The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Not surprisingly, Humbert Humbert’s obsession has moved commentators to search for equivalent situations in Nabokov’s earlier work, and they have not been disappointed. In The Gift (written between 1935 and 1937), some manuscript pages on the desk of the young poet Fyodor move a character to say:

  “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul.…” (pp. 176–77)

  Although the passage12 seems to anticipate Lolita (“It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works,” says Fyodor [p. 194]), Laughter in the Dark (1932) is mentioned most often in this regard, since Albert Albinus sacrifices everything, including his eyesight, for a girl, and loses her to a hack artist, Axel Rex. “Yes,” agrees Nabokov, “some affinities between Rex and Quilty exist, as they do between Margot and Lo. Actually, of course, Margot was a common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita [and, technically speaking, no nymphet at all—A.A.]. Anyway I do not think that those recurrent sexual oddities and morbidities are of much interest or importance. My Lolita has been compared to Emmie in Invitation, to Mariette in Bend Sinister, and even Colette in Speak, Memory.…” (Wisconsin Studies interview, see Bibliography). Nabokov is justly impatient with those who hunt for Ur-Lolitas, for a preoccupation with specific “sexual morbidities” obscures the more general context in which these oddities should be seen, and his Afterword offers an urgent corrective. The reader of this Introduction should turn to that Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” but not before placing a bookmark here, one substantial enough to remind him to return—a brightly colored piece of clothing would be suitable (the Notes Palearctic … Nearctic through My private tragedy … my natural idiom are particularly recommended). Now please turn to the Afterword.

  Having just completed the Afterword, the serious reader is familiar with Nabokov’s account of Lolita’s origins. That “initial shiver of inspiration” resulted in a novella, the Enchanter (Volshebnik), written in Russian in 1939 and published posthumously in a translation by Dmitri Nabokov.13 In the first of the two passages below, the “enchanter” sees the young girl for the first time in what might be the Tuileries Gardens:

  A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred), was treading rapidly and firmly on skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight. Subsequently (for as long as the sequel lasted), it seemed to him that right away, at that very moment, he had appreciated all of her from tip to toe: the liveliness of her russet curls (recently trimmed); the radiance of her large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries; her merry, warm complexion; her pink mouth, slightly open so that two large front teeth barely rested on the protuberance of the lower lip; the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest; the way the folds of her skirt moved; their succinctness and soft concavities; the slenderness and glow of her uncaring legs; the coarse straps of the skates.

  She stopped in front of his garrulous neighbor, who turned away to rummage in something lying to her right, then produced a slice of bread with a piece of chocolate on it and handed it to the girl. The latter, chewing rapidly, used her free hand to undo the straps and with them the entire weighty mass of the steel soles and solid wheels. Then, returning to earth among the rest of us, she stood up with an instantaneous sensation of heavenly barefootedness, not immediately recognizable as the feel of skateless shoes, and went off, now hesitantly, now with easy strides, until finally (probably because she had done with the bread) she took off at full tilt, swinging her liberated arms, flashing in and out of sight, mingling with a kindred play of light beneath the violet-and-green trees. (pp. 26–28)

  The “enchanter” makes no sexual advances until the final pages, soon after the girl’s mother has died:

  “Is this where I’m going to sleep?” the girl asked indifferently, and when, struggling with the shutters, squeezing tight their eyelike chinks, he replied affirmatively, she took a look at the cap she was holding and limply tossed it on the wide bed.

  “There we are,” said he after the old man had dragged in their suitcases and left, and there remained in the room only the pounding of his heart and the distant throbbing of the night. “There, now it’s time for bed.”

  Reeling with sleepiness, she bumped into the corner of an armchair, at which point he, simultaneously sitting down in it, took her by the hip and drew her close. She straightened, stretching up like an angel, for a split second tensed every muscle, took another half step, and softly descended onto his lap. “My sweetheart, my poor little girl,” he spoke in a kind of general mist of pity, tenderness, and desire, as he observed her drowsiness, her wooziness, her diminishing smile, palpating her through the dark dress, feeling, through the thin wool, the band of the orphan’s garter on her bare skin, thinking how defenseless, abandoned, warm she was, reveling in the animate weight of her legs as they slithered apart and then, with the faintest corporeal rustle, recrossed at a slightly higher level. She slowly entwined a somnolent arm, in its snug little sleeve, around his nape, engulfing him with the chestnut fragrance of her soft hair.… (pp. 81–82)

  But the narrator fails as both enchanter and lover, and soon afterwards dies in a manner which Nabokov will transfer to Charlotte Haze. While the scene clearly foreshadows the first night at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, its straightforward action and solemn tone are quite different, and it compresses into a few paragraphs what will later occupy almost two chapters (pp. 119–133). The narrator’s enjoyment of the girl’s “animate weight” suggests the considerably more combustible lap scene in Lolita, perhaps the most erotic interlude in the novel—but it only suggests it. Aside from such echoes, little beyond the basic idea of the tale subsists in Lolita; and the telling is quite literally a world apart.

  The Enchanter went unpublished not because of the forbidding subject matter, but rather, says Nabokov, because the girl possessed little “semblance of reality.”14 In 1949, after moving from Wellesley to Cornell, he became involved in a “new treatment of the theme, this time in English.” Although Lolita “developed slowly,” taking five years to complete, Nabokov had everything in mind quite early. As was customary with him, however, he did not write it in exact chronological sequence. Humbert’s confessional diary was composed at the outset of this “new treatment,” followed by Humbert and Lolita’s first journey westward, and the climactic scene in which Quilty is killed (“His death had to be clear in my mind in order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov). Nabokov next filled in the gaps of Humbert’s early life, and then proceeded ahead with the rest of the action, more or less in chronological order. Humbert’s final interview with Lolita was composed at the very end, in 1954, followed only by John Ray’s Foreword.

