Lolita, Nabokov’s best-known novel, is one of the most demanding with respect
to the reader’s faculty of observation. It is after repeated readings that we are able to fully perceive the real tragedy incorporated in this seemingly blithe novel: the ruination of a young girl’s life. When this tragedy is recognised, Lolita appears to be, in Linda Kauffman’s words, ‘an uncannily accurate representation of father-
daughter incest’.1 With respect to his stories, Nabokov noted that ‘a second
(main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent
one’ (SL117). Humbert’s account is so well written that, albeit semitransparent,
it is difficult to concentrate on the main story, the wreckage of Dolly’s life. The paintings mentioned in Lolita help to distinguish the veiled story from Humbert’s dominant and spectacular report. Apart from five contemporary
painters mentioned rather en passant2and three painters mentioned to modulate
certain images – ‘Claude Lorrain clouds’, ‘a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant
with inky rain’ (152) and ‘three horrible Boschian cripples’(235) – six artists are
mentioned who have a special bearing on the two stories told: Beardsley, Botticelli, Van Gogh, Prinet, Reynolds and Whistler. Beardsley’s work is not mentioned explicitly but the lascivious and ominous qualities of his work apply most fittingly to Humbert’s story. The same goes for Prinet’s Kreutzer Sonata ‘the unappetizing one in which a dishevelled violinist passionately embraces his fair accompanist as she rises from her piano stool with clammy young hands still
touching the keys’ (LoS37), a reference to Tolstoy’s story with the same title. In
this story, Tolstoy fulminates against the vileness of physical love. To express his
disgust, the word ‘swinish’ is frequently used.3
The remaining four paintings, Reynolds’s The Age of Innocence, Botticelli’s Venus, Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne and Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black form a surprising quartet (198; 270; 36; 184). Together they represent a female’s life com- pendiously in four stages; a very young girl, a young adult, a middle-aged woman and an elderly lady. Moreover, the four portraits show their subject in a defenceless and fragile position. Reynolds’s young girl has a wary look and is
barefooted, ill at ease, with a background showing excitement in the air. Botticelli’s Venus (whose pulchritude is dubbed ‘blurred’ by Humbert) with tho- se illustrious melancholy eyes and reserved expression, is protecting herself against indecent looks. Van Gogh’s woman, although of a sturdy disposition, looks pensive with slightly raised eyebrows, and Whistler’s mother is fragile from sheer age. Humbert is as unobservant of these paintings as he is indifferent to
Dolly’s life. (See colour illustration 10.)
Beardsley recurs most frequently in Lolita. The first time this name is referred to
is at the beginning of chapter 11, part one, when the names of Dolly’s class is
listed, one of them being Aubrey McFate.4Beardsley reappears as the name of the
town where the Beardsley School for Girls is situated, the school which Dolly will attend for some time, as well as the Beardsley College for Women. And finally Beardsley’s full name is revealed by Quilty who registered himself under various masks in the hotels in which Humbert and Dolly stayed, one alias being ‘Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island’ (251).
Aubrey Beardsley lived from 1872 to 1898, and it is very likely that Nabokov had been familiar with Beardsley’s work since his youth in St. Petersburg. In his auto- biography Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls the museums Tamara and he visited; in a section he finishes with the nostalgic reflection ‘“Art World”, Mir Iskusstva – Dobuzhinski, Alexander Benois – so dear to me in those days’ (236). And asked James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black, 1871
about his opinion of artists like Malevich and Kandinsky, Nabokov answers: ‘I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my boyhood – Somov,
Benois… Vrubel and Dobuzhinski’(SO 170).These painters all contributed to
Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), an art magazine whose first issue appeared in
1898. This magazine paralleled the Art Nouveau movement in Europe, especially in England. Alexander Benois was the driving intellectual force behind the development of the artistic avant-garde in Russia and Diaghilev became the editor of its magazine, Mir Iskusstva. Its literary section included some early works by Blok, Bely and Balmont and the painters mentioned by Nabokov provided for the
illustrations.5 Works by these painters adorned the walls of the Nabokov’s
St. Petersburg house, and Vladimir Nabokov devoured the verses of the Symbolist poets rapturously, especially Blok’s. Nabokov regarded Blok as the greatest poet of
his time.6The composition of Mir Iskusstva, and its aspiration, were very much
like those of the magazines published earlier in the final decade of the nineteenth century and edited by Beardsley: The Yellow Book and The Savoy. The paintings and drawings which illustrated these magazines were generously complemented by innovative literature from authors such as George Moore, Henry James, Edmund Gosse and W.B. Yeats. Diaghilev called himself one of Beardsley’s greatest
