In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) the number 342 reappears three times. 342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. 342 is Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where they spend their first night together). According to Humbert Humbert, between July 5 and November 18, 1949, he registered (if not actually stayed) at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes.
In a letter of November 12, 1889, to Suvorin (who invited Chekhov to St. Petersburg) Chekhov says that he is frightened by the thought of 343 visits that he will have to make in Petersburg:
Я бы с удовольствием приехал к Вам повидаться, да меня пугает мысль о 343 визитах, которые мне придется делать в Петербурге.
342 + 1 = 343; 365 + 1 = 366. 1860 (the year of Chekhov's birth), 1900 (1 + 1899, the year of VN's birth), 1904 (the year of Chekhov’s death) and 1952 (the year of Humbert's and Lolita's death) were leap years (a leap year has 366 days). 1952 + 1 = 1953 (the year of Stalin's death). 343 visits mentioned by Chekhov in his letter to Suvorin bring to mind VN’s story Poseshchenie muzeya (“The Visit to the Museum,” 1938) whose hero visits a museum in Montisert and finds himself in Leningrad (St. Petersburg’s name in 1924-91) of Stalin’s Russia. VN’s story begins as follows:
Несколько лет тому назад один мой парижский приятель, человек со странностями, чтобы не сказать более, узнав, что я собираюсь провести два-три дня вблизи Монтизера, попросил меня зайти в тамошний музей, где, по его сведениям, должен был находиться портрет его деда кисти Леруа. Улыбаясь и разводя руками, он мне поведал довольно дымчатую историю, которую я, признаться, выслушал без внимания, отчасти из-за того, что не люблю чужих навязчивых дел, но главное потому, что всегда сомневался в способности моего друга оставаться по ею сторону фантазии. Выходило приблизительно так, что после смерти деда, скончавшегося в свое время в петербургском доме во время японской войны, обстановка его парижской квартиры была предана с торгов, причем после неясных странствий портрет был приобретен музеем города, где художник Леруа родился. Моему приятелю хотелось узнать, там ли действительно портрет, и, если там, можно ли его выкупить, и, если можно, то за какую цену. На мой вопрос, почему же ему с музеем не списаться, он отвечал, что писал туда несколько раз, но не добился ответа.
SEVERAL years ago a friend of mine in Paris – a person with oddities, to put it mildly – learning that I was going to spend two or three days at Montisert, asked me to drop in at the local museum where there hung, he was told, a portrait of his grandfather by Leroy. Smiling and spreading out his hands, he related a rather vague story to which I confess I paid little attention, partly because I do not like other people's obtrusive affairs, but chiefly because I had always had doubts about my friend's capacity to remain this side of fantasy. It went more or less as follows: after the grandfather died in their St. Petersburg house back at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the contents of his apartment in Paris were sold at auction. The portrait, after some obscure peregrinations, was acquired by the museum of Leroy’s native town. My friend wished to know if the portrait was really there; if there, if it could be ransomed; and if it could, for what price. When I asked why he did not get in touch with the museum, he replied that he had written several times, but had never received an answer.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN tells about his grandfather Dmitri Nabokov, State Minister of Justice in 1878-1885, who died in his St. Petersburg house on March 28, 1904 (at the time of the Russo-Japanese War):
Dmitri Nabokov (the ending in ff was an old Continental fad), State Minister of Justice from 1878 to 1885, did what he could to protect, if not to strengthen, the liberal reforms of the sixties (trial by jury, for instance) against ferocious reactionary attacks. “He acted,” says a biographer (Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia, second Russian edition), “much like the captain of a ship in a storm who would throw overboard part of the cargo in order to save the rest.” The epitaphical simile unwittingly echoes, I note, an epigraphical theme—my grandfather’s earlier attempt to throw the law out of the window.
At his retirement, Alexander the Third offered him to choose between the title of count and a sum of money, presumably large—I do not know what exactly an earldom was worth in Russia, but contrary to the thrifty Tsar’s hopes my grandfather (as also his uncle Ivan, who had been offered a similar choice by Nicholas the First) plumped for the more solid reward. (“Encore un comte raté,” dryly comments Sergey Sergeevich.) After that he lived mostly abroad. In the first years of this century his mind became clouded but he clung to the belief that as long as he remained in the Mediterranean region everything would be all right. Doctors took the opposite view and thought he might live longer in the climate of some mountain resort or in Northern Russia. There is an extraordinary story, which I have not been able to piece together adequately, of his escaping from his attendants somewhere in Italy. There he wandered about, denouncing, with King Lear-like vehemence, his children to grinning strangers, until he was captured in a wild rocky place by some matter-of-fact carabinieri. During the winter of 1903, my mother, the only person whose presence, in his moments of madness, the old man could bear, was constantly at his side in Nice. My brother and I, aged three and four respectively, were also there with our English governess; I remember the windowpanes rattling in the bright breeze and the amazing pain caused by a drop of hot sealing wax on my finger. Using a candle flame (diluted to a deceptive pallor by the sunshine that invaded the stone slabs on which I was kneeling), I had been engaged in transforming dripping sticks of the stuff into gluey, marvelously smelling, scarlet and blue and bronze-colored blobs. The next moment I was bellowing on the floor, and my mother had hurried to the rescue, and somewhere nearby my grandfather in a wheelchair was thumping the resounding flags with his cane. She had a hard time with him. He used improper language. He kept mistaking the attendant who rolled him along the Promenade des Anglais for Count Loris-Melikov, a (long-deceased) colleague of his in the ministerial cabinet of the eighties. “Qui est cette femme—chassez-la!” he would cry to my mother as he pointed a shaky finger at the Queen of Belgium or Holland who had stopped to inquire about his health. Dimly I recall running up to his chair to show him a pretty pebble, which he slowly examined and then slowly put into his mouth. I wish I had had more curiosity when, in later years, my mother used to recollect those times.
