According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert’s manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotest Northwest:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H. H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this maskthrough which two hypnotic eyes seem to glowhad to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H. H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
A settlement in the remotest Northwest, Gray Star seems to hint at Polyarnaya zvezda ("The Polar Star"), a literary almanac, published in Saint Petersburg from 1822 to 1825. Its main editors were Alexander Bestuzhev and Kondratiy Ryleyev, the future Decembrists. Lolita dies on December 25, 1952. From 1821 to 1824 Ryleyev worked as an assessor of the Saint Petersburg criminal court. After leaving the criminal court, he found employment with the Russian-American Company (a trade venture, operating in Alaska, which then belonged to the Russian Empire) as a manager in the Saint Petersburg office. In the last year of his life Ryleyev lived in the house of the Russian-American Company on the Moyka canal (Moyka 72, not too far from the Nabokovs's house on the Bolshaya Morskaya Street, 47). Moyka 12 was Pushkin's last address.
One of the five Decembrists who were hanged, Ryleyev was born (in 1795) in the village of Batovo. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions Batovo, his grandmother's country estate (babushkino Batovo) in the Province of Saint Petersburg:
A couple of decades after Rïleev’s execution on the bastion of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in 1826, Batovo was acquired from the state by my paternal grandmother’s mother, Nina Aleksandrovna Shishkov, later Baroness von Korff, from whom my grandfather purchased it around 1855. Two tutor-and-governess-raised generations of Nabokovs knew a certain trail through the woods beyond Batovo as ‘Le Chemin du Pendu,’ the favorite walk of The Hanged One, as Rïleev was referred to in society: callously but also euphemistically and wonderingly (gentlemen in those days were not often hanged) in preference to The Decembrist or The Insurgent. (Chapter Three, 2)
Lolita dies on Christmas Day 1952. The name of VN's country estate Rozhdestveno (5 km from Batovo) comes from Rozhdestvo (Christmas). Tsarevich Alexey Petrovich v Rozhestvene (Prince Alexey Petrovich in Rozhdestveno) is a poem (duma) by Ryleyev. In 1905-06 VN's father (who ardently revered the Decembrists) was a member of the First Duma (Russian Parliament).
After the October Revolution of 1917 the Bolshaya Morskaya Street (where VN was born in 1899) was renamed the Herzen Street. Polyarnaya zvezda ("The Polar Star") was also the name of Herzen's and Ogaryov's literary almanac that was published in London from 1855 to 1868. Its cover showed the stylized profiles of the five executed Decembrists. Herzen's memoirs Byloe i dumy ("Bygones and Meditations"), whose fragments appeared in Polyarnaya zvezda, bring to mind Ryleyev's Dumy ("Thoughts," 1825), a collection of poetry (Pushkin used to say that its title comes from the German dumm). The purchase of Alaska by the United States took place in 1867.
VN's home city, St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. In his postscript to Lolita, 'On a Book Entitled Lolita' (1958), VN calls Gray Star "the capital town of the book:"
Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one’s private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one’s book. I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted—although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.