room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It’s the coldest and meanest in the whole house.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation).
“Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?” queried my wife – in allusion to her first surrender.
“Hell no,” said I. “I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the “Ah” simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then – Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry.”
She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her. (1.20)
Charlotte is a character in J. W. Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” 1774). In Chapter Two (IX: 6) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions nebo Shillera i Gete (the sky of Schiller and of Goethe). Resignation (1786) is a poem by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) that famously ends in the lines:
Was man von der Minute ausgeschlagen,
Gibt keine Ewigkeit zurück.
What is rejected in the moment,
No Eternity gives back.
In his poem An die Freude (“Ode to Joy,” 1785) used by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony (1824) Schiller says: "Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All people will be brothers)." Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert exclaims “Reader! Bruder!”:
A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To a post card requesting twin beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed:
The Enchanted Hunters
Near Churches
No Dogs
All legal beverages
I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter, enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized one. No - I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft, rich-colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette, and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile pages of a coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita.
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed - what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up - at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault - and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form - nothing of myself could I make out. (2.26)
When he composed the Symphony No. 9, Beethoven was practically deaf. A veteran of a remote war, Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) is hard of hearing:
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing.
Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dolly plied me with marshmallows and potato chips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount. (2.29)
Marshmallows and potato chips with which Dolly Schiller plies Humbert bring to mind very palatable potato chips that Humbert and Lolita eat in The Enchanted Hunters.