Describing his quarrel with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) compares himself to Mr. Hyde (Henry Jekyll's evil alter ego in R. L. Stevenson's 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)
Humbert’s and Lolita's landlord, Professor Chem teaches chemistry at Beardsley College:
I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence with vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 miles distant): it was the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more consistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My study turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor to ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College. (2.4)
In R. L. Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll discovers a chemical combination that releases an alternative personality, his baser side: “Mr. Hyde.” On the other hand, Professor Chem brings to mind Shem (also known as "Shem the Penman"), an autobiographical character in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake (1939), representing the introverted, artistic, and rebellious side of the protagonist.
Humbert Humbert seems to represent the baser side of John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). One is tempted to compare suave John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., to Dr Henry Jekyll. In his Cornell lecture on R. L. Stevenson VN points out that in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde there are really three personalities: Jekyll, Hyde and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over. Can we compare Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) to this third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over? Or is he too bad for that? Anyway, the name of Quilty's coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom (who wrote a biography, My Cue, after her friend's death) is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov.