Describing his visit to Ramsdale in September 1952 and meeting in the hotel lobby with Mrs. Chatfield, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions a moon-faced waiter who was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party:
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 to 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)
Fifty sherries on a round tray bring to mind Mme Larin's brusnichnaya voda (lingonberry water) of which Onegin is distrustful in Chapter Three (IV: 13) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Они дорогой самой краткой
Домой летят во весь опор.17
Теперь подслушаем украдкой
Героев наших разговор:
— Ну что ж, Онегин? ты зеваешь. —
«Привычка, Ленский». — Но скучаешь
Ты как-то больше. — «Нет, равно.
Однако в поле уж темно;
Скорей! пошел, пошел, Андрюшка!
Какие глупые места!
А кстати: Ларина проста,
Но очень милая старушка;
Боюсь: брусничная вода
Мне не наделала б вреда.
They by the shortest road
fly home at full career.17
Now let us eavesdrop furtively
upon our heroes' conversation.
“Well now, Onegin, you are yawning.”
“A habit, Lenski.” “But somehow
you are more bored than ever.” “No, the same.
I say, it's dark already in the field;
faster! come on, come on, Andryushka!
What silly country!
Ah, apropos: Dame Larin
is simple but a very nice old lady;
I fear that lingonberry water
may not unlikely do me harm.
17. В прежнем издании, вместо домой летят, было ошибкою напечатано зимой летят (что не имело никакого смысла). Критики, того не разобрав, находили анахронизм в следующих строфах. Смеем уверить, что в нашем романе время расчислено по календарю.
17. A misprint in the earlier edition [of the chapter] altered “homeward they fly” to “in winter they fly” (which did not make any sense whatsoever). Reviewers, not realizing this, saw an anachronism in the following stanzas. We venture to assert that, in our novel, the chronology has been worked out calendrically. (Pushkin's note)
Humbert receives a letter from Dolly Schiller (Lolita's married name) on Sept. 22, 1952, visits her in Coalmont on the next day (Sept. 23), revisits Ramsdale (where he finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor, the Ramsdale dentist) on Sept. 24, and murders Quilty on Sept. 25. Fifty-two days later, on Nov. 16, 1952, Humbert dies in prison of coronary thrombosis. But, according to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
Either Humbert began writing Lolita before Sept. 22, 1952 (the day on which he received a letter from Dolly Schiller), or (contrary to what John Ray, Jr. says in his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript) he died after Nov. 16, 1952. According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” outlived Humbert by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. But it seems more likely that Lolita died of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Everything what happens after her death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).
Describing Lolita’s hospitalization in Elphinstone (a little town in the Rockies), Humbert mentions a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. (2.22)
Goethe's Erlkönig (1782) was translated into Russian, as Lesnoy tsar' ("The Forest King," 1818), by Zhukovski. In a conversation with Onegin Lenski compares Tatiana Larin to Zhukovski's Svetlana (Three: V: 3):
Скажи: которая Татьяна?»
— Да та, которая, грустна
И молчалива, как Светлана,
Вошла и села у окна. —
«Неужто ты влюблен в меньшую?»
— А что? — «Я выбрал бы другую,
Когда б я был, как ты, поэт.
В чертах у Ольги жизни нет.
Точь-в-точь в Вандиковой Мадоне:
Кругла, красна лицом она,
Как эта глупая луна
На этом глупом небосклоне».
Владимир сухо отвечал
И после во весь путь молчал.
“Tell me, which was Tatiana?”
“Oh, she's the one who, sad
and silent like Svetlana,
came in and sat down by the window.”
“Can it be it's the younger one
that you're in love with?” “Why not?” “I'd have chosen
the other, had I been like you a poet.
In Olga's features there's no life,
just as in a Vandyke Madonna:
she's round and fair of face
as is that silly moon
up in that silly sky.
Vladimir answered curtly
and thenceforth the whole way was silent.
Onegin compares Olga's face to that silly moon up in that silly sky. It makes one think of a moon-faced waiter who is arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party.