admirers and was acquainted with him.7The first issue of Mir Iskusstva contained
a number of Beardsley’s drawings together with an accompanying article by the critic MacColl, who belonged to the same circles as Beardsley. Given Nabokov’s admiration for the Russian journal, it must be assumed that he had seen reproductions of Beardley’s drawings in his youth. And, upon entering the United States, he must have been reminded of this artist when in 1940 he reviewed Lifar’s biography of Diaghilev for The New Republic, in which references to Beardsley are
discussed on several occasions.8And in 1941 Nabokov reviewed the biography of
Charles Conder, an English painter and a friend of Beardsley’s.9
Aubrey Beardsley was, notwithstanding the brevity of his life and his very poor health, a most prolific artist. Although he drew his inspiration from the arts from all ages, ranging from mediaeval woodcuts to contemporary art such as that of Edward Burne-Jones (most of Beardsley’s females have a flowerlike upperlip, typically found in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings), he was an artist of great originality. His drawings are often framed by ample, tressy and meandering ornaments, and Beardsley’s style has had an influence on all kinds of decorative arts which has lasted for many decades. But the most characteristic trait of his work to his contemporaries was Beardsley’s prurience, which penetrated many of his drawings. Some of his work is corrupted by nefarious grotesquenesses and anatomic enormities. Part of his oeuvre illustrates editions of literary works by Aristophanes, Blake, Malory, Swinburne, Poe and Wilde, all authors referred to
in Lolita as well.10
Beardsley, together with Whistler, was regarded as the most important exponent of the fin-de-siècle decadence in England, whose gospel was ‘art for art’s
sake’.11The decadents, surfeited with conventional forms of art, yearned for artistic
innovation and unexplored sensations, especially through sensuous and erotic eccentricities. Being a strong believer in literary evolution, Nabokov must have been attracted by the urge the decadents felt for refurbishing the modes of art. And the same can be said of the decadents’ interest in sexuality, concupiscence being
Lolita’s main subject. ‘Were we to take him [Nabokov] seriously,’ writes John
Bayley, ‘or earnestly rather, we should have to conclude him to be some sort of decadent, both in his own writing and in his literary tastes. By decadent I mean an artist who, while not necessarily corrupt or cruel, sensational or over-ingenious, is liable to make such an impression, in his evident wish to secure certain sorts of
novel or striking effects’.12Indeed, it cannot be denied that some novels gave some
readers at some time (notably on the occasion of the first reading) the impression of callousness, Laughter in the Dark being the most obvious example. In fact, Nabokov’s affinity for decadent art does not go very far, no farther than the artistic component of it. ‘Although I do not care for the slogan “art for art’s sake” – because unfortunately such promotors of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists – there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social
importance but its art, only its art’ says Nabokov, (SO 33). And he detested the
actual life these artists led, like Oscar Wilde ‘flaunting a flamboyant perversion’ and
Diaghilev whose ‘morals were frankly abnormal’ (SO119; ‘RSD’699).
Moreover, Nabokov would never have endorsed Wilde’s statement that
‘aesthetics are higher than ethics’.13 In his afterword to Lolita, ‘On a Book
Entitled Lolita’, Nabokov gave four characteristics to specify what he understood by art: ‘curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy’. Two of these represent ethical values which were in Nabokov’s view indissolubly connected
with aesthetical merits.14 And detecting the ethical dimension behind the
‘superficial semitransparent’ story might be the highest aesthetical reward a reader might receive, however brilliant that story otherwise might be. Like Humbert who hid his wrongdoings under the splendour of his eloquence, Beardsley had a morbid sexual obsession which is easily overlooked because of the striking perfection of his drawings. One of his most accomplished drawings,
the cover for the illustrated edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone,15 recreates this
character, ‘a splendid sinner [who] compels our admiration by the fineness and
very excess of his wickedness.’16 It is hard to find a better description of
Humbert. Beardsley shows lasciviousness as Humbert would have liked us to see it: camouflaged by the exuberance of decadent art. But Beardsley’s art causes a feeling of discomfort that Lolita lacks. Take for example ‘The Coiffing’, in which
the face of the barber draws our attention. It is an illustration by Beardsley to his ‘Ballad of the Barber’.
This ballad tells us about a barber so ravished by the beauty of a girl of thirteen
that he destroys her.17 Beardsley’s insalubrious work could have warned us.
Beardsley’s art can represent Humbert’s eloquence but not Nabokov’s art. Because the more we reread Lolita the more our attention is drawn away from