Summer of 1939

The summer of 1939 is the season in which Humbert Humbert's European existence collapses and his American destiny begins. Two events converge: the death of his American uncle, which offers him a conditional escape to the United States, and the abrupt revelation of his wife Valeria's infidelity, which annihilates the already hollow pretense of his marriage. Together they force him out of the stagnant routines of Paris and onto a trajectory that will, after a long detour through war, illness, and arctic exile, lead him to Ramsdale and to Lolita.

The Uncle's Bequest and the Promise of Escape

In the summer of 1939, Humbert's American uncle dies, leaving him an annual income of a few thousand dollars on the condition that he come to live in the United States and show some interest in the uncle's business. The prospect is most welcome to Humbert, who feels his life needs a shakeup. He has been living in a small squalid Paris flat with Valeria since their marriage in 1935, working at a rickety table, attending movies and bicycle races, and finding only occasional legal outlets for his fantastic predicament through the grocer's little daughter whose shadow drives him mad. The inheritance offers a clean break from a life that has become monstrously twofold: outwardly normal relationships with terrestrial women, inwardly consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet he never dares approach. America, he tells Valeria, is the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be an improvement on dull dingy Paris.

Valeria's Confession and the Collapse of the Marriage

Just as the paperwork for emigration is nearly complete, Valeria begins to shake her poodle head without saying a word as they come out of an office building. When pressed, she announces in French that there is another man in her life. Humbert, dazed by the words, ushers her into a taxi and demands the lover's name. She points at the thick neck of the taxi driver himself—a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and crew cut, one of thousands plying that trade in Paris. At a small café, the colonel, whose name Humbert later recalls as Maximovich, unfolds his views and plans with an atrocious accent, speaking of Valeria as if she were a little ward being transferred from one wise guardian to another. He even consults Humbert on her diet, her periods, her wardrobe, and the books she should read, suggesting she will like Jean Christophe. Humbert, dying of hate and boredom, deliberates with himself whether to kill her, her lover, or both, but the colonel's constant presence prevents any violence.

The Aftermath and Humbert's Rage

After the couple finally leave the apartment, Humbert discovers that Maximovich has used the toilet without flushing it, leaving a solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it. This strikes him as a crowning insult, and he wildly looks around for a weapon, ransacking the kitchen for something better than a broom before dashing out with the heroic decision of attacking the colonel barefisted. The void of the street reveals nothing of his wife's departure except a rhinestone button she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box. Humbert later learns, through a man from Pasadena, that Mrs. Maximovich died in childbirth around 1945, and that the couple had 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. He tries to find the results in the Review of Anthropology, but they appear not to have been published yet.

The Path to America

Divorce proceedings delay Humbert's voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War settles upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, he at last reaches the States. In New York he accepts a soft job thinking up and editing perfume ads, while also working on his comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The summer of 1939 thus stands as the hinge between his old world—with its failed marriage, its European pretensions, its futile attempts at normalcy—and the new world where, after a dreadful breakdown, a sanatorium stay, and an arctic expedition, he will eventually find himself in Ramsdale, standing on the porch of 342 Lawn Street, watching a blue sea-wave swell under his heart as he sees his Riviera love kneeling on a mat in a pool of sun.