According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), in a moment of metaphysical curiosity he had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure:
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to meto me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefactionthat in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (2.31)
A Protestant’s drab atheism brings to mind Protestantskiy, pribrannyi ray (Tidy protestant paradise), a line in Gumilyov's poem Ya i vy ("Me and You," 1917):
Да, я знаю, я вам не пара,
Я пришел из иной страны,
И мне нравится не гитара,
А дикарский напев зурны.
Не по залам и по салонам
Темным платьям и пиджакам —
Я читаю стихи драконам,
Водопадам и облакам.
Я люблю — как араб в пустыне
Припадает к воде и пьет,
А не рыцарем на картине,
Что на звезды смотрит и ждет.
И умру я не на постели,
При нотариусе и враче,
А в какой-нибудь дикой щели,
Утонувшей в густом плюще,
Чтоб войти не во всем открытый,
Протестантский, прибранный рай,
А туда, где разбойник, мытарь
И блудница крикнут: вставай!
Yes, I know, we're not a pair,
In some other land I was born,
What I like is not the guitar
But the wild blows of a horn.
Not to gowns and tails I deliver
My best poems in luxurious halls,
I would rather read them to a river,
To the clouds and waterfalls.
And I love, like in desert a nomad
Drinking greedily from a jar,
Not a cavalier, sort of mad,
Who's just waiting and staring at stars.
And I'll die not in a bed, surrounded
By the doctors and notaries,
But somewhere in a dumping ground,
Or in jungles under giant trees,
Just to enter not cute and common
Tidy protestant paradise,
But the place where the footpad, loose woman,
And th' publican will tell me, «Rise!»
(tr. V. Gurvich)
The Russian word for "paradise," ray makes one think of John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript). According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to 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 settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows 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 settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published 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.
Rozhdestvo v Abissinii ("Christmas in Abyssinia," 1911) is a poem by Gumilyov:
Месяц встал; ну что ж, охота?
Я сказал слуге: «Пора!
Нынче ночью у болота
Надо выследить бобра».
Но, осклабясь для ответа,
Чуть скрывая торжество,
Он воскликнул: «Что ты, гета,
Завтра будет Рождество.
И сегодня ночью звери:
Львы, слоны и мелкота —
Все придут к небесной двери,
Будут радовать Христа.
Ни один из них вначале
На других не нападёт,
Ни укусит, ни ужалит,
Ни лягнёт и ни боднёт.
А когда, людьми не знаем,
В поле выйдет Светлый Бог,
Все с мычаньем, рёвом, лаем
У его столпятся ног.
Будь ты зрячим, ты б увидел
Там и своего бобра,
Но когда б его обидел,
Мало было бы добра».
Я ответил: «Спать пора!»
Time to hunt? – the moon had risen.
To the servant “Now!” I said,
“To the swamp’s benighted prison,
We should track where beaver’s fled.”
But in answer he now smiling –
Scarcely could he triumph hide –
“Master,” cried, “Stop your beguiling,
It’s the eve of Christmastide.
And tonight all beasts together –
Lions, elephants and mice –
At the pearly gates will tether,
Where they’ve come to gladden Christ.
There at first in peace they’ll gather –
There each other they’ll not fight,
They won’t get into a lather,
They won’t kick or buck or bite.
And when comes, past human knowing,
Shining God to take his seat,
All with roaring, barking, lowing
There will gather at his feet.
Had you eyes, you would distinguish
There among them beaver yet,
If you seek him to extinguish,
You’ll by troubles be beset!”
I replied: “I’ve sleep to get!”
(tr. Rupert Moreton)
There is abyss in Abyssinia (the Ethiopian Empire). Okhota (the hunt) mentioned by Gumilyov in the poem's first line brings to mind The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). The poem's last line, 'Ya otvetil: "Spat' pora!" (I replied: "It's time to sleep),' makes one think of "Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say" (Quilty's words to Humbert on the pillared porch of The Enchanted Hunters). Persidskaya miniatyura ("Persian Miniature," 1921) is a poem by Gumilyov:
Когда я кончу наконец
Игру в cache-cache со смертью хмурой,
То сделает меня Творец
Персидскою миниатюрой.
И небо, точно бирюза,
И принц, поднявший еле-еле
Миндалевидные глаза
На взлет девических качелей.
С копьем окровавленным шах,
Стремящийся тропой неверной
На киноварных высотах
За улетающею серной.
И ни во сне, ни на яву
Невиданные туберозы,
И сладким вечером в траву
Уже наклоненные лозы.
А на обратной стороне,
Как облака Тибета чистой,
Носить отрадно будет мне
Значок великого артиста.
Благоухающий старик,
Негоциант или придворный,
Взглянув, меня полюбит вмиг
Любовью острой и упорной.
Его однообразных дней
Звездой я буду путеводной,
Вино, любовниц и друзей
Я заменю поочередно.
И вот когда я утолю,
Без упоенья, без страданья,
Старинную мечту мою
Будить повсюду обожанье.
The game of hide-and-seek I play
With sullen death cannot endure —
Then the Creator will transform me
Into a Persian miniature.
A turquoise sky. A Prince who scarce
Raises his almond eyes to note
The upward motion of a swing
Where a girl's airily afloat.
