Describing his life with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) several times mentions his tic nerveux:
In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school - always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun. (2.2)
Sometimes… Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine prideand literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one looka gray furry question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours - how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and "Pulease, leave me alone, will you," you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story. (2.10)
In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) describes Chernyshevski (a radical critic, 1828-1889) exiled to Siberia as "a tremulous little old man with a tic:"
"Увы, жив", -- воскликнули мы, -- ибо как не предпочесть казнь смертную, содрогания висельника в своем ужасном коконе, тем похоронам, которые спустя двадцать пять бессмысленных лет выпали на долю Чернышевского. Лапа забвения стала медленно забирать его живой образ, как только он был увезен в Сибирь. О, да, разумеется: "Выпьем мы за того, кто "Что делать?" писал..." Но ведь мы пьем за прошлое, за прошлый блеск и соблазн, за великую тень, -- а кто станет пить за дрожащего старичка с тиком, где-то в легендарной дали и глуши делающего плохие бумажные кораблики для якутских детей? Утверждаем, что его книга оттянула и собрала в себе весь жар его личности, -- жар, которого нет в беспомощно-рассудочных ее построениях, но который таился как бы промеж слов (как бывает горяч только хлеб) и неизбежно обречен был рассеяться со временем (как лишь хлеб умеет становиться черствым). Кажется, ныне одни марксисты еще способны интересоваться призрачной этикой заключенной в этой маленькой, мертвой книге. Легко и свободно следовать категорическому императиву общей пользы, вот "разумный эгоизм", находимый исследователями в "Что делать?". Напомним ради забавы домысел Каутского, что идея эгоизма связана с развитием товарного производства, и заключение Плеханова, что Чернышевский всё-таки "идеалист", так как у него получается, что массы должны догнать интеллигенцию из расчета, расчет же есть мнение. Но дело обстоит проще: мысль, что расчет -- основа всякого поступка (или подвига) приводит к абсурду: сам по себе расчет бывает героический! Всякая вещь, попадая в фокус человеческого мышленья, одухотворяется. Так облагородился "расчет" материалистов: так материя у лучших знатоков ее обратилась в бесплотную игру таинственных сил. Этические построения Чернышевского -- своего рода попытка построить всё тот же перпетуум-мобиле, где двигатель-материя движет другую материю. Нам очень хочется, чтоб это вертелось: эгоизм-альтруизм-эгоизм-альтруизм... но от трения останавливается колесо. Что делать? Жить, читать, думать. Что делать? Работать над своим развитием, чтобы достигнуть цели жизни: счастья. Что делать? (но судьба самого автора, вместо дельного знака вопроса, поставила насмешливый восклицательный знак).
Чернышевского перевели бы на поселение гораздо скорее, если бы не дело каракозовцев: на их суде выяснилось, что ему хотели дать возможность бежать и возглавить революционное движение -- или хотя бы издавать в Женеве журнал, -- при чем, высчитывая даты, судьи нашли в "Что делать?" предсказание даты покушения на царя. И точно: Рахметов, уезжая заграницу, "высказал, между прочим, что года через три он возвратится в Россию, потому что, кажется, в России, не теперь, а тогда, года через три (многозначительное и типичное для автора повторение) нужно ему быть". Между тем последняя часть романа подписана 4-ым апреля 63 года, а ровно день в день три года спустя и произошло покушение. Так даже цифры, золотые рыбки Чернышевского, подвели его.
