The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  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?.

  “Savez … de vous?”: French; “Do you know that, when she was ten, my little daughter was madly in love with you?”

  Proustianized and Procrusteanized: from Procrustean; violently forced into conformity or inflexibly adapted to a system or idea. Procrustes was the legendary robber who made his victims fit a certain bed by stretching or cutting off their legs. Proust is also alluded to here, here, and here. Similar wordplay occurs in Ada when Van Veen discusses Space and Time: “avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun” (p. 541); the latter phrase is also an allusion to Verlaine (see souvenir … veux-tu?).

  late: a corrected author’s error (instead of “early” in the 1958 edition).

  tankard: a tall, one-handled drinking vessel with a lid.

  Never will Emma rally … timely tear: a reference to Madame Bovary, Part III, Chapter Eight, where Homais the pharmacist and Emma’s two physicians, Bovary and Carnivet, frantically try to save her life. They summon the very distinguished Dr. Larivière, but he cannot do anything for her (“He was the Third Doctor,” added Nabokov, “but that fairy tale Third did not work” [see Percy Elphinstone]). Old Roualt, Emma’s father (“Flaubert’s father,” because the author said, “Emma Bovary? c’est moi!”), arrives after she has died; his subsequent tears are not too “timely” (III, Chapter Nine). See nous connûmes.

  honeymonsoon: a portmanteau; honeymoon plus monsoon, the periodic wind and rainy season of Southern Asia.

  them: Lolita and her kidnaper.

  CHAPTER 28

  Pas tout à fait: French; not quite.

  handkerchief … from my sleeve: an English fad of the twenties and thirties. Affected rarely today, even among the pseudo-sophisticated.

  Ah-ah-ah: simply the sound of a three-folding “harmonica” door.

  Dick Skiller: a phonetic rendering of the pronunciation of “Schiller,” and a blending of “Dick’s killer” and the street name.

  Hunter Road: a streamlined Enchanted Hunters; see The Enchanted Hunters.

  CHAPTER 29

  Personne … Repersonne: French; a humorous alliteration; “Nobody. I re-rang the bell. Re-nobody.”

  invisible tennis racket: he is measuring this wan young woman against his wondrous memory of the tennis-playing nymphet.

  russet Venus: “The Birth of Venus”; see Botticellian pink and Florentine.

  Waterproof: see Waterproof; Jean Farlow almost mentions Clare Quilty’s name as the chapter concludes. For further discussion, see the Introduction, here. For allusions to Quilty, see Quilty, Clare.

  everything fell into order … the pattern of branches … the satisfaction of logical recognition: this passage, and the novel’s crystalline progression, are prefigured in The Defense (1930) when Nabokov describes the two books with which chessplayer Luzhin

  had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. [pp. 33–34]

  For more on Holmes, see Shirley Holmes.

  valetudinarian: a person having a sick or weakly constitution.

  visited with his uncle … Mother’s club: see 4640 Roosevelt Blvd.… mattress.

  sidetrack … female: see Some old woman.

  frileux: chilly; susceptible of cold.

  Florentine: Botticelli’s Venus (here).

  French … Dorset yokel … Austrian tailor: the “salad of racial genes” mentioned here, where a Swiss and “Danubian” dash is added. “I have carefully kept Russians out of it,” noted Nabokov, “though I think his first wife had some Russian blood mixed with Polish.” Similarly, there are very few specific allusions to Russian writers in Lolita.

  beast’s lair: Quilty.

  Viennese medicine man: Freud. See a case history.

  hypnotoid: a variant of “hypnoid,” of or pertaining to hypnosis.

  Streng verboten: German; strictly forbidden.

  like her mother: “Lolita’s smoking manners were those of her mother,” emphasized Nabokov. “I remember being very pleased with that little vision when composing it.”

  Cue: Quilty’s nickname; see “Vivian Darkbloom”.

  Curious coincidence: “Camp Q.” It’s no “coincidence” at all; someone in the know has planned it this way.

  Duk Duk: an obscene Oriental word for copulation, sometimes rendered in English as dak or dok, from the Persian dakk (vice, evil condition) and dokhtan (to pierce). No less “an amateur of sex lore” than Quilty, H.H. gleaned this from a sixteenth-century work, The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, a Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886), translated by Sir Richard Burton (1821–1800), the British explorer and Orientalist (the treatise is mentioned by name in Ada, pp. 351–352). Such recondite material reminds one of Lolita’s reputation, among non-readers, as a “pornographic novel,” and also underscores how Nabokov has had the last laugh, in more ways than one. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes about the “delusive opening moves, false scents, [and] specious lines of play” which characterize the chess problem. The subject matter of Lolita is in itself a bravura and “delusive opening move”—a withdrawn promise of pornography (see two titles). The first one hundred or so pages of Lolita are often erotic—Lolita on H.H.’s lap, for instance—but starting with the seduction scene, Nabokov withholds explicit sexual descriptions, while H.H., trying to draw the reader into the vortex of the parody, exhorts us to “Imagine me: I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.” “I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all,” H.H. says; Nabokov, on the contrary, is very much concerned with it, but with the reader’s expectations rather than H.H.’s machinations.

