The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (81 page)

in slow motion … Humbert’s gifts
: Lolita is remembered as an illusory creature in a dream, rather than as the object of H.H.’s lust (see
here
), and the allusion to his gifts recalls his desperate bribery as well as its results.

the pictures … of Gaston Godin
: furtive love is invoked; like the artists whose portraits dominate his garret, Gaston is clearly homosexual. See
large photographs
.

the Kasbeam barber
: he talks of his son, dead for thirty years, as though he were still alive (see
here
).

Lolita playing tennis
: if ever H.H. succeeds in “
fix[ing] once for all the perilous magic of nymphets
,” it is in
this scene.

the hospital at Elphinstone … irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star
: Nabokov is referring to Lolita by her
married name.
Twin deaths are recorded: Lolita “dies” for H.H. when Quilty steals her from the hospital (
here
) and “dies” for Nabokov when the book is completed, and her image is irretrievable. But Lolita does not die
in
the book; as H.H. says, “
I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive
.” Her creator points beyond the novel’s fictive time into the future, for he would agree with H.H.’s closing statement that art “is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” It is important to note that none of these “secret points” is exclusively sexual. Rather, the images and characters all formulate varying states of isolation, loss, obsession, and ecstasy which generalize H.H.’s consuming passion; the concluding “co-ordinate,” after all, places in their midst the author, butterfly net firmly in hand.

tinkling sounds … Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov
: the final “co-ordinates” form a most interesting progression. The last “nerve of the novel” is in fact outside the novel and extends from the lepidopterist to the nympholept, who almost seem to pass one another on the same trail. H.H. also experiences a most pleasing unity of sounds coming from a valley town (
here
); and the butterfly in question was captured by Nabokov near Dolores, Colorado (see
Dolores
and
Dolores, Colo.
). Nabokov commented: “This Coloradian member of the subgenus
Lycaeides
(which I now place in the genus
Plebejus
, a grouping corresponding exactly in scope to my former concept of
Plebejinae
) was described by me as a subspecies of Tutt’s ‘
argyrognomon
’ (now known as
idas
L.), but is, in my present opinion, a distinct species.” See
John Ray, Jr.
.

My private tragedy … my natural idiom
: the narrator of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(Nabokov’s first novel in English) says something very similar about Knight:

Nabokov’s “private tragedy”
is
our concern, for in varying degrees it involves us all. Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to
Lolita
is H.H.’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all of our attempts to communicate. “ 
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once
.” It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in
Lolita
: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “
I have only words to play with
,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm. H.H. has failed once—“
She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I use[d] for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own teeth on edge
”—but it is a necessary act of love to try, and perhaps Nabokov succeeds with the reader where H.H. failed with Lolita.

frac-tails
: Nabokov wittily demonstrates that the “native illusionist” is now an internationalist:
frac
is French for “dress coat.” It is just that Nabokov (and this edition) should conclude with a joke, however small, for, from behind “
the bars of the poor creature’s cage
,” desperate Humbert also exults. In
Gogol
, Nabokov notes how “one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant” (p. 142), a juxtaposition implicit in the early title,
Laughter in the Dark.
The title goes two ways: it records the laughter of the cosmic joker who has made a pawn of Albinus, blinding and tormenting him, but it also summarizes Nabokov’s response to life, his course for survival. Toward the end of
Lolita
, the sick and despairing Humbert has finally tracked down Lolita, who is now the pregnant Mrs. Richard Schiller. He recalls how he rang the doorbell, ready to kill Dick. The bell seems to vibrate through his whole exhausted system, but suddenly Humbert takes his automatic French response to the sound
and playfully twists it into verbal nonsense: “
Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne.
From what depth this re-nonsense?
” he wonders. It sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov’s profoundly humane comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert’s narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the sadness or terror of everyday life.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel
Lolita
(1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including
Lolita
—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

Alfred Appel, Jr., was born in New York City on January 31, 1934, and raised on Long Island. He served for two years in the U. S. Army, and was educated at Cornell and Columbia, which granted him a Ph.D. degree in 1963. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford, and, since 1968, at Northwestern University, where he is presently Professor of English and American Culture. He has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. The first edition of
The Annotated Lolita
was in print for twenty years and went through twelve printings. His other books include
Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, Signs of Life
, and
The Art of Celebration: The Expression of Joy in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, Photography, and Music
, forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

BOOKS BY
Vladimir Nabokov

NOVELS
Mary
King, Queen, Knave
The Defense
The Eye
Glory
Laughter in the Dark
Despair
Invitation to a Bebeading
The Gift
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Bend Sinister
Lolita
Pnin
Pale Fire
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Transparent Things
Look at the Harlequins!

SHORT FICTION
Nabokov’s Dozen
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
The Enchanter

DRAMA
The Waltz Invention
Lolita: A Screenplay
The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Strong Opinions

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Nikolai Gogol
Lectures on Literature
Lectures on Russian Literature
Lectures on Don Quixote

TRANSLATIONS
Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin,
Lermontov, and Tiutchev
A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)
The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Anon.)
Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977

MISCELLANEOUS
Poems and Problems
The Annotated Lolita

ALSO BY
Alfred Appel, Jr
.

Nabokov
(co-editor)
Nabokov’s Dark Cinema
Signs of Life
Witching Times
(editor)
The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922–1972
(co-editor)
The Art of Celebration

ADA, OR ARDOR

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday,
Ada, or Ardor
is one of Nabokov’s greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, an epic, and a philosophical treatise on the nature of time; a parody of the history of the novel; and an erotic catalogue.
Ada, or Ardor
is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

Fiction/Literature

BEND SINISTER

Filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay,
Bend Sinister
is a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country’s foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, Paduk’s government attempts to co-opt Krug’s support in order to validate the new regime.

Fiction/Literature

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude,” an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When he is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence, and they and the whole world disappear.

Fiction/Literature

THE DEFENSE

As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, an enigma to his parents, and an object of ridicule to his classmates. Taking up chess, he prodigiously rises to the rank of grandmaster, but in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when his intricate defense withers under his opponent’s unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault.

Fiction/Literature

THE ENCHANTER