Describing his childhood, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the splendid Hotel Mirana that revolved around him as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects – paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity - the fatal rigidity - of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness. (1.2)
The hotel's name seems to hint at "Udaleny ot mira na kladbishche (Removed from the world to a cemetery)," the first line of Alexander Blok's poem Na mogile druga ("At the Grave of a Friend," 1902):
Удалены от мира на кладбище,
Мы вновь с тобой, негаданный мертвец.
Ты перешел в последнее жилище,
Я всё в пыли, но вижу свой конец.
Там, в синеве, мы встретим наши зори,
Все наши сны продлятся наяву.
Я за тобой, поверь, мой милый, вскоре
За тем же сном в безбрежность уплыву.
In his Pushkin speech, O naznachenii poeta (“On a Poet’s Destination,” 1921) Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921) says that the Cosmos (an organized harmony, culture) is born from the Chaos (a primeval, elemental anarchy):
Что такое поэт? Человек, который пишет стихами? Нет, конечно. Он называется поэтом не потому, что он пишет стихами; но он пишет стихами, то есть приводит в гармонию слова и звуки, потому что он — сын гармонии, поэт.
Что такое гармония? Гармония есть согласие мировых сил, порядок мировой жизни. Порядок — космос, в противоположность беспорядку — хаосу. Из хаоса рождается космос, мир, учили древние. Космос — родной хаосу, как упругие волны моря — родные грудам океанских валов. Сын может быть не похож на отца ни в чём, кроме одной тайной черты; но она-то и делает похожими отца и сына.
Хаос есть первобытное, стихийное безначалие; космос — устроенная гармония, культура; из хаоса рождается космос; стихия таит в себе семена культуры; из безначалия создается гармония.
In his essay V zashchitu A. Bloka (“In Defense of A. Blok,” 1931) Nikolay Berdyaev (a Russian philosopher, 1874-1948) points out that poetry’s greatest and most painful problem is that it relates but to a small degree to the Logos, it relates rather to the Cosmos:
Можно было бы показать, что все почти поэты мира, величайшие и наиболее несомненные, находились в состоянии «прелести», им не дано было ясного и чистого созерцания Бога и мира умных сущностей, их созерцания всегда почти были замутнены космическим прельщением. Если для Данте сделают исключение, то не за Беатриче, а за ад, в который он столь многих послал. Это есть самая большая и мучительная проблема поэзии: она лишь в очень малой степени причастна Логосу, она причастна Космосу.
It may seem, that almost all the poetry of the world, even the without doubt greatest, is situated in a condition of “prelest’-bewitchment”, that there was not granted it a clear and pure contemplation of God and the world of intelligible entities, their contemplation almost always having been muddled by a cosmic allure. If an exception be made for Dante, then it is not because of Beatrice, but because of the Inferno, into which he dispatched so many. This is a very great and tortuous problem that involves poetry: it relates but to a small degree to the Logos, it relates rather to the Cosmos.
Humbert compares his Lolita to E. A. Poe's Virginia and to Dante's Beatrice:
What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo. Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me. Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about paysuits? Slips? No slips. Lo and I loathed slips. (1.25)
Line 3 of Blok's poem At the Grave of a Friend, "Ty pereshyol v poslednee zhilishche (You moved to the last abode)," brings to mind "Pereshyol ty v novoe zhilishche (You moved to the new abode), the first line of VN's poem Na smert' Yu. I. Ayhenval'da ("On the Death of Yu. I. Ayhenvald," 1929):
Перешел ты в новое жилище,
и другому отдадут на днях
комнату, где жил писатель нищий,
иностранец с книгою в руках.
Тихо было в комнате: страница
изредка шуршала; за окном
вспыхивала темная столица
голубым трамвайным огоньком.
В плотный гроб судьба тебя сложила,
как очки разбитые в футляр...
Тихо было в комнате, но жило
в ней волненье, сокровенный жар.
Ничего не слышали соседи,
а с тобою голос говорил,
то как гул колышущейся меди,
то как трепет ласточкиных крыл,
голос муз, высокое веселье...
Для тебя тот голос не потух
там, где неземное новоселье
ныне празднует твой дух.
Humbert's Aunt Sybil (tyotya Sibilla in the Russian Lolita, 1967) brings to mind veshchyaya sibilla (the prophetic sybil) mentioned by Blok in a poem ("Imitation of Valeriy Bryusov") that in a letter of Sept. 29, 1904, Blok sends to Andrey Bely (the penname of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934, a poet and writer whose pseudonym means "white"):
В темном зале свет заемный
Мог мерцать и отдохнуть...
В ложе - вещая сибилла,
Облачась в убор нескромный,
Черным веером закрыла
Бледно-матовую грудь.
The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) and Mona Dahl (Lolita's best friend and confidant at Beardsley) bring to mind bereg ocharovannyi (an enchanted shoreline) and ocharovannaya dal' (a charmed remoteness) in Blok's poem Neznakomka ("The Stranger," 1906):
И странной близостью закованный,
Смотрю за темную вуаль,
И вижу берег очарованный
И очарованную даль.
And with a strange sense of intimacy enchaining me,
I peer beyond her dusky veil
and perceive an enchanted shoreline,
a charmed remoteness.
(VN's translation)
Bereg ocharovannyi (an enchanted shoreline) makes one think of Drugie berega ("Other Shores," 1954), the Russian version of VN's autobiography Speak, Memory (1951).