Dolores Haze (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, Lolita's full name) was born on January 1, 1935:
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl”that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hairof the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary”revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” - that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,” and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze! (1.15)
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters!
“Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love,
Dolly.”
“The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.” (1.19)
The daughter of Harold Haze and Charlotte Becker, Dolores Haze was born in Pisky (a town in the Midwest). The name of Lolita's home town seems to hint at the zodiac constellation Pisces. Ramsdale (a town in New England where Lolita lives with her mother and where Humbert Humbert first meets her) makes one think of the Aries, a zodiac constellation also known as the Ram. 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. Lolita dies less than a week before her eighteenth birthday.
In his essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (1956) VN mentions his friend and fellow writer Mark Aldanov (Mark Landau, 1886-1957):
The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcooled by an animal: This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage. The impulse I record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not translated into English, and all are prohibited for political reasons in Russia). The man was a central European, the anonymous nymphet was French, and the loci were Paris and Provence. I had him marry the little girl’s sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted attempt to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a truck. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends — Mark Aldanov, two social revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940.
Part Two of Aldanov's novel Peshchera ("The Cave," 1936) begins with the genuine horoscope of Albrecht von Wallenstein (a Bohemian military leader and statesman, 1583-1634, who fought on the Catholic side during the Thirty Years' War) written by Johannes Kepler (a German mathematician and astronomer, 1571-1630, best known by his three laws of planetary motion):
«О человеке этом поистине могу сказать, что дан ему дух бодрствующий, сильный и беспокойный и что любит он все новое. Обычное же существо людей и действия их ему не нравятся: ищет он дел редких и неиспытанных, и в мыслях у него много больше того, что замечают другие.
Восхождение Сатурна свидетельствует, что мысли этого человека бесполезны и печальны. Он имеет склонность к алхимии, к магии, к колдовству и к общению с духами. Человеческих же заповедей и веры он не ценит и не уважает. Все раздражает его, все вызывает в нем подозрение из того, что творят Господь и люди. А покинутый одинокий месяц показывает, что эта его природа весьма вредит ему в общении с другими людьми и не вызывает в них добрых чувств к нему.
Однако лучшее при его рождении было то, что показался тогда и Юпитер. Посему есть надежда, что с годами отпадут его недостатки и что этот необыкновенный человек станет способен к делам высоким и важным». (chapter 1)
Это подлинный гороскоп юного Валленштейна, составленный Кеплером (Navitas Wallensteinii, Jannis Kepleri, astronomi, opera omnia, volumen primum, p. 388). — Автор.
Wallenstein (1799) is a trilogy of dramas by Friedrich Schiller (a German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian, 1759-1805). It consists of the plays Wallenstein's Camp (Wallensteins Lager), a lengthy prologue, The Piccolomini (Die Piccolomini), and Wallenstein's Death (Wallensteins Tod). Like Beethoven (the composer who used Schiller's Ode to Joy for the final movement of his Ninth Symphony), Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband, veteran of a distant war) is hard of hearing. Kepler's second law of planetary motion describes the "invisible string" connecting the Sun and a planet. Chapter Five of Kepler's Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619) includes a long digression on astrology. In Navitas Wallensteinii Kepler mentions the rising Saturn and Jupiter (a planet that could be seen in the sky at the moment of Wallenstein's birth). 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). 3 + 4 + 2 = 9 (prior to 2006, when Pluto was "expelled," there were nine planets in the Solar System). Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert says that his only regret is that 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 panties - she 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" brings to mind Klyuch ("The Key," 1929), the first novel in Aldanov's trilogy Klyuch, Begstvo ("The Escape," 1932) and Peshchera. Klyuch begins with the murder (or death due overdose) of Fisher, a rich banker who loves little girls. Peshchera makes one think of a kind of cave mentioned by Humbert when he describes his childhood romance with Annabel Leigh:
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. (1.3)
