Maximovich

Maximovich, a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and crew cut, enters Humbert Humbert's life as the taxi driver who becomes Valeria's lover. He is the instrument through which Humbert's first marriage collapses, and his presence in the story is marked by a peculiar blend of formal courtesy and vulgar physicality that Humbert finds both infuriating and absurd.

Identity and Background

Maximovich is introduced as one of the thousands of White Russian exiles plying the trade of taxi driver in Paris. He is a "stocky White Russian ex-colonel" with a "bushy mustache and a crew cut," a man whose military past has been reduced to driving a cab. Humbert, in his retrospective narration, cannot recall his ridiculous name at first, but later it "taxies back" to him: Maximovich. The colonel speaks French with an "atrocious accent" and presents himself as a scholar of sorts, recommending Jean Christophe to Valeria. He is a figure of displaced gentility, a former Counselor to the Tsar now reduced to counting teaspoons in a rival's flat.

Role in the Collapse of Humbert's Marriage

Maximovich is the catalyst for the end of Humbert's marriage to Valeria. When Valeria confesses there is another man, she points to the taxi driver's thick neck. Maximovich then takes charge of the situation with a possessive smile, unfolding his views and plans for a life with his "child-wife Valeria." He speaks of her as if she were absent, a little ward being transferred from one wise guardian to another, even consulting Humbert on her diet, periods, and wardrobe. This usurpation of Humbert's role as husband is a profound humiliation. Humbert, restrained by years of secret suffering, can only seethe as Maximovich orchestrates the departure, helping Valeria pack and carrying her luggage streetward. The final insult comes when Humbert discovers that Maximovich, after using the bathroom, has left the toilet unflushed, a "solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it." Humbert interprets this as a crowning insult, though he later concedes it may have been a form of middle-class Russian courtesy, an attempt to muffle his private need in decorous silence.

Later Fate and Thematic Significance

Maximovich's story does not end with his departure from Humbert's life. Years later, Humbert learns from a man from Pasadena that Mrs. Maximovich (Valeria) died in childbirth around 1945. The couple had somehow gotten to California and were used in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. Humbert's informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes "obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms" in the company of several other hired quadrupeds. This grotesque image reduces the former colonel and his wife to a state of animalistic servitude, a darkly comic punishment that Humbert savors as his "little revenge." The colonel's fate is later echoed in a chance encounter: a White Russian baron, who had known Maximovich and Valeria in California, operates a motor-boat for tourists off the Georgia coast, a reminder of the displaced and diminished lives of the émigré community. Maximovich thus serves as a figure of comic degradation, a foil to Humbert's own pretensions, and a symbol of the absurd and often cruel turns of fate that permeate the novel.