lolita

genre, for example, is a happy ending, which Nabokov was certainly unwilling to provide,
feeling that he needed to shroud the dramatic finale of Lolita in a cloud of ambiguity and “black
humor.” Several of these authorial strategies had been successfully dealt with and tested by Ilf
and Petrov, whose novels enjoyed immense popularity in the Soviet Union (especially with
younger readers) in spite of being blasphemously critical of the Soviet regime.
There are numerous allusions to Ilf and Petrov’s novels in the text of Lolita. For example,
Humbert’s way of addressing the “Gentlemen and Gentlewomen of the Jury” is clearly borrowed
from The Golden Calf, in which the protagonist Ostap uses exactly the same way of addressing
the imaginary audience as he blackmails an underground Soviet millionaire into sharing one of
his millions with the Ostap-led gang of adventurers. Besides, the overall tone of playfulness and
“black humor” of Humbert’s confessions may have been prompted by Ilf and Petrov’s venomous
irony toward nearly everything in the Soviet socio-cultural landscape. Most strikingly, as Lem
notes, Humbert’s laughter is aimed at something no one else before him was able to ridicule so
effortlessly – his own lust and concupiscence. 11 Bender is similarly ironic about his own sexual
impulses in both novels. But it seems to me that the most conspicuous parallel between Lolita
and Twelve Chairs is the fact that the character of the widow Haze is, perhaps, modeled in part
upon that of the widow Gritsatsuyeva.
Ostap Bender’s idea of marrying the widow to get hold of her several chairs, inside which
the diamonds may have been hidden, is similar to Humbert’s cold-blooded consent to wed the
“Haze woman” hoping that the minor inconvenience of a convenience marriage would allow him
to be closer to the object of his passion, Charlotte’s longed-for daughter. Resemblances between
Gritsatsuyeva and Charlotte are numerous. Both women can be qualified as знойная женщина,
мечта поэта / “a passionate woman, a poet’s dream” (Ilf & Petrov 1928, 181); they look
11 Lem thinks that this ubiquitous irony is what differs Nabokov from Dostoevsky. His example of the lustful that
Nabokov’s H.H. turns into the ludicrous is his daydreams about leaving the school in Beardsley with Lolita, crossing
the Mexican border and “lying low” with her for several years before he could legally marry her. He is concerned
that her “nymphage” would then end as she comes of age but quickly finds the solution:
With patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her
exquisite veins, a Lolita the second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still
be dans la force de l’âge…a vieillard encore vert… bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert,
practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad (Nabokov 1970, 173-
174).
Lem emphasizes the fact that the filthiness and cynicism of these dreams borders on the comical and humorous,
allowing Humbert to get away with his “priapic super-optimism” (Lem 1962).
10