The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (77 page)

vair
: gray; the pale color of miniver fur.

Soleil Vert
: French; Green Sun.

L’autre soir … de ta vie?
: “The other night, a cold
air
[italics mine—A.A.] from the opera forced me to take to my bed; / Broken note—he who puts his trust in it is quite foolish! / It is snowing, the decor collapses, Lolita! / Lolita, what have I done with your life?” The four lines are a splendid parody and pastiche of various kinds of French verse. The alexandrine verse of line one (see
Ne manque … Qu’il t’y
) scans perfectly in French. The
air froid
is an untranslatable pun (
air
: melody; draft or wind). Line two is a traditional saying, originating with Virgil, though it is in fact drawn here from
Le Roi s’amuse
(1832), a play by Victor Hugo:

These lines are sung by the King, first in Act IV, scene ii, in a cabaret. The first two lines are repeated from off stage in Act V, scene iii, which informs Triboulet (or Rigoletto) that the King is still alive (he had planned to murder the King, but kills his daughter instead). The play was performed only once before being banned by royal decree. It is the source of Verdi’s
Rigoletto
(1851); Piave adapted the words and Verdi was responsible only for the music. The French version, which H.H. undoubtedly knows, is
Rigoletto, ou Le Buffon du prince. Rigoletto
is appropriate, since, figuratively speaking, H.H. is in his own right a grotesque clown. For Hugo, see
Don Quixote
. Line three of H.H.’s pastiche is overly sonorous, but the burlesqued entreaty of line four manages to express both the “truth and a caricature of it” (the artistic intention of Fyodor in
The Gift
, p. 200).

pederosis
: see
tennis ball … my … darling
.

ensellure
: French; the concave curve formed by the spine; in a woman, the lumbar incurvation.

Babylonian blood
: H.H. is very coy in “racial” matters, and enjoys using euphemisms (e.g., “
Turk
”) in the manner of the Victorians, with their “Mediterranean types.” See
spaniel … baptized
.

depraved May
: echo of a well-known line in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas” (line 20). See
pastiches
.

Blake
: after the English poet and engraver William Blake (1757–1827). The invented
Toylestown
is a pun commemorating his “London” (1794) —toil’s town.

burning … Tigermoth
: a play on Blake’s “The Tiger” (1794)—“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright”—and a reference to the actual Tigermoth (“an Arctid,” noted Nabokov). For entomological allusions, see
John Ray, Jr.
.

cavalier servant
: a knight who is vassal to his fair lady; a medieval archetype of courtly love.

mulberry moth
wrote Nabokov
: “Rita’s phrase ‘Going round and round like a mulberry moth’ combines rather pleasingly the ‘round and round the mulberry tree’ of the maypole song and the silk moth of China which breeds on mulberry.” See
John Ray, Jr.
.

Valechka
: like
Ritochka
, a Russian diminutive.

Schlegel … Hegel
: Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the German philosophers, form a nonsense rhyme.

shams and shamans
: H.H. enjoys the fact that while shamans (conjurers, witch doctors) may be shams, the semantic similarities are also illusory; the former is Anglo-Saxon in origin, the latter Tungusic and Sanskritic.
Columbine
(two lines above in the text) was misspelled in the 1958 edition (0 instead of
u
); it has been corrected.

ancilla
: accessory, aid; literally, in Latin, “maidservant.”

Tartary
: from
Tartarus
, the infernal regions of mythology; any region, usually in European Russia and Asia, inhabited by the violent Tatar (or Tartar) tribes or hordes, who are mostly Turkic. The Tartar empire is restored in
Ada’s
Antiterra.

Mnemosyne
: in Greek mythology, a Titaness, daughter of Uranus and Gaea. She is associated with memory or remembrance. The nine Muses resulted from her union with Zeus. In the Foreword to the revised
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov says, “I had planned to entitle the British edition
Speak, Mnemosyne
but was told that ‘little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.’ ”

Cantrip … Mimir
: a cantrip is a charm or spell, while Mimir is a giant in Norse mythology who lived by the well at the root of Yggdrasill, the great tree symbolizing the universe. By drinking its water, he knew the past and future.

travaux
: French; works.

très digne
: French; very dignified.

souvenir … veux-tu?
: “memory, memory, what do you want of me?” The opening line (minus “
l’automne
,” the last word) of “Nevermore”
(title in English), by Paul Verlaine (1844–1896). H.H. begins his next sentence with that last word. Memories awakened by The Enchanted Hunters bring this line to mind. Verlaine’s poem ends with the poet telling his beloved that his most perfect day was when she charmingly murmured “
Le premier
oui”—her first yes (see also
Keys
, p. 33). For further Verlaine allusions, see
Mes fenětres
and
mon … radieux
. H.H. identifies with Verlaine, who was abandoned by his much younger (and homosexual) lover and traveling companion, Rimbaud. In
Pale Fire
, Kinbote recalls a visit to Nice, and “an old bearded bum … who stood like a statute of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his matted hair” (p. 170). Ada and Van Veen are touched by “the long sobs of the violins,” the opening lines of Verlaine’s
Chanson d’automne
(1866), translated and quietly absorbed into the text of
Ada
(p. 411). Van’s “assassin pun” (p. 541) puns on “
la Pointe assassine
,” line seventeen of Verlaine’s
Art poétique
(1882). “Verlaine had been also a teacher somewhere / In England. And what about Baudelaire, / Alone in his Belgian hell?” writes Nabokov in “Exile,” an uncollected poem (
The New Yorker
, October 24, 1942, p. 26). For Baudelaire, see
oh Baudelaire!
.

