“waterproof”: When Jean Farlow notices that H.H. has gone swimming with his watch on, Charlotte reassures her, and dreamily relishes a miracle of modern technology: “ ‘Waterproof,’ said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.”. The word is also the clue H.H. uses to torment the reader who strains to learn the identity of Lolita’s abductor (see Waterproof), and one is thus reminded that Lolita is a very special kind of detective story (see Lo-lee-ta).
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:
I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian’s Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before his first book—that is, at the time he left Russia,—his English was as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books. [pp. 82–83].
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.
ABOUT VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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.
ABOUT ALFRED APPEL, JR.
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
&nbs
p; 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
ALSO BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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
The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
Fiction/Literature
THE EYE
The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965—thirty years after its original publication—Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder.
Fiction/Literature
THE GIFT
The last of the Nabokov’s novels in Russian, The Gift is his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write—a book very much like The Gift itself.
Fiction/Literature
GLORY
Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil project”—to illegally re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he had fled in 1919. He succeeds—but at a terrible cost.
Fiction/Literature
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium store. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz.
Fiction/Literature
PALE FIRE
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Fiction/Literature
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
Fiction/Literature
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899) whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Nabokov himself. Focusing on the central figures of his life—his four wives, his books, and his muse, Dementia—the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself, as the worlds of reality and literary invention grow increasingly indistinguishable.
Fiction/Literature
MARY
Nabokov’s first novel, Mary takes place in a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés. Lev Ganin, once a vigorous young officer, now poised between his past and his future, relives his idyllic first love affair with Mary in pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast to his memories is the decide
dly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he later discovers, is Mary’s husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution, but expecting her arrival from Russia.
Fiction/Literature
PNIN
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: “A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.” Although he is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Well known as a distinguished novelist, Sebastian Knight had two secret love affairs that profoundly influenced his career, the second of which in a disastrous way. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist’s private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject’s own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding.
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 60