  “Anybody can imagine those elements of animality,” he said, and yet a great many readers wished that he had done it for them—enough to have kept Lolita at the top of the best-seller list for almost a year, although librarians reported that many readers never finished the novel. The critics and remedial readers who complain that the second half of Lolita is less interesting are not aware of the possible significance of their admission. Their desire for highbrow pornography is “doubled” in Clare Quilty, whose main hobby is making pornographic films. When Lolita tells H.H. that Quilty forced her to star in one of his unspeakable “sexcapades,” more than one voyeuristic reader has unconsciously wished that Quilty had been the narrator, his unseen movie the novel. But the novel’s “habit of metamorphosis” is consistent, for the erotica which seemed to be there and turned out not to be was in fact present all along, most modestly; and it is Nabokov’s final joke on the subject, achieved at the expense of the very common reader. Although the requisite “copulation of clichés” doesn’t occur in the novel proper, its substratum reveals some racy stuff indeed: “Duk Duk”; “Undinist” (fountain pen … repressed undinist
… water nymphs in the Styx); “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” (Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.); the quotations in French from Ronsard and Belleau (Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente and Remy Belleau’s “un petit … escarlatte”); anagrammatic obscenities (Miss Horn … Miss Cole); foreign disguises (souffler, souffler); and so forth—erotica under lock and key, buried deep in dictionaries and the library stacks. Until now, only a few furtive “amateur[s] of sex lore,” law-abiding linguists, and quiet scholars—good family men, all—have had exclusive access to this realm. The “incidental Dick” and “hole” of this passage are in the open—democratic, available references—on the junior-high level.

  redhaired guy: see here.

  Sade’s … start: Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), by the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), “French soldier and pervert” (as Webster’s Second defines him). Like Lolita, Justine is prefaced by a Foreword resolutely “moral” in tone (in some editions, however, these initial paragraphs are not formally identified as a “Foreword”). The title character is an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She undergoes an array of rapes, beatings, and tortures as monstrously imaginative as they are frequent. Quilty has done a screenplay of Justine (Justine).

  souffler: to “blow.”

  my Lolita: the “Latin” tag (see the writer’s ancient lust and my Lolita) appropriately concludes this important paragraph, as it will the entire novel (do not pity C.Q.…. aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments … my Lolita).

  dreaming … of … 2020 A.D.: “2020” because he has perfect prevision; also a numerical reflection of the doubling that occurs throughout the novel (see Beale).

  mon … radieux: “my great radiant sin,” a line from Verlaine’s Lunes (“Moons”), part of the sequence titled Laeti et errabundi, in which the poet celebrates his liaison and travels with Rimbaud. Again, H.H. identifies with Verlaine, the abandoned lover, and casts Lo as the deceitful Carmen. For Rimbaud, see Peacock, Rainbow,ramparts of ancient Europe, and touché, reader!; for more on Verlaine, souvenir … veux-tu?.

  Changeons … séparés: “Let’s change [our] life, my Carmen, let us go live in some place where we shall never be separated”; from Mérimée (see Est-ce que … Carmen)—José and Carmen’s next-to-last interview. He has romantically offered America as the place where they will be able “to lead a quiet life.” H.H. is more specific in matters of geography. The Mérimée phrase “quelque part” mirrors “Quelquepart Island” (Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island), another “coincidence” that allows the author to reveal his presence at the center of a crucial scene, a verbal plant akin to the appearance of McFate’s “face” in the mirrorlike Ramsdale class list. For Mérimée, see Little Carmen.

  And we shall live happily ever after: H.H. holds out to Lolita the possibility of a stereotyped fairy-tale ending, even though the tale seems already to have ended in “Elphinstone” (Elphinstone). For more on the fairy tale, see Percy Elphinstone.

  Carmen … moi: “Carmen, do you want to come with me?” A quotation from Mérimée; a most dramatic moment at the end of the novella (see also Keys, p. 51). Carmen does go with José, but after they ride off she says that she will never live with him again, and will only follow him to death. A tearful imploration fails, and he kills her.

  “you got it all wrong … your incidental Dick, and this awful bole: obscene double entendres on his name and home, which may have been missed by speed-readers. More subtle is H.H.’s use of one last colloquialism, “got,” as though this common touch would help him communicate with Lolita. Her adult coarseness is telescoped by the “bucks” and “honey” here.

  mon petit cadeau: French; my little gift, the little something. His “4000 bucks” in 1952 meant a great deal more than in today’s money. “For some odd reason,” said Nabokov, “this paragraph, top of p. 279, is the most pathetic in the whole book; stings the canthus, or should sting it.”

  fly to Jupiter: they are going to Juneau, but to H.H. it might as well be the planet. Jupiter is veiled by haze, and Lolita dies in “Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (see Gray Star).

