Forums
While reading this excellent recent NabNote (https://thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/de%20Vries_Spring_2025_0.pdf), the caged birds in Dickens' Bleak House also came to mind, at least to some extent, given Nabokov's analysis of them in his Lecture on same, and the ties between Ada and BH.
Probably even less likely, but still maybe something... is the Blue Bird bus company, which according to Wikipedia was widely used in southern U.S. schools starting in the 1940s.
From Lolita:
"In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school; always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people's whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun."
- Log in to post comments
Lollikins & bobolinks
In her letter to Lolita Mona Dahl (Lolita's schoolmate and best friend at Beardsley) calls Lolita "Lollikins:"
“Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of my – and the author’s – Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint.
“We are going to New York after tomorrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while he and Fullbright are around.
“As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire à ton amant, Chimène, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y mène. Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y – What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P. S. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.” (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here titre documentaire. I read it twice.) (2.19)
Lollikins is a term used to describe shenanigans that are funny and enjoyable. Christopher Pearse Cranch's poem The Bobolinks (1866) begins as follows:
WHEN Nature had made all her birds,
With no more cares to think on,
She gave a rippling laugh, and out
There flew a Bobolinkon.
A Bobolinkon sounds to me rather like Lollikins (it also brings to mind Abraham Linkoln, the 16th President of the United States). In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Hurricane Lolita:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)
and some kind of link-and-bobolink:
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (ll. 811-815)
An American writer and artist often associated with Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School, Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-92) also mentions bobolinks in his poem Bird Language:
One day in the bluest of summer weather,
Sketching under a whispering oak,
I heard five bobolinks laughing together
Over some ornithological joke.
What the fun was I couldn't discover.
Language of birds is a riddle on earth.
What could they find in whiteweed and clover
To split their sides with such musical mirth?
Was it some prank of the prodigal summer,
Face in the cloud or voice in the breeze,
Querulous catbird, woodpecker drummer,
Cawing of crows high over the trees?
Was it some chipmunk's chatter, or weasel
Under the stone-wall stealthy and sly?
Or was the joke about me at my easel,
Trying to catch the tints of the sky?
Still they flew tipsily, shaking all over,
Bubbling with jollity, brimful of glee,
While I sat listening deep in the clover,
Wondering what their jargon could be.
'T was but the voice of a morning the brightest
That ever dawned over yon shadowy hills;
'T was but the song of all joy that is lightest, —
Sunshine breaking in laughter and trills.
A sonnet sequence in Ariel and Caliban (1887), a collection of poetry by Christopher Pearse Cranch, includes fifty-seven sonnets. According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days to write Lolita. In the novel's penultimate sentence Humbert mentions prophetic sonnets:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)
While Lollikins brings to mind spillikins (a game of skill called in Russian biryul'ki), bobolinks make one think of Bobok (1873), a story by Dostoevski. The story consists largely of a dialogue between recently deceased occupants of graves in a cemetery, most of whom are fully conscious and retain all the features of their living personalities. The dialogue is overheard by a troubled writer who has lain down near the graves. The title "Bobok" refers to a nonsensical utterance repeatedly made by one of the cemetery's residents, an almost completely decomposed corpse who is otherwise silent.
Peter Krestovski
The characters in Lolita include a burly ex-policeman of Polish descent called Peter Krestovski:
I was now glad I had it with me - and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof - only a little iridescent fluff. A burly ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the ’twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker - completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did wound a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You lie here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin. (2.17)
Peter Krestovski seems to be a cross between two novelists: Vsevolod Krestovski (1840-95) and Pyotr Boborykin (1836-1921) nicknamed Pierre Bobo by his colleagues. Boborykin's prolificacy made Saltykov-Shchedrin coin the phrase naboborykat' roman (to write a novel rapidly):
Опять, черт возьми, он набоборыкал роман… Это просто-напросто каталог вещей, а вовсе не роман!
(about Boborykin's novel Kitay-gorod, 1883)
Lolita was "nabokoved" (or, perhaps, "nabobokoved") by her author. A squirrel that Humbert did wound brings to mind Ivan Petrovich Belkin (the surname comes from belka, squirrel), the narrator in Pushkin's Povesti Belkina (1830). In Ot izdatelya (From the Editor), the Introduction to The Tales of the Late I. P. Belikn, the letter of Belkin's friend to the Editor (i. e. Pushkin) is dated November 16, 1830:
Вот, милостивый государь мой, все, что мог я припомнить касательно образа жизни, занятий, нрава и наружности покойного соседа и приятеля моего. Но в случае, если заблагорассудите сделать из сего моего письма какое-либо употребление, всепокорнейше прошу никак имени моего не упоминать; ибо хотя я весьма уважаю и люблю сочинителей, но в сие звание вступить полагаю излишним и в мои лета неприличным. С истинным моим почтением и проч.
1830 году. Ноября 16.
Село Ненарадово
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.