According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, 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, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow 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 publshed 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.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). In Linor (1924), his Russian version of E. A. Poe's poem Lenore (1843), Valeriy Bryusov (who translated into Russian the entire corpus of Poe's poems, including The Raven and Annabel Lee) says that Lenore died dvazhdy (twice), having died young:
Расколот золотой сосуд, и даль душе открыта!
Лишь тело тут, а дух несут, несут струи Коцита.
А! Ги де Вир! рыдай теперь, теперь иль никогда!
Твоя Линор смежила взор, — в гробу, и навсегда!
Обряд творите похорон, запойте гимн святой,
Печальный гимн былых времен о жертве молодой,
О той, что дважды умерла, скончавшись молодой!
«Лжецы! вы в ней любили прах, но гордость кляли в ней!
Когда в ней стебель жизни чах, вы были с ней нежней.
Так как же вам творить обряд, как петь вам гимн святой?
Не ваш ли взгляд, недобрый взгляд, не вы ли клеветой
Невинность в гроб свели навек, — о! слишком молодой!»
Peccavimus. Но наших уз не отягчай! звучит
Пусть грустный звон, но пусть и он ее не огорчит.
Линор идет, — «ушла вперед», — с Надеждой навсегда.
Душа темна, с тобой она не будет никогда, —
Она, дитя прекрасных грез, что ныне тихий прах.
Жизнь веет в золоте волос, но смерть в ее очах…
Еще есть жизнь в руне волос, но только смерть в очах.
«Прочь! в эту ночь светла душа! Не плакать мне о ней!
Меж ангелов пою, спеша, пэан далеких дней.
Пусть звон молчит, пусть не смутит, в ее мечтах, вдали,
Ту, что плывет к лучам высот от про́клятой земли,
К друзьям на зов, от всех врагов (и сон земной исчез)!
Из ада в высь несись, несись — к сиянию небес,
Из мглы, где стон, туда, где трон властителя небес!
Ah broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?--weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung!--
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
"And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!
"How shall the ritual, then, be read?--the requiem how be sung
"By you--by yours, the evil eye,--by yours, the slanderous tongue
"That did to death the innocent that died, and died so young?"
Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel so wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride--
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes--
The life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes.
"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
"But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days!
"Let no bell toll!--lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
"Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damnéd Earth.
"To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven--
"From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven--
"From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven."
At the end of their life in Beardsley (a small University town in New England) Humbert calls Lolita "Lenore:"
“Look,” she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, “look, I’ve decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we’ll go wherever I want, won’t we?”
I nodded. My Lolita.
“I choose? C’est entendu? ” she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.
“Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you’ll get soaked.” (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)
She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird. (2.14)
Guy De Vere in E. A. Poe's Lenore brings to mind the heroine of Alfred Tennyson's poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1842). Lolita tells Humbert that Clare (Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographer who abducts Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) is a woman:
“Who was it exactly? Vermont or Rumpelmeyer?”
“No, Edusa Gold - the gal who coaches us.”
“I was not referring to her. Who exactly concocted that play?”
“Oh! Yes, of course. Some old woman, Clare Something, I guess. There was quite a crowd of them there.”
“So she complimented you?”
“Complimented my eye - she kissed me on my pure brow” - and my darling emitted that new yelp of merriment which - perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms - she had lately begun to affect. (1.15)
“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)
The capital town of the book, Gray Star seems to hint at "And this gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star" (the lines in Tennyson's poem Ulysses, 1842):
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Tennyson's poem ends in the famous line "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." It is inscribed on the cross at Observation Hill, commemorating Robert Scott's heroic, albeit tragic, pursuit of the South Pole. "Borot'sya i iskat', nayti i ne sdavat'sya" (To strive and to seek, to find and not to yield) is the heroes' motto in Veniamin Kaverin's novel Dva kapitana ("The Two Captains," 1937-46). The novel tells the story of a Russian youth, Alexander Grigoriev, as he grows up through Czarist Russia to the October Revolution of 1917 to World War II. At the center of the story is Grigoriev's search for the lost Arctic expedition of Captain Ivan Tatarinov and the discovery of Severnaya Zemlya (an archipelago in the Russian high Arctic).
A settlement in the remotest Northwest, Gray Star also seems to hint at Polyarnaya zvezda ("The Polar Star"), a literary almanac, published in Saint Petersburg from 1822 to 1825. Its main editors were Alexander Bestuzhev and Kondratiy Ryleyev, the future Decembrists. From 1821 to 1824 Ryleyev (who owned Batovo, a country estate in the Province of St. Petersburg that later belonged to VN's grandmother) worked as an assessor of the Saint Petersburg criminal court. After leaving the criminal court, he found employment with the Russian-American Company (a trade venture, operating in Alaska, which then belonged to the Russian Empire) as a manager in the Saint Petersburg office. In the last year of his life Ryleyev lived in the house of the Russian-American Company on the Moyka canal (Moyka 72, not too far from the Nabokovs' house on the Bolshaya Morskaya Street, 47). Moyka 12 was Pushkin's last address. In his essay Krovavaya pishcha ("The Bloody Food," 1932) Hodasevich speaks of the terrible destiny of Russian writers and points out that Ryleyev (whose rope broke during the execution) umer dvazhdy (died twice):
Я называю имена лишь по одному разу. Но ведь на долю скольких пришлось по две, по три "казни" -- одна за другой! Разве Пушкин, прежде чем был пристрелен, не провел шесть лет в ссылке? Разве Лермонтов, прежде, чем был убит, не узнал солдатчины и не побывал тоже в ссылке? Разве Достоевского не возили на позорной тележке и не взводили на эшафот, прежде чем милостиво послали на каторгу? Разве Рылеев, Бестужев и Гумилев перед смертью не узнали, что есть каземат? Еще ужаснее: разве Рылеев не дважды умер?
In Homer's poem, Odysseus (Lat., Ulysses) is the king of Ithaca, a small Greek Ionian island traditionally identified as modern Ithaki. VN wrote much of Lolita living in Ithaca, N. Y. Humbert's childhood love, Annabel Leigh died of typhus in Corfu (the largest of the Ionian islands). A small town in the Rockies where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized, Elphinstone brings to mind Counter Admiral John Elphinstone (1722-85), a British senior naval officer who in the battle of Chesma (July 5-7, 1770) commanded the Russian rear guard.