In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Clare Quilty (a fashionable playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for kidnapping Lolita) tells Humbert that he has been called the American Maeterlinck:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing face is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play - I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow” (2.35)
Schmetterling (cf. "Maeterlinck-Schmetterling") is German for 'butterfly.' General Bagration (cf. the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island mentioned by Quilty) was felled in the battle of Borodino (that took place near the village of Borodino on 7 September 1812 during Napoleon's invasion of Russia). Napoleon chose the bee (l'abeille) as the symbol of his armorial bearings. La Vie des Abeilles ("The Life of the Bee," 1901) is a book by Maurice Maeterlinck (a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist, 1862-1949). In his essay Les Parfums ("The Perfumes," 1907) Maeterlinck mentions the flowers visied by the bee (l'abeille) or butterfly (papillon):
Vous êtes-vous jamais demandé ce qu’est en soi cette âme mystérieuse d’un grand nombre de fleurs, qui nous parle à travers leur parfum ? — Il est peu d’énigmes aussi insolubles. Nous ignorons à peu près entièrement l’intention de cette zone d’air férié et invisiblement magnifique que les corolles répandent autour d’elles. Il est fort douteux qu’elle serve principalement à attirer les insectes. D’abord, beaucoup de fleurs, parmi les plus odorantes, n’admettent pas la fécondation croisée, de sorte que la visite de l’abeille ou du papillon leur est indifférente ou importune. Ensuite, ce qui appelle les insectes c’est uniquement le pollen et le nectar, qui généralement n’ont pas d’odeur sensible. Aussi les voyons-nous négliger les fleurs les plus délicieusement parfumées, telles que la rose et l’œillet, pour assiéger en foule celles de l’érable ou du coudrier, dont l’arome est pour ainsi dire nul.
The French word ensuite (used by Maeterlinck in the next sentence) is used by Humbert when he drives with Lolita from Camp Q to The Enchanted Hunters (the hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together and where Quilty also stays at the time):
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
“Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?”
“Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.”
“But we are lovers, aren’t we?”
“Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?”
“You talk like a book, Dad. ”
“What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.”
“Are you easily shocked?”
“No. Go on.”
“Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.”
“Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?”
“Well - I joined in all the activities that were offered.”
“Ensuite? ”
“Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact.”
“Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.”
“We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.”
“Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the swear words. Anything else?”
“The Girl Scout’s motto,” said Lo rhapsodically, “is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such aswell, never mind what. My duty isto be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.”
“Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.”
“Yep. That’s all. Nowait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn’t that terrific?”
“Well, that’s better.”
“We washed zillions of dishes. ‘Zillions’ you know is schoolmarm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother saysNow let me seewhat was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun.”
“C’est bien tout? ”
“C’est . Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t tell you without blushing all over.”
“Will you tell it me later?”
“If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?”
“Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo.”
“Stop at that candy bar, will you,” said Lo.
Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity. (1.27)
Maeterlinck's essay Les Parfums appeared in Le Figaro (a Paris newspaper) on Mach 1, 1907. The French name of March (the third month of the year) is Mars. The number 342 that reappears in Lolita three times (342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale; 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters; between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes) seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth and the second planets of the Solar System). But it also may hint at March, April and February (the third, the fourth and the second months of the year). 3 + 4 + 2 = 9. Humbert tracks down and murders Quilty on September 25, 1952. September is the ninth month of the year.
The title of Maeterlinck's essay brings to mind Humbert's American uncle, a great traveler in perfumes:
My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigiditythe fatal rigidityof some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate. (1.2)
After his uncle's death Humbert decides to leave Europe and move to America:
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 estampea 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.
These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d’Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me. I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too: moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort. During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her husband’s solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the préfecture, and other formalities, that had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris.
We were coming out of some office building one morning, with her papers almost in order, when Valeria, as she waddled by my side, began to shake her poodle head vigorously without saying a word. I let her go on for a while and then asked if she thought she had something inside. She answered (I translate from her French which was, I imagine, a translation in its turn of some Slavic platitude): “There is another man in my life.” (1.8)
Colonel Maximovich (Valeria's lover, a White Russian for whom she leaves Humbert) brings to mind Maksim Maksimovich, the title character of the first story in Lermontov's Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time," 1840). At the beginning of his poem Borodino (1837) Lermontov addresses his uncle:
Скажи-ка, дядя, ведь не даром
Москва, спалённая пожаром,
Французу отдана?
Ведь были ж схватки боевые,
Да, говорят, еще какие!
Недаром помнит вся Россия
Про день Бородина!
– HEY tell, uncle, had we a cause
When Moscow, razed by fire, once was
Given up to Frenchman's blow?
Old-timers talk about some frays,
And they remember well those days!
With cause all Russia fashions lays
About the day of Borodino!
Thirty-seven-year-old Humbert meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her, because on the eve McCoo's house in Ramsdale burned to the ground. Humbert finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor (the Ramsdale dentist). According to Mayakovski (VN's 'late namesake'), the whole world is bardak (a brothel) and all people, except his uncle, are whores:
Все люди бляди,
Весь мир бардак!
Один мой дядя
И тот мудак.
All people are whores,
The whole world is a brothel!
My uncle alone:
But even he is a cretin.
There is Bard (who said, with that cold in his head, 'to borrow and to borrow and to borrow') in Barda (cf. the Barda Sea mentioned by Quilty) and Barda in bardak.