Describing his life in Paris with his first wife Valeria, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions a glorified pot-au-feu ("pot on the fire," a stew composed of meat — typically an assortment of beef cuts — along with carrots, potatoes, and an array of other vegetables):
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu , an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style - and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naive as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.
After a brief ceremony at the mairie , I tool her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba .
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe - a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. (1.8)
In his memoirs Byloe i dumy ("Bygones and Meditations") Alexander Herzen several times quotes Proudhon's words about marriage. Every time Proudhon mentions un bon pot-au-feu:
Бывают прочные отношения сожития мужчины с женщиной без особенного равенства развития, основанные на удобстве, на хозяйстве, я почти скажу, на гигиене. Иногда это-рабочая ассоциация, взаимная помощь, соединенная с взаимным удовольствием; большей частию жена берется, как сиделка, как добрая хозяйка, "pour avoir un bon pot-au-feu", как говорил мне Прудон. Формула старой юриспруденции очень умна: a mensa et toro, - уничтожь общий стол и общую кровать, они и разойдутся с покойной совестью. (Chapter XXXIII)
У Прудона есть отшибленный угол, и тут он неисправим тут предел его личности, и, как всегда бывает, за ним он консерватор и человек предания. Я говорю о его воззрении на семейную жизнь и на значение женщины вообще.
– Как счастлив наш N., – говаривал Прудон шутя, – у него жена не настолько глупа, чтоб не умела приготовить хорошего pot-au-feu, и не настолько умна, чтоб толковать о его статьях. Это все, что надобно для домашнего счастья.
В этой шутке Прудон, смеясь, выразил серьезную основу своего воззрения на женщину. Понятия его о семейных отношениях грубы и реакционны, но и в них выражается не мещанский элемент горожанина, а скорее упорное чувство сельского pater familias'a, гордо считающего женщину за подвластную работницу, а себя за самодержавную главу дома. (Chapter XLI)
A French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) famously said: La propriété, c'est le vol! (Property is theft!). Vory (Thieves, 1890) is a story by Chekhov. "A large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba" (as Humbert calls Valeria) brings to mind Chekhov's stories Baby (Peasant Wives, 1891) and Bab'ye tsarstvo (A Woman's Kingdom, 1894). A character in the latter story, Lysevich (Anna Akimovna's lawyer) makes one think of Colonel Maximovich (a White Russian for whom Valeria leaves Humbert), Jack Windmuller (the Ramsdale lawyer whom Humbert visits on September 24, 1952, on the eve of Quilty's murder) and Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., of the District of Columbia bar (Humbert's lawyer, a good friend and relation of John Ray, Jr., the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). In his humorous story Nechto ser'yoznoe ("Something Serious," 1885) Chekhov mentions Proudhon and Buckle (the authors whom schoolboys often quote in their love letters):
Ввиду пересмотра «Уложения о наказаниях» не мешало бы кстати внести в него статьи:
О составляющих сообщества любителей сценического искусства и равно о тех, кои, зная о существовании таковых сообществ, не доносят о том, куда следует.
О тех, кои, не имея таланта и дарования, ради корысти, суетной славы или другой личной выгоды, позволяют себе на публичных концертах и семейных вечерах петь романсы или куплеты. (Для таковых самой лучшей исправительной мерой может служить намордник.)
О гимназистах, употребляющих в любовных письмах цитаты из известных авторов (Прудон, Бокль и проч.) без указания источников.
О болеющих писательским зудом и изолировании таковых от общества.
О постройке за городом на счёт земства толстостенных зданий специально для девиц, уличаемых в злоупотреблении гаммами.
Об изгнании из отечества лиц, кои, выдавая себя за женихов, обедают ежедневно на счёт отцов, имеющих дочерей.
О предании рецензентов суду за лихоимство.
О статских советниках, присваивающих себе титул превосходительства.
О педагогах, занимающихся лесоистреблением.
О супругах вице-губернаторов, предводителей и старших советников, кои, пользуясь галантностью и услужливостью секретарей, экзекуторов и чинов полиции, неустанно распространяют подписные листы «в пользу одного бедного семейства», «на обед в честь Ивана Иваныча» и проч., чем и порождают в обывателях малодушный страх перед филантропией.
О девицах, из каких-либо видов скрывающих свой возраст.
О браке муз с безумными и сумасшедшими поэтами.
In his story Chekhov mentions the girls who, for some reason, conceal their age. According to Humbert, he never established Valeria's exact age for even her passport lied. Like Jean Farlow (a friend of Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother whom Humbert marries in Ramsdale) and Gaston Godin (Humbert's chess partner at Beardsley), Valeria is an amateur painter:
I do not know if the pimp’s album may not have beeen another link in the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death (nothing very grand - the Mirana had been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess; his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. (1.7)
In Chekhov’s story Dom s mezoninom (“The House with the Mezzanine,” 1896) the narrator (a landscape painter) says that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no brains:
Белокуров длинно, растягивая «э-э-э-э...», заговорил о болезни века — пессимизме. Говорил он уверенно и таким тоном, как будто я спорил с ним. Сотни верст пустынной, однообразной, выгоревшей степи не могут нагнать такого уныния, как один человек, когда он сидит, говорит и неизвестно, когда он уйдёт.
— Дело не в пессимизме и не в оптимизме, — сказал я раздраженно, — а в том, что у девяноста девяти из ста нет ума.
Belokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that, sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.
'Pessimism or optimism have nothing to do with it,' I said, irritably. 'The point is, ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no brains.' (chapter II)
The surname Belokurov (White-curled) brings to mind Valeria's curly blond hair.