“Alas, alive,” we exclaimed, for how could one not prefer the death penalty, the convulsions of the hanged man in his hideous cocoon, to that funeral which twenty-five insipid years later fell to Chernyshevski’s lot. The paw of oblivion began slowly to gather in his living image as soon as he had been removed to Siberia. Oh yes, oh yes, no doubt students for years sang the song: “Let us drink to him who wrote What to Do? …” But it was to the past they drank, to past glamour and scandal, to a great shade… but who would drink to a tremulous little old man with a tic, making clumsy paper boats for Yakut children somewhere in those fabulous backwoods? We affirm that his book drew out and gathered within itself all the heat of his personality—a heat which is not to be found in its helplessly rational structures but which is concealed as it were between the words (as only bread is hot) and it was inevitably doomed to be dispersed with time (as only bread knows how to go stale and hard). Today, it seems, only Marxists are still capable of being interested by the ghostly ethics contained in this dead little book. To follow easily and freely the categorical imperative of the general good, here is the “rational egoism” which researchers have found in What to Do? Let us recall for comic relief Kautski’s conjecture that the idea of egoism is connected with the development of commodity production, and Plekhanov’s conclusion that Chernyshevski was nevertheless an “idealist,” since it comes out in his book that the masses must catch up with the intelligentsia out of calculation—and calculation is an opinion. But the matter is simpler than that: the idea that calculation is the foundation of every action (or heroic accomplishment) leads to absurdity: in itself calculation can be heroic! Anything which comes into the focus of human thinking is spiritualized. Thus the “calculation” of the materialists was ennobled; thus, for those in the know, matter turns into an incorporeal play of mysterious forces. Chernyshevski’s ethical structures are in their own way an attempt to construct the same old “perpetual motion” machine, where matter moves other matter. We would very much like this to revolve: egoism-altruism-egoism-altruism… but the wheel stops from friction. What to do? Live, read, think. What to do? Work at one’s own development in order to achieve the aim of life, which is happiness. What to do? (But Chernyshevski’s own fate changed the businesslike question to an ironic exclamation.)
Chernyshevski would have been transferred to a private domicile much sooner if it had not been for the affair of the Karakozovites (adherents of Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate Alexander the Second in 1866): it was made clear at their trial that they had wanted to give Chernyshevski the opportunity of escaping from Siberia and heading a revolutionary movement—or at least publishing a political review in Geneva; and checking the dates, the judges found in What to Do? a forecast of the date of the attempt on the Tsar’s life. The protagonist Rakhmetov, on his way abroad, “said among other things that three years later he would return to Russia, because, it seemed, not then, but three years later [a highly significant repetition typical of our author], he would be needed in Russia.” Meanwhile the last part of the novel was signed on April 4, 1863, and exactly three years later to the day the attempt took place. Thus even figures, Chernyshevski’s goldfish, let him down.
"Eexactly three years later to the day" brings to mind the three empty years that followed Lolita's abduction from (or, rather, death in) the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949:
This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called “Dolorés Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster. (2.25)
“Dolorés Disparue” hints at Albertine disparue, the sixth volume of Marcel Proust's seven part novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (“In Search of Lost Time”). In The Gift, Fyodor compares Zina Mertz's late father to Proust's Swann:
Зина об этом рассказывала по-другому. В ее передаче, облик ее отца перенимал что-то от прустовского Свана. Его женитьба на ее матери и последующая жизнь окрашивались в дымчато-романтический цвет. Судя по ее словам, судя также по его фотографиям, это был изящный, благородный, умный и мягкий человек, – даже на этих негибких петербургских снимках с золотой тисненой подписью по толстому картону, которые она показывала Федору Константиновичу ночью под фонарем, старомодная пышность светлого уса и высота воротничков ничем не портили тонкого лица с прямым смеющимся взглядом. Она рассказывала о его надушенном платке, о страсти его к рысакам и к музыке; о том, как в юности он однажды разгромил заезжего гроссмейстера, или о том, как читал наизусть Гомера: рассказывала, подбирая то, что могло бы затронуть воображение Федора, так как ей казалось, что он отзывается лениво и скучно на ее воспоминания об отце, т.е. на самое драгоценное, что у нее было показать. Он сам замечал в себе эту странную заторможенность отзывчивости. В Зине была черта, стеснявшая его: ее домашний быт развил в ней болезненно заостренную гордость, так что даже говоря с Федором Константиновичем она упоминала о своей породе с вызывающей выразительностью, словно подчеркивая, что не допускает (а тем самым все-таки допускала), чтоб он относился к евреям, если не с неприязнью, в той или иной степени присущей большинству русских людей, то с зябкой усмешкой принудительного доброхотства. Вначале она так натягивала эти струны, что ему, которому вообще было решительно наплевать на распределение людей по породам и на их взаимоотношения, становилось за нее чуть-чуть неловко, а с другой стороны, под влиянием ее горячей, настороженной гордыни, он начинал ощущать какой-то личный стыд, оттого что молча выслушивал мерзкий вздор Щеголева и то нарочито гортанное коверкание русской речи, которым тот с наслаждением занимался, – например, говоря мокрому гостю, наследившему на ковре: «ой, какой вы наследник!».
