Describing his travels with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) says that Rita proposed playing Russian roulette with his automatic:
She had a natty little coupé; and in it we traveled to California so as to give my venerable vehicle a rest. Her natural speed was ninety. Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952, and she was the sweetest, simplest, gentles, dumbest Rita imaginable. In comparison to her, Valechka was a Schlegel, and Charlotte a Hegel. There is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita - wherever you are, drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most soothing, the most comprehending companion that I ever had, and certainly saved me from the madhouse. I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl’s bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan - and in the course of some investigation she undertook on her own (without really knowing a thing), around San Humbertino, got entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I had the devil of a time retrieving her - used and bruised but still cocky. Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with my sacred automatic; I said you couldn’t, it was not a revolver, and we struggled for it, until at last it went off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it made in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her shrieks of laughter. (2.26)
According to Humbert Humbert, in comparison to Rita, Valechka (as Humbert Humbert calls his first wife Valeria) was a Schlegel, and Charlotte (Humbert Humbert's second wife, Lolita's mother) a Hegel. Valeria is a character (Fabio's wife) in Turgenev's story Pesn' torzhestvuyushchey lyubvi ("The Song of Triumphant Love," 1881). In a letter of October 20, 1848, from Hyères (a seaside resort on the French Riviera) to Pauline Viardot (a French opera singer, 1821-1910, with whom Turgenev was in love) in Paris Turgenev mentions his favorite dessert, une charlotte russe:
Comment allez-vous? Que faites-vous? Comment vous portez-vous? Bien, n'est-ce pas? Vous occupez-vous de l'arrangement de votre maison? Je dine chez vous dimanche, le 5; voulez-vous accepter cette invitation! -- C'est convenu, le 5, dans votre petit salon chinois, vous aurez un convive de plus a table. Je demande pour ce jour-la une charlotte russe.
In the 1860s Ivan Turgenev and the Viardot family lived in Baden-Baden, Germany. Fyodor Dostoevski modeled his invented town of Roulettenburg (in which Dostoevski's 1866 novel Igrok, "The Gambler," is set) on the German spa town of Baden-Baden, where he himself used to gamble in the famous casino. Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita's abductor (or his own picture) in the old issues of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert calls himself "Professor Hamburg:"
A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To a post card requesting twin beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed:
The Enchanted Hunters
Near Churches
No Dogs
All legal beverages
I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter, enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized one. No - I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft, rich-colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette, and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile pages of a coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita.
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed - what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up - at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault - and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form - nothing of myself could I make out. (2.26)
A hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together, The Enchanted Hunters, brings to mind Turgenev's Zapiski okhotnika ("A Hunter's Notes," 1851). Roulettenburg in The Gambler brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk ("Cattle-driving town"), the fictional setting (modeled on Staraya Russa) of Dostoevski's novel Brat'ya Karamazovy ("Brothers Karamazov," 1880). "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" (a philosophical story within a story from The Brothers Karamazov) is appended to Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel by Konstantin Merezhkovski (a zoologist who loved little girls, 1855-1921) set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island. Ray Zemnoy brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript). According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) 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 “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 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.).