Wallenstein was born on Sept. 24, 1583, and died (in an assassination) on Feb. 25, 1634. Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) on Sept. 22, 1952, visits her in Coalmont on the next day (Sept. 23), revisits Ramsdale (where he finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor, the dentist) on Sept. 24, and murders Quilty in Parkington on Sept. 25, 1952. According to John Ray, Jr., Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. Kepler (the astronomer) was born on Dec. 27, 1571, and died on Nov. 15, 1630. On November 16, 1830, Pushkin finished his little tragedy Kamennyi gost' ("The Stone Guest"). It is believed that Pushkin added last touches to The Stone Guest on the morning of January 27, 1837, the day of his fatal duel with d'Anthès. In his Table-Talk (1835-36) Pushkin mentions the horoscope of poor Ivan VI (the emperor of Russia, 1740-64, who spent all his life in captivity and was murdered on July 5, 1764, when an officer attempted to release him) writen by Leonhard Euler (a Swiss polymath, 1707-83, who lived in St. Petersburg, VN's home city):
Когда родился Иван Антонович, то императрица Анна Иоановна послала к Эйлеру приказание составить гороскоп новорожденному. Эйлер сначала отказывался, но принужден был повиноваться. Он занялся гороскопом вместе с другим академиком — и, как добросовестные немцы, они составили его по всем правилам астрологии, хоть и не верили ей. Заключение, выведенное ими, ужаснуло обоих математиков — и они послали императрице другой гороскоп, в котором предсказывали новорожденному всякие благополучия. Эйлер сохранил однако ж первый и показывал его графу К. Разумовскому, когда судьба несчастного Ивана VI совершилась. [XLII]
Describing his visit to Ramsdale on Sept. 24, 1952, Humbert metions a moon-faced waiter who was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party:
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was - ? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen -
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said.
There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just entered Beardsley College. And how was? I have all necessary information about Mrs. Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.
Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could dedicate myself freely to the main object of my visit to Ramsdale. In the methodical manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come with barber and priest: “Réveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de mourir! ” I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of physiognomization - I am on my way to his uncle and walking fastbut let me jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a clouded memory the toad of a face. In the course of a few glimpses, I had noticed its slight resemblance to a cheery and rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine in Switzerland. With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy arms, and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the whole a harmless old rascal. Too harmless, in fact, to be confused with my prey. In the state of mind I now found myself, I had lost contact with Trapp’s image. It had become completely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty - as represented, with artistic precision, by an easeled photograph of him that stood on his uncle’s desk. (2.33)
In the Russian Lolita (1967) Gumbert Gumbert uses the phrase po astral'noy skheme (after an astral scheme):
Сердясь на себя, что трачу попусту время, я устремился в гостиницу, - ту самую, в которую заехал с новым чемоданом пять лет тому назад. Взял комнату с ванной, назначил по телефону два свидания - деловое и медицинское, - побрился, выкупался, надел черный костюм и спустился в бар. Там ничего не изменилось. Узкий зал был залит все тем же тусклым, невозможно-гранатовым светом - которым когда-то в Европе отличались притоны, но который здесь просто "создавал настроение" в приличном, "семейном" отеле. Я сел за тот же столик, за которым сидел в самом начале моего пребывания в Рамздэле, в тот день, когда, став жильцом Шарлотты, я нашел нужным отпраздновать новоселье тем, что по-светски с ней распил пол-бутылки шампанского, - чем роковым образом покорил ее бедное, полное до краев сердце. Как и тогда, лакей с лицом как луна распределял по астральной схеме пятьдесят рюмочек хереса на большом подносе для свадебного приема (Мурфи, на этот раз, сочетался браком с Фантазией). Без восьми три. Идя через холл, я должен был обойти группу дам, которые с mille graces прощались и расходились после клубного завтрака. Одна из них с приветственным клекотом набросилась на меня. Это была толстая, низенькая женщина, вся в жемчужно-сером, с длинным, серым пером на шляпке. Я узнал в ней миссис Чатфильд. Она напала на меня с приторной улыбкой, вся горя злобным любопытством (не проделал ли я, например, с Долли того, что Франк Ласелль, пятидесятилетний механик, проделал с одиннадцатилетней Салли Горнер в 1948-ом году). Очень скоро я это жадное злорадство совершенно взял под контроль. Она думала, что я живу в Калифорнии. А как поживает? С изысканнейшим наслаждением, я сообщил ей, что моя падчерица только что вышла за блестящего молодого инженера-горняка, выполняющего секретное правительственное задание в северо-западном штате. Взятая врасплох, она возразила, что не одобряет таких ранних браков, что никогда бы она не позволила своей Филлис, которой теперь восемнадцать лет...