Zina told it quite differently. In her version the image of her father took on something of Proust’s Swann. His marriage to her mother and their subsequent life were tinted with a romantic haze. Judging by her words and judging also by the photographs of him, he had been a refined, noble, intelligent and kindly man—even in these stiff St. Petersburg cabinet pictures with a gold stamped signature on the thick cardboard, which she showed Fyodor at night under a streetlamp, the old-fashioned luxuriance of his blond mustache and the height of his collars did nothing to spoil his delicate features and direct, laughing gaze. She told him about his scented handkerchief, and his passion for trotting races and music, and that time in his youth when he had routed a visiting grand master of chess, and the way he recited Homer by heart: in talking of him she selected things that might touch Fyodor’s imagination, since it seemed to her she detected something sluggish and bored in his reaction to her reminiscences of her father, that is to the most precious thing she had to show him. He himself noticed this strangely delayed responsiveness of his. Zina had one quality which embarrassed him: her home life had developed in her a morbidly acute pride, so that even when talking to Fyodor she referred to her race with challenging emphasis, as if stressing the fact that she took for granted (a fact which its stressing denied) that he regarded Jews, not only without the hostility present to a greater or lesser degree in the majority of Russians, but did so without the chilly smile of forced goodwill. In the beginning she drew these strings so taut that he, who in general did not give a damn about the classification of people according to race, or racial interrelations, began to feel a bit awkward for her, and on the other hand, under the influence of her burning, watchful pride, he became aware of a kind of personal shame for listening silently to Shchyogolev’s loathesome rot and to his trick of garbling Russian, in imitation of a farcical Jewish accent as when he said, for instance, to a wet guest who had left traces on the carpet: “Oy, vat a mudnik!” (Chapter Three)
According to Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's stepfather, Fyodor's landlord), if he had spare time, he would have written a novel:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: «Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал… Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, – но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, – знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, – знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, – и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать – соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем – просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, – и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?» – и Борис Иванович, обратя в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (ibid.)
A kind of Dostoevskian tragedy brings to mind a Dostoevskian grin that Humbert feels dawning (through the very grimace that twists his lips) like a distant and terrible sun, as he imagines his life with Charlotte (Lolita's mother):
After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly - Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother's husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day, every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. "To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss . . ." Well-read Humbert! (1.17)
In his review of Fyodor's book on Chernyshevski Valentin Linyov mentions Dostoevski (a writer and member of the Petrashevski circle who was arrested in April 1849 and, after a mock execution, exiled to Siberia):
Спустя недели две после выхода "Жизни Чернышевского" отозвалось первое, бесхитростное эхо. Валентин Линев (Варшава) написал так:
"Новая книга Бориса Чердынцева открывается шестью стихами, которые автор почему-то называет сонетом (?), а засим следует вычурно-капризное описание жизни известного Чернышевского. Чернышевский, рассказывает автор, был сыном "добрейшего протоиерея" (но когда и где родился, не сказано), окончил семинарию, а когда его отец, прожив святую жизнь, вдохновившую даже Некрасова, умер, мать отправила молодого человека учиться в Петербург, где он сразу, чуть ли не на вокзале, сблизился с тогдашними "властителями дум", как их звали, Писаревым и Белинским. Юноша поступил в университет, занимался техническими изобретениями, много работал и имел первое романтическое приключение с Любовью Егоровной Лобачевской, заразившей его любовью к искусству. После одного столкновения на романтической почве с каким-то офицером в Павловске, он однако принужден вернуться в Саратов, где делает предложение своей будущей невесте, на которой вскоре и женится.
