In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert is tempted to drown his wife Charlotte in Hourglass Lake:
The short white-sand strip of “our” beach – from which by now we had gone a little way to reach deep water – was empty on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder, and here was the subtle point: the man of law and the man of water were just near enough to witness an accident and just far enough not to observe a crime. They were near enough to hear a distracted bather thrashing about and bellowing for somebody to come and help him save his drowning wife; and they were too far to distinguish (if they happened to look too soon) that the anything but distracted swimmer was finishing to tread his wife underfoot. I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the ease of the act, the nicety of the setting! So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know – trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to drop back, take a deep breath, then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive corpse. I say corpse because surprise, panic and inexperience would cause her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while I would be able to hold on for at least a full minute, open-eyed under water. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime. It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still holding her down, and then would dive again as many times as would be necessary, and only when the curtain came down on her for good, would I permit myself to yell for help. And when some twenty minutes later the two puppets steadily growing arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the smiling surface of Hourglass Lake.
Simple, was it not? But what d’ye know, folks - I just could not make myself do it!
She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote as I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any other day or night, could I make myself put her to death. Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting herand I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly and making him say “akh!” and sit down. But I could not kill Charlotteespecially when things were on the whole not quite as hopeless, perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that miserable morning. Were I to catch her by her strong kicking foot; were I to see her amazed look, hear her awful voice; were I still to go through with the ordeal, her ghost would haunt me all my life. Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone - but thank God, not water, not water!
Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable.
We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended one arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked. She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another.
“Those disgusting prying kids,” said Charlotte, holding up her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. “I shall have to speak about that to Peter Krestovski.”
From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things.
“You scared us,” said Charlotte.
Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature (spies are generally shot), trying to finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was quite true). "And have you ever tried painting, Humbert?” Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.
He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she smiled.
“I almost put both of you into my lake,” she said. “I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.”
“Waterproof,” said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.
Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand, palm up.
“You could see anything that way,” remarked Charlotte coquettishly.
Jean sighed. “I once saw,” she said, “two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears - ”
“Hullo there,” said John’s voice. (1.20)
In Taman', the third novella in Lermontov's Geroy nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840), the smugglers nearly manage to drown Pechorin in the sea. Lermontov's Taman' was Chekhov's favorite story (Chekhov's dream was to write another Taman'). In Chekhov’s play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896) the action takes place in Sorin’s country estate at the lakeside. In Chekhov’s story Poprygun’ya (“The Grasshopper,” 1891) Olga Ivanovna (like Jean Farlow, an amateur artist) wears a waterproof (raincoat):
Приехала она домой через двое с половиной суток. Не снимая шляпы и ватерпруфа, тяжело дыша от волнения, она прошла в гостиную, а оттуда в столовую.
She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with excitement, she went, without taking off her hat or waterproof, into the drawing-room and thence into the dining-room. (chapter V)
Poor Charlotte is a mediocre mermaid. According to Pnin (the title character of a novel, 1957, by VN), Lermontov has expressed everything about mermaids in only two poems:
"All right, I'm afraid we are wandering away from our little joke. Now, you look at the picture. So this is the mariner, and this is the pussy, and this is a rather wistful mermaid hanging around, and now look at the puffs right above the sailor and the pussy."
"Atomic bomb explosion," said Pnin sadly.
"No, not at all. It is something much funnier. You see, these round puffs are supposed to be the projections of their thoughts. And now at last we are getting to the amusing part. The sailor imagines the mermaid as having a pair of legs, and the cat imagines her as all fish."
"Lermontov," said Pnin, lifting two fingers, "has expressed everything about mermaids in only two poems. I cannot understand American humor even when I am happy, and I must say--" He removed his glasses with trembling hands, elbowed the magazine aside, and, resting his head on his arm, broke into muffled sobs. (Chapter Two, 7)
Lermontov's poems that Pnin has in mind are Rusalka ("The Mermaid," 1832) and Morskaya tsarevna ("The Sea Princess," 1841). Morskaya tsarevna brings to mind Lesnoy tsar' ("The Forest King," 1818), Zhukovski's Russian version of Goethe's Der Erlkönig (1782). Describing Lolita’s stay in the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. (2.22)
Humbert calls himself Charlotte’s merman. Russian for "merman," vodyanoy brings to mind vodyanoe obshchestvo (the spa society) mentioned by Pechorin at the beginning of Knyazhna Meri (Princess Mary), the fourth novella in Lermontov’s novel:
11-го мая.
Вчера я приехал в Пятигорск, нанял квартиру на краю города, на самом высоком месте, у подошвы Машука: во время грозы облака будут спускаться до моей кровли. Нынче в пять часов утра, когда я открыл окно, моя комната наполнилась запахом цветов, растущих в скромном палисаднике. Ветки цветущих черешен смотрят мне в окна, и ветер иногда усыпает мой письменный стол их белыми лепестками. Вид с трех сторон у меня чудесный. На запад пятиглавый Бешту синеет, как «последняя туча рассеянной бури»; на север поднимается Машук, как мохнатая персидская шапка, и закрывает всю эту часть небосклона; на восток смотреть веселее: внизу передо мною пестреет чистенький, новенький городок, шумят целебные ключи, шумит разноязычная толпа, — а там, дальше, амфитеатром громоздятся горы всё синее и туманнее, а на краю горизонта тянется серебряная цепь снеговых вершин, начинаясь Казбеком и оканчиваясь двуглавым Эльборусом… Весело жить в такой земле! Какое-то отрадное чувство разлито во всех моих жилах. Воздух чист и свеж, как поцелуй ребенка; солнце ярко, небо сине — чего бы, кажется, больше? — зачем тут страсти, желания, сожаления?.. Однако пора. Пойду к Елизаветинскому источнику: там, говорят, утром собирается всё водяное общество.
May 11
Yesterday I arrived in Pyatigorsk and rented quarters in the outskirts at the foot of Mount Mashuk; this is the highest part of the town, so high that the clouds will reach down to my roof during thunderstorms. When I opened the window at five o'clock this morning the fragrance of the flowers growing in the modest little front garden flooded my room. The flower-laden branches of the cherry trees peep into my windows, and now and then the wind sprinkles my writing desk with the white petals. I have a marvelous view on three sides. Five-peaked Beshtau looms blue in the west like "the last cloud of the storm blown over." In the north rises Mashuk like a shaggy Persian cap, concealing this part of the horizon. To the east the view is more cheerful: down below, the clean new town spreads colorfully before me, the medicinal fountains babble, and so do the multilingual crowds. Further in the distance the massive amphitheater of mountains grows ever bluer and mistier, while on the fringe of the horizon stretches the silvery chain of snow-capped peaks beginning with Kazbek and ending with twin-peaked Elbrus... It is a joy to live in a place like this! A feeling of elation flows in all my veins. The air is pure and fresh like the kiss of a child, the sun is bright and the sky blue-what more could one desire? What place is there here for passions, yearnings and regrets? But it's time to go. I'll walk down to Elizabeth Spring, where they say the spa society congregates in the mornings.
In the Foreword to his English translation (in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov) of Geroy nashego vremeni VN emphasizes the role of eavesdropping in the novel as a literary device to advance the plot.
Five years later, when Lolita tells Humbert the name of her lover (who turns out to be Ivor Quilty’s nephew), Humbert recalls the word uttered by Charlotte:
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering - she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace - of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. (2.29)