Describing his quarrel with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to Mr. Hyde (a character in R. L. Stevenson's novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886):
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East – or to explode her incognito, Miss Finton Lebone – had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.
“…This racket… lacks all sense of…” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically…”
I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know - and cradled the next quack and a half.
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark - hub of bicycle wheel - moved, shivered, and she was gone.
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed - no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on. (2.14)
Dr. Henry Jekyll's evil alter ego, Mr. Edward Hyde is a dwarfish man:
The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. 'There must be something else,' said the perplexed gentleman. 'There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.' ("Search for Mr. Hyde")
The Dwarf (1953) is a story by Ray Bradbury, an American writer (1920-2012) whose first name brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). "The old story of Dr. Fell" alludes to the well-known nursery rhyme (an impromptu translation of the thirty-seventh epigram of Martiall) by Tom Brown (an English translator and satirist, 1662-1704):
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
In the Russian Lolita (1967) VN adds a sentence about Dr Blue (the doctor in the Elphinstone hospital):
Я не люблю вас, доктор Блю, а почему вас не люблю, я сам не знаю, доктор Блю. Не сомневаюсь, что его ученость значительно уступала его репутации. Он уверил меня, что у нее "вирусная инфекция", и, когда я упомянул о ее недавней инфлуэнце, сухо сказал, что это другой микроб и что у него уже сорок таких пациентов на руках (все это звучит, конечно, как "горячка" старых беллетристов).
[I don’t like you, Doctor Blue, and why I don’t like you, I don’t know myself, Doctor Blue.] Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. (2.22)
Dr. Blue makes one think of Ray Bradbury's story (set on Mars) The Blue Bottle (1950). A little town in the Rockies, Elphinstone brings to mind VN's story Kartofel'nyi el'f ("The Potato Elf," 1924) whose hero, Fred Dobson, is a circus dwarf. The characters in VN's story include the conjuror Shock. According to suave John Ray, Jr. (the "real" author of Lolita who chose the pseudonym 'Humbert Humbert' as his mask and who seems to represent the Jekyll part of Humbert's personality), a great work of art should come as a more or less shocking surprise:
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual;” and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H. H.” No doubt, he is horrible, is is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!