Describing his life with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that he dwelled deep in his elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise:
She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would - invariably, with icy precision - plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise. (2.3)
In his essay Lunacharski (1927) Mark Aldanov (a Russian writer, 1886-1957) mentions Lunacharski's misteriya (miracle play) Ivan v rayu ("Ivan in Paradise," 1920):
Было бы странно, если б автору этой пьесы не вверили в сов. России дела воспитания юношества. Не нужно, однако, думать, что "Королевский брадобрей" написан по "агитзаказу" для обличения королей и магнатов. Короли и магнаты в нем обличаются, так сказать, попутно, -- в агитационных целях и не пишут длиннейших трагедий в стихах. Нет, главная прелесть драматических произведений г. Луначарского заключается именно в том, что они должны ставить перед избранными философские и эстетические проблемы предельного глубокомыслия: автор явно реформирует мировое искусство. Это с особенной силой сказывается в его чисто символических пьесах. Не буду излагать их подробно, -- и так прошу читателей простить эти выписки. Скажу только, что в мистерии "Иван в раю", в основу которой, по словам г. Луначарского, положена гипотеза трагического пантеизма, честный идейный борец Иван, поднявшись к престолу Бога, ведет философский спор с Иеговой и убеждает его отречься от власти в пользу человечества. Иегова, после 42 страниц философских диалогов, дьявольских монологов, ангельских и других хоров, "раздирающего звука труб", "кукования птицы Гамаюн" и т.д., соглашается с Иваном и сходит с престола. Надо отметить, что Ивану помог убедить Иегову "хор богоборцев во главе с Каином и Прометеем". И действительно, богоборцы говорили весьма убедительно. Вот как начинается богоборческая песня:
Аддай -- дай
У-у-у
Гррр-бх-тайдзах Авау, авау, пхоф бх.
A playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist, A. V. Lunacharski (1875-1933) was the minister of education in Lenin's government. His miracle play Ivan v rayu brings to mind John Ray, Jr., the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript. In his Foreword John Ray, Jr. mentions his colleague, Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann:
Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might inpetly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H. H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H. H.” describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann reminds one of Princess Blanka, in Lunacharski's blank verse tragedy Korolevskiy bradobrey ("The King's Barber," 1906) the daughter of King Dagobert. In his essay Aldanov tells the plot of Lunacharski's tragedy and says that King Dagobert wants to rape his beautiful daughter:
В трагедии "Королевский брадобрей", написанной белыми стихами, выведены король Дагобер и его родная дочь, красавица принцесса Бланка. Король, натурально, желает изнасиловать свою дочь, -- чего же другого можно было ждать от короля? Но так как Дагоберу, кроме того, хочется "плюнуть высшей власти в очи", то он требует, чтобы церковь благословила его намерение. Религия -- опиум для народа, и церковь, в лице архиепископа, изъявляет согласие. Некоторые колебания возникают только у канцлера, который боится народного гнева в случае огласки дела. Канцлер советует королю "на coitus решившись, оный тайно и совершить". Дагобер, однако, ничуть не боится огласки, и, созвав всех магнатов, объявляет им о своем решении вступить в брак с дочерью. Черствые магнаты ничего против этого не имеют. Протестует один лишь мэр Этьен, честный выходец из народа. На протяжении двух страниц мэр Этьен в самых горячих и благородных виршах ругает магнатов за то, что они "девицу предали на поругание распутному, безумному отцу". Король приказывает отвести мэра Этьена на казнь. "Этьена уводят понурого и задумчивого". "Впечатление в общем тяжелое", -- метко замечает от себя автор. Впрочем, черствые магнаты тотчас после увода мэра Этьена "шумно и радостно" восклицают: "Виват, виват король!" Дагобер вызывает к себе дочь (которая, кстати сказать, любит хорошего человека, Евстафия), заявляет ей, что намерен ее изнасиловать:
КОРОЛЬ.
Так так-то, дочка.
Я мог бы разломать тебя. Я мог бы
Взять плеть мою и бичевать тебя,
Как виноватую собаку! Только
Ведь свадьба наша будет вскоре: кожу,
Девичью кожу белую испортить
Пред свадьбой не хочу.
БЛАНКА (падает ).
О! ужас! ужас!
Злодей-король стоит на своем. Кроме того, он, как обычно поступают в таких случаях короли, грозит зажарить на медленном огне Евстафия, так, чтобы Бланка могла "расширенными ноздрями нюхать обугленного мяса аромат..." При этой угрозе король хохочет не менее адски, чем граф Лео Дорнбах фон Турау. Бланка немедленно сходит с ума; разумеется, она также хохочет -- и даже хохочет в три приема:
БЛАНКА.
Ты -- Вельзевул (хохочет ). А ты не думал,
глупый,
Что я тебя узнаю? -- но назвала
Тебя я именем твоим. На, ешь
(разрывает платье на груди ),
Ешь тело, грудь кусай, грызи, пей кровь!
(хохочет ).
Нет, не добраться до души вовеки,
Душа у мамы, нету здесь души...
(хохочет и падает на скамью ).
Подлый Дагобер, однако, неумолим, и душа принцессы Бланки, наверное, и вправду отошла бы к её покойной маме, -- но на счастье королевский брадобрей, некий Аристид, по разным сложным, преимущественно философским, соображениям, "быстрым движением бритвы перерезывает королю горло. Голова короля отваливается". Аристид "садится на его грудь, размахивая кровавой бритвой", высказывает намерение отрезать королю также нос и уши и говорит, что сделал бы то же самое, если б был брадобреем у Господа на небе. На этом тонком замечании тонкая трагедия, связанная тонкими нитями с реальной общественностью, кончается.
The king's barber, a certain Aristides (who, at the end of the tragedy, cuts the king's throat with a rapid movement of his razor), brings to mind a very old Kasbeam barber who gives Humbert a very mediocre haircut:
That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of food crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put up at Chestnut Court - nice cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees, an old swing - and a tremendous sunset which the tried child ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam because it was only thirty miles north from her home town but on the following morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again the sidewalk where she had played hopscotch some five years before. For obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip, even though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way - to remain in the car and not look up old friends. My relief at her abandoning the project was spoiled by the thought that had she felt I were totally against the nostalgic possibilities of Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not have given up so easily. On my mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too and complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed till teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt better she suggested we just continue westward. I must say she was very sweet and languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I decided to go and fetch her a toothsome picnic lunch in Kasbeam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of a hill, and from our window you could see the road winding down, and then running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chestnut trees, towards the pretty town, which looked singularly distinct and toylike in the pure morning distance. One could make out an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle, and a dog, a bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those pilgrims and mules winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue hills and red little people. I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down, eventually meeting the cyclist - a plain plump girl with pigtails, followed by a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. (2.16)
In prison Humbert grows a beard:
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (2.31)
Humbert's poem "Wanted" that he wrote in a Quebec sanatorium ends in the lines:
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. (2.25)
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:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
and 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 “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.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, 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.).