Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Felis tigris goldsmithi:
I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned - Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska - ah, that first whiff of the West! We traveled very leisurely, having more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to see he Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo. (2.16)
In his notes ("translation of foreign terms") appended to his Russian translation (1967) of Lolita VN says that Humbert has in mind the tiger in a poem by Goldsmith. In his poem The Deserted Village (1770) Oliver Goldsmith (an Anglo-Irish poet, novelist and playwright, 1728-74) mentions crouching tigers who wait their hapless prey:
Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary scene,
Where half the convex world intrudes between,
Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,
Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.
Far different there from all that charm'd before,
The various terrors of that horrid shore:
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,
And fiercely shed intolerable day;
Those matted woods, where birds forget to sing,
But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;
Those pois'nous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd,
Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;
Where at each step the stranger fears to wake
The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,
And savage men more murd'rous still than they;
While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,
Mingling the ravag'd landscape with the skies.
Far different these from every former scene,
The cooling brook, the grassy-vested green,
The breezy covert of the warbling grove,
That only shelter'd thefts of harmless love.
The following fragment of Goldsmith's poem was translated into Russian by Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942):
In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs—and God has given my share—
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose.
I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,
Amidst the swains to shew my book-learned skill,
Around my fire an evening groupe to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;
And, as an hare whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return—and die at home at last.
Во всех скорбях, мне посланных судьбой,
Во всех скитаньях, тягостных и темных,
Не разлучался я с моей мечтой -
Окончить жизнь меж этих хижин скромных.
Хотелось мне сберечь остаток дней,
Сберечь свечу от быстрого сгоранья,
Чтоб послужить еще стране моей,
Среди народа бросить семя знанья.
Хотелось мне в вечерний мирный час
Собрать толпу, которая с вниманьем
Прослушает мой горестный рассказ
Про жизнь с ее борьбой, мечтой, терзаньем...
Как прячется олень в глуши лесной,
Заслыша лай собак и звуки рога,
Так в мыслях я летел в мой край родной,
Чтоб там почить, благословляя Бога.
Balmont also translated into Russian William Blake's poem The Tyger included in Blake's collection Songs of Experience (1794). According to Humbert, he picked up Rita 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)
An American movie actress, Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino, 1918-87) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest child of two dancers. She brings to mind a mature screen star who had recently jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo. Humbert's Rita (who is twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of Humbert's age) was born in 1920. In April of the preceding year VN left Russia forever. Describing his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh, Humbert mentions a stray canary that in June 1919 had fluttered into Annabel's house and his, in two widely separated countries:
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyse my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! (1.4)
E. A. Poe's poem Annabel Lee (1849) alluded to by Humbert at the beginning of Lolita was translated into Russian by Balmont. Kanareyka ("The Canary," 1921) is a poem by Ivan Bunin (1870-1953). In his diary (the entry of July 10, 1933) Bunin says that Balmont had sent him a sonnet (entitled Dva poeta, "Two Poets") 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." Pust' my tol'ko psy (Though we are only dogs) brings to mind Gumbert Gustopsovyi (Humbert the Hound) in the Russian Lolita:
Теперь всё было готово. Нервы наслаждения были обнажены. Корпускулы Крауза вступали в фазу неистовства. Малейшего нажима достаточно было бы, чтобы разразилась райская буря. Я уже не был Гумберт Густопсовый, грустноглазый дог, охвативший сапог, который сейчас отпихнет его. Я был выше смехотворных злоключений, я был вне досягаемости кары. В самодельном моем серале я был мощным, сияющим турком, умышленно, свободно, с ясным сознанием свободы, откладывающим то мгновение, когда он изволит совсем овладеть самой молодой, самой хрупкой из своих рабынь.
Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose. I had ceased to be Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping the boot that would presently kick him away. I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution. In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves. (1.13)