At the end of May, 1947, thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her, because on the eve McCoo's house was destroyed by fire:
Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me againI mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.
One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion. (1.10)
The synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in Humbert's veins brings to mind pozhar inoy lyubvi (the fire of a different love that burns in the poet's blood) mentioned by Alexander Blok at the end of his poem Pust' ya pokinu etot grad... (Even if I leave this city," 1900):
Пусть я покину этот град...
Тоска невольная сжимает
Мне сердце. Я б остаться рад.
Что будет там, душа не знает...
Там - новый натиск бурь и бед,
Моя тоска - тому залогом.
В глубокой мгле грядущих лет
Каким предамся я дорогам?
Здесь - в свете дня, во тьме ночной
Душа боролась, погибала,
Опять воспрянув, свой покой
Вернуть не в силах, упадала
В тревоги жизни городской
И, дна достигнув, поднимала
Свой нежный цвет над черной мглой -
Так - без конца, так - без начала...
Или бушующая кровь
Рождала новую любовь?
Иль в муке и тревоге тайной
И в сочетаньях строгих числ
Таился тот - необычайный,
Тот радостный, великий смысл?
Да, да! Моей исконной мукой
Клянусь, пожар иной любви
Горел, горит в моей крови!
Моя тоска - тому порукой!
In his poem Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) Blok mentions mirovoy pozhar v krovi (the universal fire in the blood):
Мы на горе всем буржуям
Мировой пожар раздуем,
Мировой пожар в крови —
Господи, благослови!
To smoke the nobs out of their holes
We’ll light a fire through all the world,
A bloody fire through all the world —
Lord, bless our souls! (3)
(tr. Jon Stallworthy & Peter France)
The names of some of the twelve Red Army soldiers (who are led by Christ) in Blok's poem suggest that they are the apostles. After the murder of Clare Quilty (the playwright who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) Humbert is not certain that his victim is dead and mentions St. Thomas (the apostol who refused to believe the resurrected Jesus had appeared to the ten other apostles until he could see and feel Jesus's crucifiction wounds):
The rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill, and presently found myself going at the same lazy pace in a direction opposite to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the boudoir and Chum in the bathroom. No, it was not a house I would have liked to live in. I wondered idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. Not that I cared; on the whole I wished to forget the whole mess - and when I did learn he was dead, the only satisfaction it gave me, was the relief of knowing I need not mentally accompany for months a painful and disgusting convalescence interrupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and relapses, and perhaps an actual visit from him, with trouble on my part to rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something. It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moment our main, if not only, handle to reality. I was all covered with Quilty - with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. (2.36)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) the name of Quilty's coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) becomes Vivian Damor-Blok. In September, 1952, when Humbert visits Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) in Coalmont, she tells him that Duk Duk Ranch where she stayed with Quilty and his friends had burned to the ground:
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she had - oh, 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)
Quilty was called Cue by his friends (after Quilty's death Vivian Darkbloom wrote a biography, My Cue). Quilty's nickname reminds Humbert of Camp Q (where Lolita was debauched by Charlie Holmes, the headmistress' son). Q in the camp's name is a qui pro quo (Lat., "who instead of whom," a bummel). Quo vadis? ("Whither goest thou?") are St. Peter's first words to the risen Christ during their encounter along the Appian Way. To Peter's question Quo vadis, Domine Christ replies: Romam eo iterum crucifigi ("I am going to Rome to be crucified again"). Peter then gains the courage to continue his ministry and returns to the city, where he is martyred by being crucified upside-down. Emperor Nero (r. 54-68 AD) blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (1895-96) is a historical novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz (a Polish writer, 1846-1916). Alexander Blok's father (a jurist, like VN's father) lived and died (in 1909) in Warsaw.