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). On 24 September 1952 (the day on which Humbert Humbert revisits Ramsdale), Murphy marries Fantasia:
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)
In VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930) Luzhin's father loudly repeats the word fantazia (the phrase “imagining things” in the English version):
Он проснулся на следующее утро с чувством непонятного волнения. Было ярко, ветрено, мостовые отливали лиловым блеском; близ Дворцовой Арки над улицей упруго надувалось огромное трехцветное полотно, сквозь которое тремя разными оттенками просвечивало небо. Как всегда в праздничные дни, он вышел гулять с отцом, но это не были прежние детские прогулки: полуденная пушка уже не пугала, и невыносим был разговор отца, который, придравшись ко вчерашнему вечеру, намекал на то, что хорошо бы начать заниматься музыкой. За завтраком был последний остаток сливочной пасхи (приземистая пирамидка с сероватым налетом на круглой макушке) и еще не початый кулич. Тетя, все та же милая рыжеволосая тетя, троюродная сестра матери, была весела чрезвычайно, кидалась крошками и рассказала, что Латам за двадцать пять рублей прокатит ее на своей «Антуанете», которая, впрочем, пятый день не может подняться, между тем как Вуазен летает как заводной, кругами, да притом так низко, что, когда он кренится над трибунами, видна даже вата в ушах у пилота. Лужин почему-то необыкновенно ясно запомнил это утро, этот завтрак, как запоминаешь день, предшествующий далекому пути. Отец говорил, что хорошо бы после завтрака поехать на острова, где поляны сплошь в анемонах, и, пока он говорил, тетя попала ему крошкой прямо в рот. Мать молчала, – и вдруг, после второго блюда, встала и, стараясь скрыть дрожащее лицо, повторяя шепотом, что «это ничего, ничего, сейчас пройдет», – поспешно вышла. Отец бросил салфетку на стол и вышел тоже. Лужин никогда не узнал, что именно случилось, но, проходя с тетей по коридору, слышал из спальни матери тихое всхлипывание и увещевающий голос отца, который громко повторял слово «фантазия».
He woke up next day with a feeling of incomprehensible excitement. The April morning was bright and windy and the wooden street pavements had a violet sheen; above the street near Palace Arch an enormous red-blue-white flag swelled elastically, the sky showing through it in three different tints: mauve, indigo and pale blue. As always on holidays he went for a walk with father, but these were not the former walks of his childhood; the midday cannon no longer frightened him and father’s conversation was unbearable, for finding a pretext in last night’s concert, he kept hinting that it would be a good idea to take up music. For lunch there was the remains of the paschal cream cheese (now a squat little cone with a grayish shading on its round summit) and a still untouched Easter cake. His aunt, the same sweet copper-haired aunt, second cousin to his mother, was gay in the extreme, threw cake crumbs across the table and related that foi twenty-five rubles Latham was going to give her a ride in his “Antoinette” monoplane, which, by the way, was unable to leave the ground for the fifth day, while Voisin on the contrary kept circling the aerodrome like clockwork, and moreover so low that when he banked over the stands one could even see the cotton wool in the pilot’s ears. Luzhin for some reason remembered that morning and that lunch with unusual brightness, the way you remember the day preceding a long journey. His father said it woud be a good idea alter lunch to drive to the Islands beyond the Neva, where the clearings were carpeted with anemones, and while he was speaking, the young aunt landed a crumb right in Father’s mouth. His mother remained silent. Suddenly after the second course she got up, trying to conceal her face twitching with restrained tears and repeating under her breath “It’s nothing, nothing, it’ll pass in a moment,” hastily left he dining room. Father threw his napkin on the table and followed her. Luzhin never discovered exactly what had happened, but passing along the corridor with his aunt he heard subdued sobs from his mother’s room and his father’s voice remonstrating and loudly repeating the phrase “imagining things.” (Chapter 3)
In the next paragraph konus luchey (a band of sunbeams) is mentioned:
«Уйдем куда-нибудь», – зашептала тетя, красная, притихшая, с бегающими глазами, – и они оказались в кабинете, где над кожаным креслом проходил конус лучей, в котором вертелись пылинки. Она закурила, и в этих лучах мягко и призрачно закачались складки дыма. Это был единственный человек, в присутствии которого он не чувствовал себя стесненным, и сейчас было особенно хорошо: странное молчание в доме и как будто ожидание чего-то. «Ну, будем играть во что-нибудь, – поспешно сказала тетя и взяла его сзади за шею. – Какая у тебя тоненькая шея, одной рукой можно…» – «Ты в шахматы умеешь?» – вкрадчиво спросил Лужин и, высвободив голову, приятно потерся щекой об ее васильковый шелковый рукав. «Лучше в дураки», – сказала она рассеянно. Где-то хлопнула дверь. Она поморщилась и, повернув лицо в сторону звука, прислушалась. «Нет, я хочу в шахматы», – сказал Лужин. «Сложно, милый, сразу не научишь». Он пошел к письменному столу, отыскал ящик, стоявший за портретом. Тетя встала, чтобы взять пепельницу, в раздумье напевая окончание какой-то своей мысли: «Это было бы ужасно, это было бы ужасно…» «Вот», – сказал Лужин и опустил ящик на низенький турецкий столик с инкрустациями. «Нужно еще доску, – сказала она. – И знаешь, я тебя лучше научу в поддавки, это проще». – «Нет, в шахматы», – сказал Лужин и развернул клеенчатую доску.
“Let’s go away somewhere,” whispered his aunt in an embarrassed and nervous manner, and they entered the study where a band of sunbeams, in which spun tiny particles of dust, was focused on an overstuffed armchair. She lit a cigarette and folds of smoke started to sway, soft and transparent, in the sunbeams. This was the only person in whose presence he did not feel constrained, and now it was especially pleasant: a strange silence in the house and a kind of expectation of something. '‘Well, let’s play some game,” said his aunt hurriedly and took him by the neck from behind. "What a thin little neck you have, one can clasp it with one hand. . . .” "Do you know how to play chess?” asked Luzhin stealthily, and freeing his head he rubbed his cheek against the delightful bright blue silk of her sleeve. "A game of Snap would be bettor,” she said absentmindedly. A door banged somewhere. She winced and turned her face in the direction of the noise, listening. "No, I want to play chess,” said Luzhin "It’s complicated, my dear, you can’t learn it in an instant.” He went to the desk and found the box, which was standing behind a desk photograph. His aunt got up to take an ashtray, ruminatively nooning in conclusion of some thought of hers: "That would be terrible, that would be terrible . . "Here,” said Luzhin and put the box down on a low, inlaid Turkish table. "You need the board as well,” she said. "And you know, it would be better for me to teach you checkers, it’s simpler.” "No, chess,” said Luzhin and unrolled an oilcloth board. (Chapter 3)
Luch means in Russian "beam, ray." John Ray, Jr. is the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript. Luzhin's aunt who teaches the boy to play chess (and who has an affair with Luzhin's father) brings to mind Humbert's Aunt Sybil (whose favorite expression is “overwhelmingly obvious”):
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 subjectspaleopedology 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 rigiditythe fatal rigidityof 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 would 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 action in The Luzhin Defense begins on Saturday, August 28, 1910 (Leo Tolstoy's eighty-second birthday). The splendid Hotel Mirana brings to mind Tolstoy's novel Voyna i mir ("War and Peace," 1869).