He would lapse for ever-increasing periods into an unconscious state; during one such lapse he was transferred to his pied-à-terre on the Palace Quay in St. Petersburg. As he gradually regained consciousness, my mother camouflaged his bedroom into the one he had had in Nice. Some similar pieces of furniture were found and a number of articles rushed from Nice by a special messenger, and all the flowers his hazy senses had been accustomed to were obtained, in their proper variety and profusion, and a bit of house wall that could be just glimpsed from the window was painted a brilliant white, so every time he reverted to a state of comparative lucidity he found himself safe on the illusory Riviera artistically staged by my mother; and there, on March 28, 1904, exactly eighteen years, day for day, before my father, he peacefully died. (Chapter Three, 1)
In a letter of November 16, 1900, to Suvorin (the publisher of Novoe Vremya newspaper) Chekhov says that he learnt from the newspapers that Suvorin’s daughter Nastya had married:
Из газет я узнал, что Настя вышла замуж. Поздравляю Вас, Анну Ивановну и Настю, желаю от души и от чистого сердца счастья. К Вашей семье я привязан почти как к своей, и в искренность моего пожелания Вы можете верить.
On November 12, 1900, Anastasia Suvorin (who was enamored with Chekhov) married lieutenant S. V. Myasoedov-Ivanov, a son of Deputy Minister of Communications V. A. Myasoedov-Ivanov:
Сегодня, 12-го ноября в церкви департамента уделов состоялось бракосочетание дочери издателя „Нового времени“ А. С. Суворина, Ан. Ал. Сувориной, с сыном товарища министра путей сообщения В. А. Мясоедова-Иванова, лейтенантом С. В. Мясоедовым-Ивановым. (Novoe Vremya, Nov. 13, 1900).
In the same letter of November 16, 1900, Chekhov tells Suvorin that a cough prevented him from coming to St. Petersburg:
Я в Москве. Был здоров, даже очень, а теперь опять стал покашливать. Пора уезжать. Если Вы телеграфируете мне, что теперь или через неделю будете в Москве, то я не уеду, а подожду Вас. Очень хочется повидаться. Хотел я поехать дня на три к Вам в Петербург, да остановил кашель.
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert’s manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita’s married name) outlives Humbert by forty days and dies in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
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 published 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.
The capital of the book, Gray Star brings to mind seraya ot zvyozd dal’ (remote regions grey from the stars) mentioned by VN at the beginning of Drugie berega (“Other Shores,” 1954), the Russian version of his autobiography:
Сколько раз я чуть не вывихивал разума, стараясь высмотреть малейший луч личного среди безличной тьмы по оба предела жизни? Я готов был стать единоверцем последнего шамана, только бы не отказаться от внутреннего убеждения, что себя я не вижу в вечности лишь из-за земного времени, глухой стеной окружающего жизнь. Я забирался мыслью в серую от звёзд даль -- но ладонь скользила всё по той же совершенно непроницаемой глади. Кажется, кроме самоубийства, я перепробовал все выходы. Я отказывался от своего лица, чтобы проникнуть заурядным привидением в мир, существовавший до меня. Я мирился с унизительным соседством романисток, лепечущих о разных йогах и атлантидах. Я терпел даже отчёты о медиумистических переживаниях каких-то английских полковников индийской службы, довольно ясно помнящих свои прежние воплощения под ивами Лхассы. В поисках ключей и разгадок я рылся в своих самых ранних снах -- и раз уж я заговорил о снах, прошу заметить, что безоговорочно отметаю фрейдовщину и всю её тёмную средневековую подоплеку, с её маниакальной погоней за половой символикой, с её угрюмыми эмбриончиками, подглядывающими из природных засад угрюмое родительское соитие.
Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried every trthing. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. (Chapter One, 1)
Describing his first road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert mentions shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort and a fixed star:
By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a child as her I. Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anythinga lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a caf, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever - but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it. (2.1)