In VN's novel Pnin (1957), Timofey Pnin mentions Turgenev who was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants and the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy who liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with red noz:
With apologies for his 'negligent toilet', Pnin showed the film to a group of students--and Betty Bliss, a graduate working in Comparative Literature where Pnin was assisting Dr Hagen, announced that Timofey Pavlovich looked exactly like Buddha in an oriental moving picture she had seen in the Asiatic Department. This Betty Bliss, a plump maternal girl of some twenty-nine summers, was a soft thorn in Pnin's ageing flesh. Ten years before she had had a handsome heel for a lover, who had jilted her for a little tramp, and later she had had a dragging, hopelessly complicated, Chekhovian rather than Dostoyevskian affair with a cripple who was now married to his nurse, a cheap cutie. Poor Pnin hesitated. In principle, marriage was not excluded. In his new dental glory, he went so far one seminar session, after the rest had gone, as to hold her hand on his palm and pat it while they were sitting together and discussing Turgenev's poem in prose: 'How fair, how fresh were the roses.' She could hardly finish reading, her bosom bursting with sighs, the held hand aquiver. 'Turgenev,' said Pnin, putting the hand back on the table, 'was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants, and Madam Pushkin said: "You annoy me with your verses, Pushkin"--and in old age--to think only!--the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with a red noz!' (Chapter Two, 4)
At the beginning of his sonnet Turgenev (1925), Igor Severyanin (a Russian poet, born Igor Lotaryov, 1887-1941) calls Turgenev "Sedoy koloss, ustalyi, staryi lev s glazami umirayushchey gazeli (a gray colossus, a tired old lion with the eyes of a dying gazelle):"
Седой колосс, усталый, старый лев
С глазами умирающей газели,
Он гордый дух, над ним всю жизнь висели
Утесы бед и смерть, оскалив зев…
Как внятен женских русских душ напев
Ему в его трагичной карусели
От Франции и до страны метели,
Где тлел к нему неправый, мелкий гнев…
Его натуре хрупкой однолюба,
Кому претило все, что в жизни грубо,
Верна любовь к певунье, в чье гнездо
Он впущен был, и — горькая победа, —
Ему давала в роли Людоеда
Тургеневу! — Полина Виардо...
At the end of the sonnet, Severyanin mentions the role of Lyudoed (l'Ogre) that Pauline Viardot-García (a French opera singer of Spanish descent, 1821-1910) offered Ivan Turgenev (a Russian writer, 1818-1883, who lived with the Viardot family). L'Ogre (also known as L'école des ogres) is a 1-act or 2-act fairy-tale operetta (conte de fée) composed by Ivan Turgenev (libretto) and Pauline Viardot (music). It was first performed in May 1868 in Baden-Baden, Germany, within the intimate domestic circle of the Viardot family, with roles performed by Pauline Viardot's students. Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley (a small University town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) quotes a so-called Column for Teens that he used to read in the Beardsley Star:
I did my best, your Honour, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an exectuvie’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triplethe next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my régime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if 'only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.' (2.8)
The Beardsley Star brings to mind Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where, according to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows 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.
Prizraki ("The Ghosts," 1863) is a story by Turgenev. Turgenev's address in Baden-Baden, a German spa where the writer lived with the Viardot family in his own villa, was Schillerstrasse, 7. In April 1868 Turgenev moved to another, even more luxurious, villa, Thiergartenstrasse, 3. Tiergarten means in German "animal garden." In his essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (1956) VN writes:
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.
VN's story Volshebnik ("The Enchanter," 1939), Lolita's Russian precursor, brings to mind Turgenev's chamber opera Le dernier Sorcier ("The Last Sorcerer"). In a letter of September 22, 1867, to Vasiliy Botkin (a Russian writer, 1812-1869) Turgenev mentions his operetki (music by Pauline Viardot) Le dernier Sorcier ("The Last Sorcerer") and Trop de femmes ("Too Many Wives"):
Баден-Баден.
Schillerstrasse, 7.
22-го сент. 1867.
Милый В<асилий> П<етрович>, я давно должен бы был ответить на твою записку -- в этом я виноват,-- но насчет post restante распорядился тотчас, дал твой адресс - и ты, вероятно, уже давно получил те письма Фета, которые я видел собственными глазами. А сам не писал я оттого, что завален работою: мы тут предаемся всякого рода чудо действиям; вторая наша оперетка - "Le dernier Sorcier" - сошла еще благополучнее первой: "Trop de femmes" (о которой говорится даже в фельетоне "Journal de Débats") - завтра мы даем второе представление, на котором присутствуют король и королева прусские - rien que cela ça. Музыка действительно премилая, и я очень жалею, что ты ее не слышал.
Кроме опереток - у нас еще тут охота - так что времени остается мало. - Впрочем я здоров, чего и тебе желаю и дружески жму тебе руку.
Преданный тебе Ив. Тургенев.
P. S. Поклонись всем приятелям, также сделай одолжение, вышли мне через Galignani английский перевод "Отцов и детей" - "Fathers and Sons" - London, Sampsen Low, Son & Marster. При свидании я заплачу тебе, что будет стоить.
Humbert Humbert receives a letter from Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller) dated September 18, 1952, on September 22, 1952:
I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down - when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice:
Dear Dad:
How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we go there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship.
Yours expecting,
Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller) (2.27)
I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navelotherwise she might not have found it.
“Alone” did I say? Pas tout fait. I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.
The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.”and not Coalmont, anyway - I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley - the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor - and that he had got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller - the grossness and obscene bonhomie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six a. m. Then, with the stern and romantic care of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes - a waistcoat with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on.
I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only Schiller Paul, Furniture - to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door. (2.28)