In VN's novel Lolita (1955) the list of Lolita's classmates in Ramsdale school includes Stella Fantasia (adorable Stella who has let strangers touch her):
Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People’s Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child’s pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school. It is a poem I know already by heart.
Angel, Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack
Beale, Mary
Buck, Daniel
Byron, Marguerite
Campbell, Alice
Carmine, Rose
Chatfield, Phyllis
Clarke, Gordon
Cowan, John
Cowan, Marion
Duncan, Walter
Falter, Ted
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Glave, Mabel
Goodale, Donald
Green, Lucinda
Hamilton, Mary Rose
Haze, Dolores
Honeck, Rosaline
Knight, Kenneth
McCoo, Virginia
McCrystal, Vivian
McFate, Aubrey
Miranda, Anthony
Miranda, Viola
Rosato, Emil
Schlenker, Lena
Scott, Donald
Sheridan, Agnes
Sherva, Oleg
Smith, Hazel
Talbot, Edgar
Talbot, Edwin
Wain, Lull
Williams, Ralph
Windmuller, Louise
A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this “Haze, Dolores” (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses - a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita. (1.11)
On 24 September 1952 (the day on which Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale), Stella Fantasia marries Murphy:
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Laselle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was –? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen –
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. (2.33)
Stella is a character (a young woman) in Konstantin Merezhkovski's Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or a Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903), an utopian novel set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island:
- Однако, - заметил я, - вы ужасно упростили жизнь.
- Да! - воскликнул как-то особенно торжественно старик, и вы сказали слова глубокого значения! Упрощение жизни - это один из основных наших догматов; только при этом условии возможна счастливая жизнь на земле! Мы допускаем все радости, все наслаждения жизни, кроме тех, которые требуют больших усложнений. А подумайте, с какими ужасными усложнениями связана была ваша наука. Наука и вместе с нею цивилизация со всеми ее ужасами, или ни та, ни другая - вот что предстояло нам выбрать, и мы избрали последнее.
- И теперешние люди довольствуются этим? - спросил я, и они не жаждут знания, не требуют его сами от вас? Неужели вам удалось сковать гордый ум человеческий, некогда паривший так высоко? Неужели никто из них не пытается создать что-нибудь в области науки или искусства?
- А вот, посмотрите сами, - ответил старик и, обратившись к одной молодой женщине, спросил ее:
- Стелла, скажи мне, хотела бы ты сочинять такую музыку, какую мы слышим?
- Да ведь это должно быть очень трудно, - ответила она.
- Да, для этого нужно каждый день и целый день все учиться и учиться.
- Нет, - живо ответила она, - спасибо, а когда же я буду играть, купаться, гулять? Я лучше хочу целый день веселиться.
- Милая Стелла, - обратился я к ней с вопросом, - неужели вам не надоест каждый день все играть и веселиться?
- Надоест? - спросила она с удивлением. - То есть к вечеру я устаю, это правда, но утром я просыпаюсь бодрой и мне опять хочется играть и веселиться. А вам разве не надоест каждый день все есть да есть? - спросила она, лукаво улыбаясь.
И, сказав это, она сделала шаг по направлению ко мне с грациозным свободным движением руки и, слегка наклонив свою прелестную головку, стала глядеть на меня с вызывающей улыбкой.
Я не знал, что ответить, смущенный и ее вопросом и еще более изящной грацией и красотой, которыми дышала вся ее фигура...
- Ну, а ты, Эрос, - обратился старик к одному из молодых людей, - хотел бы ты сидеть целые дни за книгами и изучать природу и ее законы, чтобы проникнуть во все ее тайны?
-Я не понимаю, для чего это? Разве мы и без того не знаем все, что нужно? Знаем же мы, что такое земля, солнце, луна, звезды, как они движутся, отчего бывает день и ночь, знаем, как образовалась земля, как, благодаря нашему дорогому солнцу, постепенно развились на ней растения, животные, знаем, что люди прежде жили как звери, потом строили себе города, а когда стали учеными, то были очень несчастными и мучили друг друга всевозможными способами, как потом наши покровители все это изменили. Вероятно, можно узнать еще много подробностей, но на что они нам? Нет, я, как Стелла, предпочитаю лучше жить, как мы живем, так веселее.
- Правда, Акита? - обратился он к прелестной девушке, вероятно его маленькой женке.
Но Акита только засмеялась и бросила в него цветком, который она держала в руках, за ней бросила другая, третья, и скоро посыпался целый дождь цветов на юношу, побежавшего к выходу и преследуемого роем смеющихся красавиц.
- Когда нам это надоест, - заметила Стелла, - мы, может быть, сделаемся учеными. Но вряд ли это будет. (Day Two, chapter 1)
Ezrar (the gray-bearded protector) asks Stella if she would like to compose music. Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked Quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2, is known throughout the world as the Moonlight Sonata (Mondscheinsonate). A namesake of Aubrey Beardsley (an English illustrator and author, 1872-1898), Aubrey McFate brings to mind Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, also known as the Fate Symphony (German: Schicksalssinfonie).
Stella means in Latin "star." According to John Ray, Jr. (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. The capital town of the book, Gray Star brings to mind "Slishkom star, chtoby rabotat', i slishkom bolen, chtoby zhit' (Too old to work, and too sick to live)," the last words written by Konstantin Merezhkovski (1855-1921). On 9 January 1921 Mereschkowski (as he spelt his surname) was found dead in his hotel room (in Hotel des Families in Geneva), having tied himself up in his bed with a mask which was supplied with an asphyxiating gas from a metal container. It appears that his suicide was directly connected to his paedophilic utoian beliefs (reflected in his novel) as well as his view that he was becoming too old and frail to continue his history of child abuse. As an atheist, his dreamed-of utopia was to be scientifically based, involving the evolution of a perfect human race of paedophiles held aloft by the enslavement of Africans, Asians, and others. The Earthly Paradise describes specially-bred castes of human including one of neotenized, sexualizing children prolonged into adult age - still displaying child-like features and behaviour - who were put to death at the age of 35, as they could not be happy in old age.
It seems that Lolita actually dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization, Humbert says that he felt probably Polynesian:
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars - had been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telesticallyand, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating ownerthat I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is nevrotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false moveand I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free manfree to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)