  Carmencita … -je: “my little Carmen [in Spanish], I asked her”; another quotation from Mérimée.

  fool thing a reader … suppose: especially a consumer of pulp fiction and movies, or a learned reader who has kept Carmen in mind. The several Carmen allusions on nearby pages serve as very fresh bait. See Little Carmen. See also Keys, p. 52.

  my American … dead love: “One of the few real, lyrical, heartfelt outbursts on H.H.’s part,” said Nabokov.

  CHAPTER 30

  pulled on … sweater: H.H. dons Quilty’s fate, as it were.

  genuflexion lubricity: worshipful lasciviousness or lewdness.

  he: Quilty. For allusions to him, see Quilty, Clare.

  shadowgraphs: see shadowgraphs.

  CHAPTER 31

  lithophanic: lithophane is porcelain impressed with figures made distinct by light (e.g., a lampshade).

  To quote an old poet: he is invented, but his “message” is signal.

  CHAPTER 32

  a garden and … a palace gate: one of those rare moments when H.H. is “so tired of being cynical.” He contemplates the hidden beauties of Lolita’s soul, and the mood prefigures his realization of Lolita’s loss, fully expressed here.

  stippled Hopkins: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), English poet. Stippled: dotted (see stippled). Its use refers to Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” (1877): “Glory be to God for dappled things— … / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.”

  shorn Baudelaire: H.H. is referring to what might be called the poet’s dramatic baldness. In the self-portrait c. 1860 and in Carjat’s photograph of 1863, his hair seems to have been torn from the head; and the sculpture by Raymond Duchamp Villon (1911) and the etched portrait by his brother Jacques Villon (1920) accentuate the great forehead and cranium. See oh Baudelaire!.

  God or Shakespeare: an echo of Stephen Dedalus’s invocation of “God, the sun, Shakespeare,” in the Nighttown section of Ulysses (1961 Random House edition, p. 505). For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses. “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays,” said Nabokov. “With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play” (Wisconsin Studies interview). Although the problem has not yet been submitted to a computer, Shakespeare would seem to be the writer Nabokov invokes most frequently in his novels in English. The title of his story “ ‘That in Aleppo Once …’ ” (1943) is drawn from Othello. Part of Chapter Ten of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and all of Chapter Seven of Bend Sinister are devoted to Shakespeare; he informs the center of Pale Fire, where streets of the Zemblan capital city are named Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley. “Help me, Will,” calls John Shade, searching for a title for his poem—and he does help, providing a passage from Timon of Athens. Nabokov translated into Russian Shakespeare’s Sonnets XVII and XXVII (The Rudder, September 18, 1927), two excerpts from Hamlet (Act IV, scene vii, and Act V, scene i [The Rudder, October 19, 1930]), and Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy (Act III, scene i [The Rudder, November 23, 1930]). Regarding Hamlet, see Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y.. For significant verbal play on Richard III, see coltish subteens … (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!).

  pentapod: counting as fifth the monster’s “foot of engorged brawn.”

  turpid: rare; foul, disgraceful.

  mais … t’aimais: French; but I loved you, I loved you!

  azure-barred: the motel’s neon lights reaching their bed from the window.

  Avis: Avis Byrd: a pun, since “Avis” is Latin for bird, and another verbal doubling (“bird bird”).

  above Moulinet: in the Alpes-Maritimes.

  CHAPTER 33

  scintillas: sparks.

  Bonzhur: (bonjour) “good day,” phonetically spelled to
mimic Charlotte’s poor French accent; see ne montrez pas vos zhambes.

  Edward Grammar … had just been arrayed: an actual crime, noted Nabokov, drawn from a newspaper, as was the case of Frank LaSalle here. By saying that Ed had been arrayed, instead of arraigned, H.H. punningly describes the imposing display. His name deliberately recalls that of Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973), who starred in numerous crime films.

  Turgenev: Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Russian writer. H.H. is alluding to the sonata of love that pours out the window near the end of his novel A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859).

  plashed: to plash is to form a wave so convex that it splashes over (maritime term).

  Murphy-Fantasia: the marriage of Lolita’s classmate Stella Fantasia. Note the verbal play on “moon-faced” and “stellar [Stella] care” (see also Keys, p. 8). See Marie … stellar name for more stellar play.

  mille grâces: French; a thousand affectations.

  vient de: French; just (for the immediate past).

  “Réveillez-vous … mourir”: French; “Wake-up, Laqueue [La Que: Cue; Quilty], it is now time to die!” A fake quotation, significant only for its reference to Quilty. The image of his residence in H.H.’s “dark dungeon” was introduced, in a more generalized way, at The Enchanted Hunters hotel (see one’s dungeon … some rival devil).

  toad of a face: a favorite pejorative image in Nabokov (see also Keys, p. 153n). “Toad” is the boyhood nickname of the dictator in Bend Sinister.

  Dr. Molnar: the dentist’s name aptly contains a molar; it is not, said Nabokov, an allusion to Ferenc Molnár, Hungarian playwright.

  six hundred: at that time $600 was a huge sum for dentures.

  Full Blued: simply a reference to its finish.