"Ах, конечно", - сказал я спокойно. - "Конечно, помню Филлис. Филлис и лагерь Кувшинка. Да, конечно. Кстати, ваша дочурка никогда не рассказывала вам, как Чарли Хольмс развращал там маленьких пансионерок своей гнусной матери?"
"Стыдно!" - крикнула миссис Чатфильд, - "как вам не стыдно, мистер Гумберт! Бедного мальчика только что убили в Корее".
"В самом деле", - сказал я (пользуясь дивной свободою, свойственной сновидениям). - "Вот так судьба! Бедный мальчик пробивал нежнейшие, невосстановимейшие перепоночки, прыскал гадючьим ядом - и ничего, жил превесело, да еще получил посмертный орденок. Впрочем, извините меня, мне пора к адвокату".
До конторы Виндмюллера было всего два блока. Рукопожатье его оказалось очень медленным, очень обстоятельным, очень крепким, но как бы вопросительным. Он думал, что я живу в Калифорнии. Не преподавал ли я одно время в Бердслейском университете? Туда только что поступила его дочь. А как поживает? Я дал полный отчет о миссис Скиллер. Деловой разговор оказался приятнейшим. Я перевел все свое имущество на ее имя и вышел в сентябрьский зной беззаботным нищим. Теперь, когда я покончил с делами, я мог посвятить себя главной цели поездки в Рамздэль. До сих пор, придерживаясь той методичности, которой недаром горжусь, я не снимал маски с лица Клэра Куильти; он сидел у меня в подземелье, ожидая моего прихода со служителем культа и брадобреем: "Reveillez-vous, Tropman, il est temps de mourir!" Мне сейчас недосуг заниматься вопросом, как запоминаются физиономии (нахожусь на пути к его дядюшке и иду скорым шагом); но позволю себе отчеркнуть следующее: в спирту мутной памяти я сохранял чье-то жабье лицо. Я видал это лицо мельком несколько раз и заметил в нем некоторое сходство с жизнерадостным и довольно противным родственником моим, жившим и умершим в Швейцарии. Помню его гантели, вонючее трико, толстые волосатые руки, и плешь, и свиноподобную горничную-наложницу, - но в общем этот паршивец был довольно безобидный; слишком безобидный, добавлю, чтобы сойти за мою добычу. В странном состоянии ума, в котором я сейчас находился, я как-то потерял связь с образом Густава Траппа: его полностью поглотило лицо драматурга Клэра Куильти, таким, каким он был представлен, с художественной точностью, на рекламах папирос "Дромадер" и на кабинетной фотографии, стоявшей у его дядюшки на письменном столе. (2.33)
When Humbert revisits Ramsdale, Murphy marries Stella Fantasia (Lolita's former classmate). Stella is Latin for star. The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked Quasi una fantasia, Op.27, No. 2, is a piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven, completed in 1801 and dedicated in 1802 to his pupil Countess Julie "Giulietta" Guicciardi. Although known throughout the world as the Moonlight Sonata (Mondscheinsonate), it was not Beethoven who named it so. The title "Moonlight Sonata'" was proposed in 1832, after the author's death, by the poet Ludwig Rellstab. Rellstab likened the effect of the first movement to that of moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne. Lucerne (1857) is a story by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his first erotic experience and quotes the words of his father, "Tolstoy vient de mourir:"
High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother.
“Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters. (Chapter Ten, 3)
Leo Tolstoy died on Nov. 7, 1910 (OS). Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris. Tolstoy is the author of Kreytserova sonata ("The Kreutzer Sonata," 1889). Above Humbert’s bed in the Haze Ramsdale house there is a reproduction of René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata:”
But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left - into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my” bed René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi-studio”! Let’s get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed. (1.10)
The Kreutzer Sonata is the Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 in A major (1803) by Ludwig van Beethoven. Astrology brings to mind "And the rest is rust and stardust," the last line of Humbert's poem "Wanted" that he composed in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him:
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or "starlet."
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,
I cannot get out, said the starling).
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
And where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin', darlin'?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in my corner, snarlin').
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita;
Son félé -- bien fol est qui s'y fie!
Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?
Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
Officer, officer, there they go-
In the rain, where that lighted store is!
And her socks are white, and I love her so,
And her name is Haze, Dolores.
Officer, officer, there they are-
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out, and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
June 6, 2025, Pushkin's 226th anniversary!