VN's novel Lolita (1955) begins and ends with its title character's name:
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)
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)
Lolita is the rhymesake of the heroine of Aleksey Tolstoy's science fiction novel Aelita (1923). In the language spoken on Mars the name Aelita means "the light of a star seen for the last time." 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, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. 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 registered, if not actually stayed, 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).
Aleksey Tolstoy's Aelita appeared in 1923, when the author still lived in exile in Berlin (in 1923 Tolstoy returned to the Soviet Russia). Humbert's childhood romance with Annabel Leigh (Lolita's precursor who in January 1924 died of typhos in Corfu) took place in the summer of 1923. In Tolstoy's novel an engineer Mstislav Los' and his companion Aleksey Gusev (a retired soldier) travel to Mars in a rocket designed and constructed by Los' and come back to Earth. Aelita is a Marsian girl with whom Los' falls in love. Humbert regrets that in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where he and Lolita spend their first night together) he did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night:
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her pantiesshe had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in - after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes - say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
Key "342" in Humbert's hairy fist brings to mind Aleksey Tolstoy's fairy tale story Zolotoy klyuchik, ili priklyucheniya Buratino (The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino, 1936), a literary treatment of Carlo Collodi's tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Story of the Wooden Doll (1883).
In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Hurricane Lolita that swept from Florida to Maine and the planet Mars:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)
According to Kingbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), during the reign of Charles the Beloved, Mars never marred the record. As in Tolstoy's fairy tale, in Pale Fire there is a hidden door in the wall (opening it, the King leaves the palace by a secret passage and escapes from his kingdom). A character in Pale Fire, Colonel Peter Gusev (King Alfin's 'aerial adjutant') has the same last name as Alexey Gusev (in Aelita, Mstislav Los' companion) and the same first name as the tsar Peter I. Pyotr Pervyi ("Peter the First," 1930-45) is an unfinished historical novel by Aleksey Tolstoy. The son of the tsar Peter I (Pyotr Alekseyevich Romanov), Prince Aleksey Petrovich was martyred by his father and died in imprisonment in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Saint Peter (the apostle after whom VN's home city was named) has the keys from paradise. Humbert writes Lolita in confinement and dies in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial is scheduled to start.
On the other hand, Aelita brings to mind Aeolian harps, an obscure subject in which Humbert's great-grandfather, a Dorset parson, was an expert:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects - paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)
Leo Tolstoy (no relation to Count Aleksey Nikolaevich Tolstoy) died in 1910. Eolova arfa ("The Aeolian Harp," 1815) is a ballad by Zhukovski. In 1802 Zhukovski translated into Russian Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). In his Foreword John Ray, Jr. mentions the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved:
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 settlemen 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.