At the beginning of VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) calls himself "this tangle of thorns:"
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. (1.1)
Humbert's tangle of thorns seems to hint at Christ's crown of thorns. In Russian it is called ternovyi venets. In his poem Smert' poeta ("Death of the Poet," 1837) Lermontov mentions a crown of thorns entwined in laurel that they set upon Pushkin's head:
И прежний сняв венок — они венец терновый,
Увитый лаврами, надели на него:
Но иглы тайные сурово
Язвили славное чело;
Отравлены его последние мгновенья
Коварным шепотом насмешливых невежд,
И умер он — с напрасной жаждой мщенья,
С досадой тайною обманутых надежд.
Замолкли звуки чудных песен,
Не раздаваться им опять:
Приют певца угрюм и тесен,
И на устах его печать.
And they removed his wreath, and set upon his head
A crown of thorns entwined in laurel:
The hidden spines were cruel
And pierced his noble brow;
Poisoned were his final moments
By sly insinuations of mockers ignorant,
And thus he died - for vengeance vainly thirsting
Secretly vexed by false hopes deceived.
The wondrous singing's ceased,
T'will never sound again.
His refuge, gloomy and small,
His lips forever sealed.
In Lermontov's poem Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu ("Alone I set out on the road," 1841) star converses with star:
Выхожу один я на дорогу;
Сквозь туман кремнистый путь блестит;
Ночь тиха. Пустыня внемлет богу,
И звезда с звездою говорит.
Alone I set out on the road;
The flinty path is sparkling in the mist;
The night is still. The desert harks to God,
And star with star converses.
Etot klubok terniy, as in the Russian Lolita (1967) VN renders "this tangle of thorns," brings to mind cherez ternii k zvyozdam, the Russian equivalent of the Latin phrase per aspera ad astra (through suffering to the stars). In Robert Browning's five-act epic poem Paracelsus (1835) the hero exclaims "Sic itur ad astra! " (Thus one goes to the stars!):
Paracelsus.
(to JOHANNES OPORINUS, his Secretary).
Sic itur ad astra! Dear Von Visenburg
Is scandalized, and poor Torinus paralyzed,
And every honest soul that Basel holds
Aghast; and yet we live, as one may say,
Just as though Liechtenfels had never set
So true a value on his sorry carcass,
And learned Pütter had not frowned us dumb. (Part IV "Paracelsus Aspires")
The scene is set in Colmar in Alsatia: an Inn. 1528. In 1534 Johannes Oporinus (also Johannes Oporin; Latinised from the original German name: Johannes Herbster or Hans Herbst, 1507-68), a humanist printer in Basel, published a Latin version of the Gesta Danorum, entitled Saxonis grammatici Danorum historiae libri XVI. It is from this work that Shakespeare borrowed to create Hamlet. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet's last words are "the rest is silence." At the end of his poem "Wanted" (written in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him by Quilty) Humbert says "and the rest is rust and stardust:"
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust. (2.25)
The characters in Hamlet include the Ghost. In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved who report that no ghosts walk:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow 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 publshed 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.
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) dies on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star. A settlement in the remotest Northwest, Gray Star brings to mind the Star of Bethlehem, or Christmas Star, that leads the wise men (Magi) to Jesus' birthplace. Humbert Humbert (who dies of coronary thrombosis on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) writes Lolita in legal captivity in the fall of 1952. Herbst is German for "autumn" (opora is autumn in Greek). To Autumn is a poem by Keats. Describing his life in Paris in the 1930s, Humbert mentions his paper “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey:”
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
…Fräulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise ” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties - and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. (1.5)
Fräulein von Kulp is from T. S. Eliot's poem Gerontion (1920). T. S. Eliot is the author of Whispers of Immortality (1918). At the end of his manuscript Humbert mentions the only immortality he and Lolita may share:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
This tangle of thorns (as Humbert calls himself) also brings to mind "The snail’s on the thorn," a line in Pippa's song in Robert Browning's verse drama Pippa Passes (1841):
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl'd;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!
In his poem A Wall Robert Browning mentions lappets of tangle:
O the old wall here! How I could pass
Life in a long midsummer day,
My feet confined to a plot of grass,
My eyes from a wall not once away!
And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe
Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green:
Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath,
In lappets of tangle they laugh between.
In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. mentions his colleague, Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann:
Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unsweri\vingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H. H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H. H.” describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
Describing his stay in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger, Humbert compares himself to Berthe au Grand Pied (Bertrada of Laon, the wife of Pepin the Short and the mother of Charlemagne):
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl” - that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair - of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary ”revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” - that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,” and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze! (1.15)
Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann and Berthe au Grand Pied make one think of Berthold Schwarz (also known as Berthold the Black and der Schwartzer), a legendary German (or in some accounts Danish or Greek) alchemist of the late 14th century, credited with the invention of gunpowder by 15th- through 19th-century European literature. Humbert's and Lolita's landlord at Beardsley, Professor Chem teaches chemistry at Beardsley College. Brother Berthold (an alchemist who hopes to discover perpetual motion) is a character in Pushkin's Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremyon (Scenes from the Times of Chivalry, 1835). "The Brother Berthold Schwartz Hostel" is a chapter in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev (The Twelve Chairs, 1928). The novel's main character, Ostap Bender constantly addresses gentlemen of the jury. Ilf and Petrov are the authors of Odnoetazhnaya Amerika (One-storied America, 1937), a travelogue of their road trip across the USA.