In his pocket diary Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) describes the first days of his stay at the Haze house in Ramsdale and mentions the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood:
Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she came with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me - wanted the funnies - and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones - a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir - but she had already yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpitbut fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud. (1.11)
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1878) is a poem by Francis William Bourdillon (1852-1921):
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
"The light of a whole life" brings to mind "light of my life, fire of my loins" at the beginning of Humbert's manuscript:
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 diary is exhibit number two:
Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.
I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a “typewriter tablet”; then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand in the little black book just mentioned. (1.11)
A thousand eyes that the night has are the stars. 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. In Schiller's play Die Räuber ("The Robbers," 1782) Kosinsky exclaims:
Da stand ich, wie von tausend Donnern getroffen! – Blut! war mein erster Gedanke, Blut! mein letzter.
Then I stood like one transfixed with a thousand thunderbolts! Blood was my first thought, blood my last! (Act III, scene 2)
Humbert's photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning), when Humbert was three (in 1913).
In Dostoevski's novel Brat'ya Karamazovy ("Brothers Karamazov," 1880) Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov compares his son Ivan (who affirms that, since God does not exist, all is allowed) to Karl Moor, his son Dmitri to Franz Moor, and himself to the reigning Count von Moor (the characters in Schiller's Robbers):
Божественный и святейший старец! — вскричал он, указывая на Ивана Федоровича. — Это мой сын, плоть от плоти моея, любимейшая плоть моя! Это мой почтительнейший, так сказать, Карл Мор, а вот этот сейчас вошедший сын, Дмитрий Федорович, и против которого у вас управы ищу, — это уж непочтительнейший Франц Мор, — оба из «Разбойников» Шиллера, а я, я сам в таком случае уж Regierender Graf von Moor! Рассудите и спасите! Нуждаемся не только в молитвах, но и в пророчествах ваших.
"Most pious and holy elder," he cried pointing to Ivan, "that is my son, flesh of my flesh, the dearest of my flesh! He is my most dutiful Karl Moor, so to speak, while this son who has just come in, Dmitri, against whom I am seeking justice from you, is the undutiful Franz Moor- they are both out of Schiller's Robbers, and so I am the reigning Count von Moor! Judge and save us! We need not only your prayers but your prophecies!" (Book II, Chapter 6: "Why Is Such a Man Alive?")
As he imagines his future life with Charlotte (Lolita's mother), Humbert feels a Dostoevskian grin on his lips:
After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly - Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother's husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day, every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. "To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss . . ." Well-read Humbert! (1.17)
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's stepfather, Fyodor's landlord) tells Fyodor that, if he had time, he would have written a novel:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал... Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, - но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, - знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, - знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, - и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать - соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем - просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, - и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" - и Борис Иванович, обратив в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (Chapter Three)
In Chapter Three of The Gift Fyodor mentions the fact that Goethe (Schiller's friend and fellow poet) used to point with his cane at the starry sky and say: "This is my conscience!" After reading Humbert's diary, Lolita's mother Charlotte (a namesake of the young woman in Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) rushes out of the house and dies under the wheels of a truck.
The day's only eye (in Bourdillon's poem) is the sun. The number 342 that reappears in Lolita three times (342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale; 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters; between July 5 and November 18, 1949, Humbert registers, if not actually stays, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes) seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth, and the second planets of the Solar System).
A nymphet (Humbert's term for sexually attractive little girls), Lolita makes one think of Ophelia, Polonius' fair daughter whom Hamlet calls "Nymph" at the end of his famous soliloquy:
The fair Ophelia! - Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins rememb'red.
Humbert calls Lolita "my sin, my soul." In his monologue in Shakespeare's play (3.1) Hamlet mentions the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to:
To be, or not to be - that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die - to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die - to sleep.
To sleep - perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
Bourdillon’s poem was turned into Russian by Yakov Polonski (who, strangely enough, dated his translation 1874):
Ночь смотрит тысячами глаз,
А день глядит одним;
Но солнца нет — и по земле
Тьма стелется, как дым.
Ум смотрит тысячами глаз,
Любовь глядит одним;
Но нет любви — и гаснет жизнь,
И дни плывут, как дым.
Polonski's most famous poem (it was copied out by Gogol) is Prishli i stali teni nochi (“The Shadows of the Night Came and Mounted Guard at my Door,” 1842):
Пришли и стали тени ночи
На страже у моих дверей!
Смелей глядит мне прямо в очи
Глубокий мрак её очей;
Над ухом шепчет голос нежный,
И змейкой бьётся мне в лицо
Её волос, моей небрежной
Рукой измятое, кольцо.
Помедли, ночь! густою тьмою
Покрой волшебный мир любви!
Ты, время, дряхлою рукою
Свои часы останови!
Но покачнулись тени ночи,
Бегут, шатаяся, назад.
Её потупленные очи
Уже глядят и не глядят;
В моих руках рука застыла,
Стыдливо на моей груди
Она лицо своё сокрыла…
О солнце, солнце! Погоди!
The third word in Polonski's poem, stali ("mounted"), brings to mind Stalin (the Soviet leader in 1924-53). Bourdillon is the author of Russia Reborn (1917). Stalin's predecessor, Lenin (who came to power in 1917) brings to mind Pushkin's Lenski, a Göttingen student who under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe with their poetic fire his soul had kindled. Shakespeare's Hamlet (whose words "Alas, poor Yorick!" Lenski quotes at the grave of Dmitri Larin, Tatiana's and Olga's father) was in Wittenberg (where he courted local girls and missed Giordano Bruno's lectures).