petite … accroupie
: nymphet crouching.

spaniel … baptized
: the old lady’s dog, with which Lolita had played (
cocker spaniel
). H.H. wonders if the hotel’s policy of “NO DOGS” had been broken to accommodate Christian dogs, because “NEAR CHURCHES” was commonly used (c. 1940–1960) as a code sign, a discreet indication that only Gentiles were accepted. A similar
quid pro quo
occurs in the same hotel when “Humbert” is misunderstood and distorted into a Jewish-sounding “
Humberg
,” just as “Professor Hamburg” now finds the hotel full. “Refugee” H.H. is often mistaken for a Jew; see
here
, where John Farlow is on the point of making an anti-Semitic remark and is interrupted by sensitive Jean. Quilty thinks H.H. may be a “German refugee,” and reminds him, “This is a Gentile’s house, you know” (
a Gentile’s house
).

Nabokov’s father was an outspoken foe of anti-Semitism. He wrote “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 pogrom, and was fined by the tsarist government for the fiery articles he wrote about the Beiliss trial (Maurice Samuel mentions him several times in his book on the Beiliss case,
Blood Accusation
[1966]—coincidentally published at the same time as Bernard Malamud’s novel based on it,
The Fixer
—and quotes from Nabokov’s reportage). Nabokov
fils
was also outraged by anti-Semitism, and, because his wife is Jewish, was sensitive
to it in a most acutely personal way (witness the empathy for “poor Irving” [
Irving
]). Nabokov recalled going into a New England inn years ago, accompanied by his son and his son’s friend. Opening the menu, Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He called over the waitress and asked her what the management would do if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and tired from a long journey. “What … what are you talking about?” the waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nabokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” said Nabokov. In
Pale Fire
, Kinbote and Shade discuss prejudice at length (note to line 470; pp. 216–218).

Reader! Bruder!
: German; “brother.” An echo of the last line of
Au Lecteur
, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal
(1857): “—
Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —monfrère!
” (“Hypocrite reader —my fellow man—my brother.”). See
oh Baudelaire!
.

the Gazette’s … Dr. Braddock and his group
: see
here
.
Gazette
was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

portrait … as a … brute
: an obvious play on Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916). In searching for a title for his manuscript, the narrator of
Despair
considers “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror,” but rejects it as “too jejune, too
à la mode
” (p. 201). For Joyce, see
outspoken book: Ulysses
.

Brute Force
: the actual title of a movie released by Universal Pictures in 1947, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, and Yvonne De Carlo.
Possessed
was released in 1947 by Warner Brothers, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey. The titles gloss H.H.’s circumstances, and
Brute Force
—a prison film, which Nabokov thought he had seen—is thematically apt.

Omen Faustum
: Latin; Lucky Omen, or Lucky Strike cigarettes (pointed out to me by the philologist and Latinist, Professor F. Colson Robinson), a companion to “
Dromes
”; related to
dies faustus
, “a day of favorable omen,” or, specifically, “a day on which Roman religious law permitted secular activities.”

58 Inchkeith Ave.
: obsolete for “inchworm” (or Looper), the
last
thing that should be used for the name of an avenue, since inchworms (the larvae of certain moths) destroy shade trees. For entomological allusions, see
John Ray, Jr.
. Fifty-eight inches was Lolita’s height at the outset of the novel (see
four feet ten
).

Dark Age
: the author is Quilty; see
Dark Age
.
Dark Age
was not italicized in the 1958 edition. The misprint has been corrected.

Wine, wine … for roses
: see
Reader! Bruder!
. Quilty is toying with lines from the sixth stanza of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of
The Rubáiyát
(1879), by Omar Khayyám (d. 1123?), Persian poet and mathematician:

The latter word was used earlier by H.H. (see
Incarnadine
), demonstrating once more that “
the tone of [Quilty’s] brain had affinities with my own
.”

nothing of myself
: see
a blinding flash … can be deemed immortal
; but Quilty’s “spectral shoulder” has been immortalized. For a summary of allusions to Quilty, see
Quilty, Clare
.

vin triste
: French; melancholy intoxication.

Why blue
: when I asked Nabokov “why blue?” and whether it had anything to do with the butterflies commonly known as the “Blues,” he replied: “What Rita does not understand is that a white surface, the chalk of that hotel, does look blue in a wash of light and shade on a vivid fall day, amid red foliage. H.H. is merely paying a tribute to French impressionist painters. He notes an optical miracle as E. B. White does somewhere when referring to the divine combination of ‘red barn and blue snow.’ It is the shock of color, not an intellectual blueprint or the shadow of a hobby … I was really born a landscape painter.” See
Orange … and Emerald
.

Alice-in-Wonderland
: for Lewis Carroll, see
A breeze from wonderland
.

Mes fenětres
: French; “My windows,” a mock title that parallels
Mes Hôpitaux
(“My Hospitals” [1892]) by Paul Verlaine, and in general
parodies the traditional use of the possessive in autobiographical writing. See
souvenir … veux-tu?
.