  Especially new in this treatment was the shift from the third person to the first person, which created—obviously—the always formidable narrative problem of having an obsessed and even mad character meaningfully relate his own experience, a problem compounded in th
is specific instance by the understandable element of self-justification which his perversion would necessarily occasion, and by the fact that Humbert is a dying man. One wonders whether Thomas Mann would have been able to make Death in Venice an allegory about art and the artist if Aschenbach had been its narrator. While many of Nabokov’s other principal characters are victims (Luzhin, Pnin, Albinus), none of them tells his own story; and it is only Humbert who is both victim and victimizer, thus making him unique among Nabokov’s first-person narrators (discounting Hermann, the mad and murderous narrator of Despair, who is too patently criminal to qualify properly as victim). By having Humbert tell the tale, Nabokov created for himself the kind of challenge best described in Chapter Fourteen of Speak, Memory when, in a passage written concurrently with the early stages of Lolita, he compares the composition of a chess problem to “the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings.”15

  In addition to such obstacles, the novel also developed slowly because of an abundance of materials as unfamiliar as they were unlikely. It had been difficult enough to “invent Russia and Western Europe,” let alone America, and at the age of fifty Nabokov now had to set about obtaining “such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy. “What was most difficult,” he later told an interviewer, “was putting myself … I am a normal man, you see.”16 Research was thus called for, and in scholarly fashion Nabokov followed newspaper stories involving pedophilia (incorporating some into the novel), read case studies, and, like Margaret Mead coming home to roost, even did research in the field: “I travelled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita, I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri [his son], one kneecap of another,”17 and thus a nymphet was born.

  Perspicacious “research” aside, it was a remarkable imaginative feat for a European émigré to have re-created America so brilliantly, and in so doing to have become an American writer. Of course, those critics and readers who marvel at Nabokov’s accomplishment may not realize that he physically knows America better than most of them. As he says in Speak, Memory, his adventures as a “lepist” carried him through two hundred motel rooms in forty-six states, that is, along all the roads traveled by Humbert and Lolita. Yet of all of Nabokov’s novels, Lolita is the most unlikely one for him to have written, given his background and the rarefied nature of his art and avocations. “It was hardly foreseeable,” writes Anthony Burgess, “that so exquisite and scholarly an artist should become America’s greatest literary glory, but now it seems wholly just and inevitable.”18 It was even less foreseeable that Nabokov would realize better than any contemporary the hopes expressed by Constance Rourke in American Humor (1931) for a literature that would achieve an instinctive alliance between native materials and old world traditions, though the literal alliance in Lolita is perhaps more intimate than even Miss Rourke might have wished. But to have known Nabokov at all personally was first to be impressed by his intense and immense curiosity, his uninhibited and imaginative response to everything around him. To paraphrase Henry James’s famous definition of the artist, Nabokov was truly a man on whom nothing was lost—except that in Nabokov’s instance it was true, whereas James and many American literary intellectuals after him have been so selfconscious in their mandarin “seriousness” and consequently so narrow in the range of their responses that they have often overlooked the sometimes extraordinarily uncommon qualities of the commonplace.

  Nabokov’s responsiveness is characterized for me by the last evening of my first visit to Montreux in September 1966. During my two hours of conversation with the Nabokovs in their suite after dinner, Nabokov tried to imagine what the history of painting might have been like if photography had been invented in the Middle Ages; spoke about science fiction; asked me if I had noticed what was happening in Li’l Abner and then compared it, in learned fashion, with an analogous episode of a dozen years back; noted that a deodorant stick had been found among the many days’ siege provisions which the Texas sniper had with him on the tower; discoursed on a monstrous howler in the translation of Bely’s St. Petersburg; showed me a beautifully illustrated book on hummingbirds, and then discussed the birdlife of Lake Geneva; talked admiringly and often wittily of the work of Borges, Updike, Salinger, Genet, Andrei Sinyavsky (“Abram Tertz”), Burgess, and Graham Greene, always making precise critical discriminations; recalled his experiences in Hollywood while working on the screenplay of Lolita, and his having met Marilyn Monroe at a party (“A delightful actress. Delightful,” he said. “Which is your favorite Monroe film?”); talked of the Soviet writers he admired, summarizing their stratagems for survival; and defined for me exactly what kind of beetle Kafka’s Gregor Samsa was in The Metamorphosis (“It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths”). And did I know how a dung beetle laid its eggs? Since I did not, Nabokov rose and imitated the process, bending his head toward his waist as he walked slowly across the room, making a dung-rolling motion with his hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid. When Lenny Bruce’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce’s death; he had been a favorite of theirs. But they disagreed about where it was that they had last seen Bruce; Mrs. Nabokov thought it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband—the scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred-page “Note on Prosody”—held out for the Ed Sullivan show.

  Not only was nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seemed to remember everything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we reminisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordinary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn from the text in question). Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 312 course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of 96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe my Olympia Press first edition of Lolita. With great rapidity he not only signed and dated it but added two elegant drawings of recently discovered butterflies, one identified as “Flammea palida” (“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled “Bonus bonus.”19 Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired, “Why ‘Bonus bonus’?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had come leaping out of storage. So too was Nabokov’s memory able to draw on a lifetime of reading—a lifetime in the most literal sense.20

  When asked what he had read as a boy, Nabokov replied: “Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russia
n, and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge, England, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned” (Playboy interview, 1964, collected in Strong Opinions [1973]). The Notes to this edition will demonstrate that Nabokov has managed to invoke in his fiction the most distant of enthusiasms: a detective story read in early youth, a line from Verlaine, a tennis match seen at Wimbledon forty years before. All are clear in his mind, and, recorded in Lolita, memory negates time.