A Shah, grasping a bloody spear,
Mounts rapidly a perilous slope,
Daring vermilion cliffs, to climb
After a fleeing antelope.
And tuberoses, that none awake
Or in a dream’s imagining
Has seen, and grassward trailing vines,
All on a honied evening.
Verso, I shall rejoice to bear,
As clean as clouds above Tibet,
The mark that there a master’s hand
Has, how indubitably, set.
A fragrant, aged man, perhaps
A merchant or a courtier, will
Love me at sight, and with a love,
Sharp, stubborn, that time cannot kill.
Thus I shall be the lodestar of
Long days whose sameness never ends,
And shall replace for him, in turn,
His wine, his mistresses, his friends.
And then, in truth, will come to pass—
Delight denied, as is despair —
My immemorial dream: to rouse
Adoration everywhere.
(tr. B. Deutsch)
Nikolay Gumilyov (1886-1921) is the author of Umer li Menelik ("Is Menelik Dead?", 1914). Menelik II (1844-1913) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1889 to his death in 1913. In 1913 Humbert's photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning). Umer li Gumbert (Is Humbert dead)? According to John Ray, Jr., Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“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 the 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.
Shestoe chuvstvo ("The Sixth Sense," 1920) is a poem by Gumilyov:
Прекрасно в нас влюблённое вино
И добрый хлеб, что в печь для нас садится,
И женщина, которою дано,
Сперва измучившись, нам насладиться.
Но что нам делать с розовой зарёй
Над холодеющими небесами,
Где тишина и неземной покой,
Что делать нам с бессмертными стихами?
Ни съесть, ни выпить, ни поцеловать.
Мгновение бежит неудержимо,
И мы ломаем руки, но опять
Осуждены идти всё мимо, мимо.
Как мальчик, игры позабыв свои,
Следит порой за девичьим купаньем
И, ничего не зная о любви,
Всё ж мучится таинственным желаньем;
Как некогда в разросшихся хвощах
Ревела от сознания бессилья
Тварь скользкая, почуя на плечах
Ещё не появившиеся крылья;
Так век за веком - скоро ли, Господь? -
Под скальпелем природы и искусства
Кричит наш дух, изнемогает плоть,
Рождая орган для шестого чувства.
Fine is the wine that loves us,
and the bread baked for our sake,
and the woman whom we are allowed to enjoy
after she has tortured us.
But sunset clouds, rose
in a sky turned cold,
calm like some other earth?
immortal poems?
All inedible, non-potable, un-kissable.
Time comes, time goes,
and we wring our hands
and never decide, never touch the circle.
Like a boy forgetting his games
and watching girls in the river
and knowing nothing but eaten
by desires stranger
Than he knows — like a slippery creature
sensing unformed wings
on its back and howling helpless
in the bushes and brambles — like hundred
Years after hundred years — how long, Lord,
how long ? — as nature and art
cut, and we scream, and slowly, slowly,
our sixth-sense organ is surgically born.
(tr. Burton Raffel)
My sixth sense tells me that Humbert is not dead and that John Ray, Jr. and Humbert Humbert are one and the same person (the suave John Ray, Jr. is, as it were, the Jekyll part of Humbert's personality). In the Russian Lolita (1967), John Ray, Jr.'s foreword to Humbert's manuscript is dated August 5, 1955. On August 3, 1921, Gumilyov was arrested by the Cheka (Lenin's secret police). On August 7, 1921, Alexander Blok died in St. Petersburg. In the Russian Lolita, the name of Clare Quilty's coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), becomes Vivian Damor-Blok.
Drab is Bard in reverse. As he speaks to Humbert, Quilty mentions the Bard (Shakespeare) and the Barda Sea:
“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 farce 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 thingyou 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)
Gumilyov was executed on August 26, 1921, in a forest near St. Petersburg. Gumilyov's African narrative poem Mik (1915) brings to mind Kipling's Indian novel Kim (1901). Dying for a smoke, Quilty "quotes" Kipling:
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. (2.35)
Before the execution Gumilyov was allowed to smoke a cigarette. Gumilyov's poem Slonyonok ("The Baby Elephant," 1921) makes one think of Kipling's story The Elephant's Child (1902). Lolita calls Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains where she fell ill and was hospitalized on June 28, 1949) Elephant:
“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.
“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau.
“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”
She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused.
“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes… Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw - smiling - through everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him…
Well, Cue - they all called him Cue
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence… took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name - Duk Duk Ranch - you know just plain silly - but it did not matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the red-haired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a coronation ceremony and then - a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
“Go on, please.”
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his - Golden Guts - and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.
“Where is the hog now?”
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out.
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)
“What things exactly?”
“Oh, things… Oh, I really I” - she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
“It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushing with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she hadoh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch - and it just was not there any more - it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange. (2.29)
Humbert the Terrible brings to mind the Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Ilya Repin (a Russian realist painter, 1844-1930) made between 1883 and 1885. Krylov's fable Lyubopytnyi ("The Inquisitive Man," 1814) ends in the line "Slona-to ya i ne primetil (The Elephant I did not notice)." We do not notice that Lolita actually dies in Elphinstone ("Elephant") on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).