In Lolita, an entry about the actress
Dolories Quine stimulates HH's words: How the look of
my dear love's name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me
rock with helpless pain! When HH mentions
Quine next he almost suggests that Quine is Quilty's killer: The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing
Quilty.
The reference to Mazeppa and the actress who
played him as a Tartar boy (in the Bowery theatre, New York) took me
to Lord Byron's hero, although his heroism was later contested
by Pushkin, in "Poltava".
Dolores McCord ( or Adah Menken) ,as Mazeppa, in
NY, "let herself be strapped quasi-nude to the back of a black, spirited
horse. When the horse ran away, the audience gasped; their excitement,
insinuates Author Oursler, for some reason of his own, being more spiritual than
physical."
Dolores Quine "Made
New York
debut in 1904
in Never Talk to
Strangers."
I've been puzzling over the varios references to "swine" but I cannot see
any relation bt. weight-lifting Trapp (Quilty) and "Quine,the Swine."
I looked in VN's EO for
references to Pushkin's long poem "Poltava" and there were
only three laudatory, but short, entries, making reference to it and
mentioning Maria Volkonski ( Pushkin was courting her and the heroine of
Poltava is called Maria).
In V&V, Nabokov translated from
Poltava (1951-57) its "Dedication" ending with "your
woeful wilderness, the last sound of your words, are the one treasure, shrine,
the one love of my soul."
The clues are too confusing for me to follow with profit because I
lack all the needed information on Byron, Swinburne, Pushkin, Decembrists, false
heroes.Perhaps, should they be significant, someone else could clarify for me
this link bt Quine and Quilty, or Quine and HH himself.