At the end of his manuscript Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the secret of durable pigments and prophetic sonnets:
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
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)
"Aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments" make one think of cave paintings and angels of the Renaissance. On the other hand, one is also reminded of René Prinet’s Kreutzer Sonata (1901), a picture whose reproduction hangs above Humbert’s bed in the Haze house in Ramsdale:
But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left - into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my” bed René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi-studio”! Let’s get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed. (1.10)
The Kreutzer Sonata (1803) is the Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 in A major by Ludwig van Beethoven. Prophetic sonnets mentioned by Humbert at the end of Lolita bring to mind Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Sonnet 23 in a sonnet sequence by Christopher Pearse Cranch (an American writer and artist, 1813-92, often associated with Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School):
THE mind's deep history here in tones is wrought,
The faith, the struggles of the aspiring soul,
The confidence of youth, the chill control
Of manhood's doubts by stern experience taught;
Alternate moods of bold and timorous thought,
Sunshine and shadow — cloud and aureole;
The failing foothold as the shining goal
Appears, and truth so long, so fondly sought
Is blurred and dimmed. Again and yet again
The exulting march resounds. We must win now!
Slowly the doubts dissolve in clearer air.
Bolder and grander the triumphal strain
Ascends. Heaven's light is glancing on the brow,
And turns to boundless hope the old despair.
Humbert's and Lolita's address at Beardsley, 14 Thayer Street, seems to hint at Alexander Wheelock Thayer (an American librarian and journalist, 1817-97), the author The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven (1879), the first scholarly biography of Beethoven (a German composer, 1770-1827). A symphony composed by Beethoven in 1804-08, the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, is also known as the Fate Symphony (German: Schicksalssinfonie). 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). Describing his day in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger, Humbert mentions the dandelions in the lawn of the Haze house that had changed from suns to moons:
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog - I loathe dogs - had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheersat least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue carnot Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair - a nymphet, by Pan! - ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pauseand then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it. (1.17)
In his memoir essay Tolstoy v muzykal'nom mire ("Tolstoy in the Musical World," 1939) Leonid Sabaneyev (a musical critic and memoirist, 1881-1968) mentions Beethoven's sonata Quasi una fantasia (also know as "The Moonlight Sonata"):
В очень категорической форме это двойственное отношение проявилось, когда Толстой, после исполнения Гольденвейзером сонаты Бетховена (Quasi una fantasia, именуемой обычно почему-то «Лунной») — исполнения, к слову сказать, суховатого и весьма среднего, прослезился и сказал недовольно: «Как я испорчен! На меня эта музыка все-таки действует!»
The author of Kreytserova sonata (“The Kreutzer Sonata,” 1889), a story that was the inspiration of René Prinet’s picture, Leo Tolstoy died on Nov. 7, 1910. Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris:
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. (1.2)
According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days to write Lolita. Beethoven died at the age of fifty-six. The sonnet sequence in Ariel and Caliban (1887), a collection of poetry by Christopher Pearse Cranch, includes fifty-seven sonnets. 57 × 6 = 114 × 3 = 342. 342 Lawn Street is the address of the Haze house in Ramsdale. 342 is Humbert's and Lolita's room in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). Between July 5 and November 18, 1949 Humbert registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. The number 342 that reappears in Lolita three times seems to hint at Earth, Mars and Venus (the third, the fourth, and the second planet of the Solar System). 3 + 4 + 2 = 9. Beethoven is the author of nine symphonies. In the last movement of The Ninth Symphony (1824) Beethoven (who was practically deaf when he composed it) used Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude (“Ode to Joy,” 1785). A veteran of a remote war, Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) is hard of hearing:
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing. (2.29)