At the end of his letter to V. the hero of VN's story That in Aleppo Once... (1943) quotes Othello's words "but yet the pity of it, Iago! / O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!" in Shakespeare's Othello (4.1):
Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title.
In VN's story all quotes from Shakespeare's tragedy are italicized. In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert mentions a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics:
I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way – even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. (2.16)
Like Chekhov's story Shvedskaya spichka ("The Swedish Match," 1884), in which, incidentally, no crime is committed, That in Aleppo Once... is a parody of those honest mystery stories. But, if we keep an eye on the clues, we find out that its hero is a murderer and that he commits suicide after killing his wife and his wife's lover.
After murdering Clare Quilty (Lolita's lover), Humbert Humbert asks Lolita not to pity CQ:
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)
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to HH’s manuscript), Humbert Humbert died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on Nov. 16, 1952. But it seems that "coronary thrombosis" is just an euphemism and that, immediately after completing his manuscript, HH commits suicide.
The main purpose of this brief post is to draw your attention to the updated full version of my previous post, "HER FAN, HER GLOVES, HER MASK IN THAT IN ALEPPO ONCE..."