Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized on Tuesday, June 28:
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap - two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. (2.22)
The main character in Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen (1845), José Lizzarrabengoa is a Basque hidalgo from Navarre. A Basque nurse at the Elphinstone hospital, Mary Lore (Lolita's accomplice who conceives a dislike for Humbert) brings to mind Marie de' Medici (1575-1642), Queen of France and Navarre as the second wife of King Henry IV, and Lorenzo de' Medici (1440-1492), an Italian statesman, the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic and patron of arts. The surname Medici translates to "medical doctors" (plural of medico). The Medici iconic coat of arms, a gold shield with five red balls (or palle) and one top blue ball decorated with three golden French fleurs-de-lis, was historically linked by some interpretations to the profession of pharmacy and apothecary. In Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) quotes the lines from Nekrasov's poem O pogode ("On the Weather," Part Two, 1865):
Духов день (28 мая 1862 г.), дует сильный ветер; пожар начался на Лиговке, а затем мазурики подожгли Апраксин Двор. Бежит Достоевский, мчатся пожарные, "и на окнах аптек в разноцветных шарах вверх ногами на миг отразились". А там, густой дым повалил через Фонтанку по направлению к Чернышеву переулку, откуда вскоре поднялся новый черный столб... Между тем Достоевский прибежал. Прибежал к сердцу черноты, к Чернышевскому, и стал истерически его умолять приостановить всё это. Тут занятны два момента: вера в адское могущество Николая Гавриловича и слухи о том, что поджоги велись по тому самому плану, который был составлен еще в 1849 году петрашевцами.
Whit Monday (May 28, 1862), a strong wind is blowing; a conflagration has begun on the Ligovka and then the desperadoes set fire to the Apraxin Market. Dostoevski is running, firemen are galloping "and in pharmacy windows, in gaudy glass globes, upside down are in passing reflected" (as seen by Nekrasov). And over there, thick smoke billows over the Fontanka canal in the direction of Chernyshyov Street, where presently a new, black column arises…. Meanwhile Dostoevski has arrived. He has arrived at the heart of the blackness, at Chernyshevski's place, and starts to beg him hysterically to put a stop to all this. Two aspects are interesting here: the belief in Nikolay Gavrilovich's satanic powers, and the rumors that the arson was being carried out according to the same plan which the Petrashevskians had drawn up as early as 1849.
"I na oknakh aptek (and in pharmacy windows)" brings to mind Aptekarsha ("The Chemist's Wife," 1886), a story by Doctor Anton Chekhov (a consumptive Russian writer who was born on January 17/29, 1860, in Taganrog and who died in Badenweiler, a German spa, on July 2/15, 1904). In a letter of September 11, 1888, to Suvorin Chekhov famously says that medicine is his lawful wife and literature is his mistress:
Вы советуете мне не гоняться за двумя зайцами и не помышлять о занятиях медициной. Я не знаю, почему нельзя гнаться за двумя зайцами даже в буквальном значении этих слов? Были бы гончие, а гнаться можно. Гончих у меня, по всей вероятности, нет (теперь в переносном смысле), но я чувствую себя бодрее и довольнее собой, когда сознаю, что у меня два дела, а не одно... Медицина — моя законная жена, а литература — любовница. Когда надоедает одна, я ночую у другой. Это хотя и беспорядочно, но зато не так скучно, да и к тому же от моего вероломства обе решительно ничего не теряют. Не будь у меня медицины, то я свой досуг и свои лишние мысли едва ли отдавал бы литературе. Во мне нет дисциплины.
You advise me not to hunt after two hares, and not to think of medical work. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense.... I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides neither of them loses anything from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work I doubt if I could have given my leisure and my spare thoughts to literature. There is no discipline in me.
At one time, VN's "lawful wife" was entomology. Elphinstonia charlonia (the Greenish Black-tip or Lemon White) is a butterfly in the family Pieridae:
While Elphinstonia makes one think of Elphinstone, charlonia makes one think of Charlotte (Lolita's mother whom Humbert married in Ramsdale and who died under the wheels of a truck). Describing his visits to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions poor Bluebeard:
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever - and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting roomall were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that “snow” and “joy juice”). (2.22)
Chekhov's humorous story Moi zhyony ("My Wives," 1885) is subtitled "Pis'mo v redaktsiyu - Raulya Siney Borody (A Letter to the Editors - by Raul the Bluebeard)." In his travelogue Notes d'un voyage dans l'ouest de la France (1836) Prosper Mérimée (a French writer, 1803-1870) interpreted local regional traditions by suggesting Bluebeard (La Barbe Bleue) was actually a mythologized, folklore memory of the Breton Baron Gilles de Rais (Joan of Arc's comrade-in-arms, Marshal of France and confessed child murderer, c. 1405-1440). The author of Carmen, Prosper Mérimée died on September 23, 1870 (five days before his sixty-seventh birthday), in Cannes, France. On September 23, 1952, Humbert visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller and big with child) in Coalmont (a small mining town) and finds out the name of her abductor (whom Humbert murders two days later).