Он возвращается в Москву, занимается философией, участвует в журналах, много пишет (роман "Что нам делать"), дружит с выдающимися писателями своего времени. Постепенно его затягивает революционная работа, и после одного бурного собрания, где он выступает совместно с Добролюбовым и известным профессором Павловым, тогда еще совсем молодым человеком, Чернышевский принужден уехать заграницу. Некоторое время он живет в Лондоне, сотрудничая с Герценом, но затем возвращается в Россию и сразу арестован. Обвиненный в
подготовке покушения на Александра Второго Чернышевский приговорен к смерти и публично казнен.
Вот вкратце история жизни Чернышевского, и всё обстояло бы отлично, если б автор не нашел нужным снабдить свой рассказ о ней множеством ненужных подробностей, затемняющих смысл, и всякими длинными отступлениями на самые разнообразные темы. А хуже всего то, что, описав сцену повешения, и покончив со своим героем, он этим не удовлетворяется и на протяжении еще многих неудобочитаемых страниц рассуждает о том, что было бы, если бы -- что, если бы Чернышевский, например, был не казнен, а сослан в Сибирь, как Достоевский.
ABOUT a fortnight after The Life of Chernyshevski appeared it was greeted by the first, artless echo. Valentin Linyov (in a Russian émigré paper published in Warsaw) wrote as follows:
“Boris Cherdyntsev’s new book opens with six lines of verse which the author for some reason calls a sonnet (?) and this is followed by a pretentiously capricious description of the well-known Chernyshevski’s life.
“Chernyshevski, says the author, was the son of ‘a kindly cleric’ (but does not mention when and where he was born); he finished the seminary and when his father, having lived a holy life which inspired even Nekrasov, died, his mother sent the young man to study in St. Petersburg, where he immediately, practically on the station, became intimate with the then “molders of opinion,” as they were called, Pisarev and Belinski. The youth entered the university and devoted himself to technical inventions, working very hard and having his first romantic adventure with Lyubov’ Yegorovna Lobachevski, who infected him with a love for art. After a clash on romantic grounds with some officer or other in Pavlovsk, however, he was forced to return to Saratov, where he proposed to his future bride and soon afterwards married her.
“He returned to Moscow, devoted himself to philosophy, wrote a great deal (the novel What Are We to Do?) and became friends with the outstanding writers of his time. Gradually he was drawn into revolutionary work and after one turbulent meeting, where he spoke together with Dobrolyubov and the well-known Professor Pavlov, who was still quite a young man at that time, Chernyshevski was forced to go abroad. For a while he lived in London collaborating with Herzen, but then he returned to Russia and was immediately arrested. Accused of planning the assassination of Alexander the Second, Chernyshevski was sentenced to death and publicly executed.
“This in brief is the story of Chernyshevski’s life, and everything would have been all right if the author had not found it necessary to equip his account of it with a host of unnecessary details which obscure the sense, and with all sorts of long digressions on the most diversified themes. And worst of all, having described the scene of the hanging and put an end to his hero, he is not satisfied with this and for the space of still many more unreadable pages he ruminates on what would have happened ‘if’—if Chernyshevski, for example, had not been executed but had been exiled to Siberia, like Dostoevski. (Chapter Five)
Fyodor Dostoevski (1821-1881) is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty is Humbert's double. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and 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 on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. 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.).