@KEV67: "why did his parents call him Humbert?" (Posted on May 4)
1/ None of the names in "Lolita" are the real "names" (with one exception IIRC) - see the fictional forewords in the novel.
2/ Humbert Humbert is a fictional character so the question is more "why did Nabokov call him Humbert?"
Humbert etymologically means “famous warrior”. At least three times in the novel it is made reference to his Celtic looks. Nabokov associates him to Tristram, a Celtic Knight of the (Celtic) Arthurian Legend who is a symbol of eternal and fatal love (remember "Tristram and Iseult"?). Notice how Tristram is referenced several times in this novel, directly (e.g. Ilse Tristramson) and indirectly.
There is a chain of Arthurian legend references throughout the novel (e.g. the town of Wace (Robert Wace was a middle-ages author who was the first to mention the King Arthur's legend and to name Excalibur, the sword of the king), Cavall (a hound of King Arthur), Briceland (for Brocéliande, an enchanted forest in the Celtic land of Brittany mentionned by Wace as the location of the tomb of Merlin), etc...).
The names of the friends of Quilty (B. Mead, Fay Page and Vivian Darkbloom) also all points to a major character of the Arthurian Legend, the Lady of the Lake.
As Nabokov said in interviews in the 60s, he devised Lolita as a riddle and of course Humbert Humbert is part of it. A major part of it.
In an interview in 1962 for the BBC when asked on why he wrote “Lolita” he said "I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”
In anotyher one he said:
"(Lolita) was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle - its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look" .
And indeed, there are phenomenons of reflexion in the novel (e.g. Trapp / Pratt; widow Haze / widow Hays; Blanche Schwarzman / Melanie Weiss (*)).
(*) Blanche (="white" in French), Schwarz (="black" in German) and Melanie (="black", "dark", from "melanos" in ancient Greek), Weiss (= "white" in German).
The diverse recurrent keywords (e.g. "rose, "chestnuts", etc...) and numbers (342, 52, etc...) in the novel are also hinting to this.
