During Humbert Humbert's and Lolita's second road trip across the USA, Lolita (the title character of a novel, 1955, by VN) is hospitalized in Elphinstone and abducted from the hospital by Clare Quilty (the playwright who tells the staff that he is Lolita's uncle):
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically - and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating owner - that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is neurotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false move - and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man - free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)
John Elphinstone (1722-85) was a senior British naval officer who worked closely with the Russian Navy after 1770, during the period of naval reform under Russian Empress Catherine II. Together with the Scottish-born Samuel Greig (who was known in Russia as Samuil Karlovich Greig) and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, Elphinstone was a member of the naval staff, headed by Count Alexey Orlov, which defeated the Turkish fleet at the battle of Chesma Bay, near Chios Island, off the far western coast of Turkey. The battle of Chesma took place on Jule 5, 1770. Lolita escapes from Humbert on July 4, 1949 (known colloquially as the Fourth of July, Independence Day ia a national holiday which commemorates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, establishing the United States of America).
At the Elphinstone hospital Clare Quilty calls himself "Mr Gustave," because Lolita told him that he resembled Gustave Trapp, Humbert’s Swiss uncle:
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us. I do remember, however, the first time I saw its driver quite clearly. I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether. With a swishing sound a sunburst swept the highway, and needing a pair of new sunglasses, I puss - led up at a filling station. What was happening was a sickness, a cancer, that could not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us at a cafe or bar bearing the idiotic sign: The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful. Having seen to the needs of my car, I walked into the office to get those glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing a traveler’s check and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I happened to glance through a side window, and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo who was leaning out of the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread fingers going up and down as it did when she was very serious and emphatic. What struck me with sickening force was - how should I put it? - the voluble familiarity of her way, as if they had known each other - oh, for weeks and weeks. I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father’s in Switzerland - same smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth. Lolita was studying a road map when I got back into the car.
“What did that man ask you, Lo?”
“Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don’t know. He wondered if I had a map. Lost his way, I guess.”
We drove on, and I said:
“Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not care for the moment; but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen and where you will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to know exactly what he said to you and what you told him.”
She laughed.
“If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him, Dad. ”
“Did he ask where we were going?”
“Oh, he knows that ” (mocking me).
“Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.”
“Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you - Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.”
It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we traveled on, unpursued. (2.18)
On April 16, 1877, in the Restaurant Trapp near the Gare St. Lazare, a dinner was given by the group of young writers who for publicity's sake had baptized themselves “Naturalists.” Among the guests of honor were Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita:
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred. (2.36)
But only fifty-two days pass between Sept. 25, 1952 (the day of Quilty's murder and Humbert's arrest), and Nov. 16, 1952 (the day of Humbert's death). 56 − 52 = 4. In Garshin's story Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1877) the action takes place in July 1877, during the last of the Russo-Turkish Wars (1877-78). The narrator of Garshin's story (a wounded volunteer soldier) twice mentions a poor little dog:
Целая картина ярко вспыхивает в моем воображении. Это было давно; впрочем, все, вся моя жизнь, та жизнь, когда я не лежал еще здесь с перебитыми ногами, была так давно... Я шел по улице, кучка народа остановила меня. Толпа стояла и молча глядела на что-то беленькое, окровавленное, жалобно визжавшее. Это была маленькая хорошенькая собачка; вагон конно-железной дороги переехал ее. Она умирала, вот как теперь я. Какой-то дворник растолкал толпу, взял собачку за шиворот и унес. Толпа разошлась.
A complete picture clearly flashes into my mind. That was long, long ago; but then, all things, all my life, that life of mine up to the time when I found myself lying here with broken legs, was so long, long ago... I remember I was going down the street; a knot of people blocked my way. The crowd was standing and gazing in silence at something whitish in color, covered with blood, piteously whining. It was a pretty little dog; a horse-car had run over it. It was dying just as I am now. A yard-keeper forced his way through the throng, took the dog by the neck and carried it away. The throng dispersed.
Опять эта беленькая собачка! Дворник не пожалел ее, стукнул головою об стену и бросил в яму, куда бросают сор и льют помои. Но она была жива. И мучилась еще целый день. А я несчастнее ее, потому что мучаюсь целые три дня. Завтра — четвертый, потом пятый, шестой... Смерть, где ты? Иди, иди! Возьми меня!
Once more that poor little dog! The yard-keeper had no mercy on it as he beat its head against the wall and flung it into a pit where garbage was thrown and into which slops were drained. But it was still alive, and it suffered for a whole day. But I am more unfortunate than the dog, for here I have been suffering for three whole days. To-morrow will be the fourth, then will come the fifth, then the sixth. . . . Death, where art thou? Come! come! Take me!
At the Elphinstone hospital Quilty calls for Lolita with a cocker spaniel pup. In the hall of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together and where Quilty also stays at the time) Lolita caresses an old lady's cocker spaniel:
A hunchbacked and hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergymen. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand - as who would not, my heart - while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. (1.27)
When Humbert and Lolita leave Wace (where they saw a play by Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom), Lolita tells Humbert that Clare is a woman and that she has Negro blood:
Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit - and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed - seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely - Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.
As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause - a sound my nerves cannot stand - began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors - a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.
“You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat.
“I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the conversation - to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.”
“Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.”
“I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.”
“What?” countered Lo, her features working. “that fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.”
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy. (2.18)
In the Post Scriptum to his poem Moya Rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830) Pushkin mentions his black grandsire Hannibal who, according to Bulgarin (a hostile critic), was bought for a bottle of rum and whose son, Osip Abramovich Gannibal (a naval officer, the poet's maternal grandfather, 1744-1806), participated in the battle of Chesma:
Решил Фиглярин, сидя дома,
Что чёрный дед мой Ганнибал
Был куплен за бутылку рома
И в руки шкиперу попал.
Сей шкипер был тот шкипер славный,
Кем наша двигнулась земля,
Кто придал мощно бег державный
Рулю родного корабля.
Сей шкипер деду был доступен,
И сходно купленный арап
Возрос усерден, неподкупен,
Царю наперсник, а не раб.
И был отец он Ганнибала,
Пред кем средь чесменских пучин
Громада кораблей вспылала,
И пал впервые Наварин.
Решил Фиглярин вдохновенный:
Я во дворянстве мещанин.
Что ж он в семье своей почтенной?
Он?.. он в Мещанской дворянин.