Humbert Humbert and Valeria

Humbert Humbert's first marriage, to Valeria Zborovski, was a calculated but catastrophic attempt to manage his forbidden desires through conventional domesticity. Lasting from 1935 to 1939 in a small Parisian flat, the union was founded on mutual deception and ended in public humiliation for Humbert, followed by a grotesque postscript that confirmed his contempt for the woman he had married.

Identity and the Illusion of a Child-Bride

Humbert chose Valeria not for any genuine affection but because she gave "the imitation she gave of a little girl." She dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, pouted, dimpled, and shook her short curly blond hair in what Humbert recognized as the tritest fashion imaginable. He was, as he later admitted, "as naive as only a pervert can be." On their wedding night, he made her wear a girl's plain nightshirt he had stolen from an orphanage. But reality soon asserted itself: the bleached curl revealed its melanic root, the down on her shaved shin turned to prickles, and her mobile mouth disclosed its resemblance to her toadlike dead mother. Instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert found himself with "a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba."

Life in the Squalid Flat

The marriage settled into a dreary routine in their two-room flat with a hazy view from one window and a brick wall from the other. Humbert worked at a rickety table while Valeria read Paris-Soir; they went to movies, bicycle races, and boxing matches. He appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove Humbert mad, but with Valeria's help he found "some legal outlets" to his fantastic predicament. They ate most of their meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte, and next door an art dealer displayed an ancient American locomotive print that seemed to promise escape.

The Affair and Departure

The marriage unraveled in the summer of 1939, when Humbert inherited an income from an American uncle and planned to move to the States. Valeria became restless and irritable. One morning, as they came out of a building with her papers almost in order, she began to shake her poodle head and announced: "There is another man in my life." Humbert, furious not from affection but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for him alone to decide, demanded the lover's name. She pointed at the taxi driver, a stocky White Russian ex-colonel named Maximovich. In a café, the colonel unfolded his plans to marry Valeria, consulting Humbert on her diet, periods, and wardrobe as if he were a guardian transferring a ward. Humbert deliberated whether to kill her, her lover, or both, but the colonel's constant presence prevented any violence. Valeria packed her belongings, and Humbert noticed with disgust that the colonel had not flushed the toilet, leaving a pool of urine with a cigarette butt as a final insult.

The Grotesque Aftermath

Humbert later learned of Valeria's fate from a man from Pasadena. Mrs. Maximovich, née Zborovski, had died in childbirth around 1945. The couple had gone to California and been used in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist, studying human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. A doctor swore he had seen obese Valechka and her gray-haired, corpulent colonel crawling about well-swept floors with other hired quadrupeds. Humbert tried to find the results in the Review of Anthropology, but they appeared not to have been published yet. This degrading end confirmed his view of Valeria as a figure of fun, but also revealed the depth of his own cruelty and the sordid world he inhabited.

Narrative Role and Significance

Valeria's role in Humbert's narrative is primarily as a failed experiment in self-control and a foil to his obsession with nymphets. She represents the "terrestrial woman" he could use but never desire, and her departure clears the way for his journey to America and his fateful encounter with Lolita. The marriage also establishes Humbert's pattern of self-deception and his willingness to use others for his own ends, while the grotesque postscript underscores the novel's themes of degradation and the impossibility of escaping one's past.