The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  seva ascendes … quidquam: the language of Horace, Catullus, et al. (see the writer’s ancient lust) is appropriate to this modern, if hysterical, elegiast, whose “Latin” here turns out to be a curious mishmash of Latin, English, French, German, and Italian: “The sap ascendeth, pulsates, burning [brulans, from the French brûler, “to burn”], itching, most insane, elevator clattering, pausing, clattering, people in the corridor. No one but death would take this one [Lolita] away from me! Slender little girl, I thought most fondly, observing nothing at all.” At moments of extreme crisis, H.H. croaks incomprehensibly, losing more than his expropriated English; for his attempts “to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” almost resist language altogether, carrying him close to the edge of non-language and a figurative silence. Thus H.H. significantly announces this scene as a “Parody of silence,” and, far from being nonsensical, the ensuing “Latin” is a parodic stream-of-consciousness affording a brief critical comment on a technique Nabokov found unsatisfactory, even in the novels of Joyce, whom he revered (“poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now,” writes Nabokov toward the end of a similar parody in Ada [p. 300]). “We think not in words but in shadows of words,” Nabokov said. “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts” (Playboy interview). To Nabokov, the unconnected impressions and associations that impinge on the mind were irrational until they were consciously ordered and to order them in art is to fulfill virtually a moral obligation, for without rational language man has “grown a very / landfish, languageless, / a monster,” as Thersites says of Ajax in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Even the imprisoned Cincinnatus, under sentence of death, is “already thinking of how to set up an alphabet” which might humanize the dystopian world of Invitation to a Beheading (p. 139). See the second half of Lo-lee-ta.

  nota bene: Latin; mark well. The 1958 edition incorrectly ran the two words together.

  dryads and trees: see frock-fold … Browning.

  writer fellow … ad: Clare Quilty (see Morell … “conquering hero”). “Dromes” is a corrected misprint (“Droms” in the 1958 edition). For allusions to Quilty, see Quilty, Clare.

  Femina: Latin; woman.

  Purpills: a contraction of “Papa’s Purple Pills” from the previous paragraph.

  CHAPTER 28

  le grand moment: French; the great moment.

  hot hairy fist: Quilty also has conspicuously hairy hands.

  sicher ist sicher: German; sure is sure.

  my uncle Gustave: Gustave Trapp, sometimes a “cousin,” whom H.H. mistakes for Quilty (see here). A cousin of one’s mother is both one’s cousin and, in a sense, uncle.

  Jean-Jacques Humbert: after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Swiss-born French philosopher and author of the famous Confessions.

  one’s dungeon … some rival devil: Quilty, H.H.’s “rival devil,” is staying at The Enchanted Hunters, and appears on the next page. The lust figuratively emanating from H.H.’s “dungeon” is objectified much later: “I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon” (see Réveillez-vous … mourir).

  comme on dit: French; as they say.

  King Sigmund: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis. See a case history and patients … had witnessed their own conception.

  antiphony: a musical response; a musical piece alternately sung by a choir divided into two parts.

  powdered bugs: Nabokov said, “The ‘powdered bugs’ wheeling around the lamps are noctuids and other moths which look floury on the wing (hence ‘millers,’ which, however, may also come from the verb), as they mill in the electric light against the damp night’s blackground. ‘Bugs’ is an Americanism for any insect. In England, it means generally bedbugs.” For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  somebody sitting … porch: Quilty. Their verbal sparring telescopes their pursuit of one another and prefigures the physical struggle. The allusions to Quilty are summarized in Quilty, Clare.

  a rose, as the Persians say: the fatidic flower and an allusion to The Rubáiyát (see Wine, wine … for roses).

  a blinding flash … can be deemed immortal: for the photograph in question, see nothing of myself. H.H. was not immortalized.

  CHAPTER 29

  entre nous soit dit: French; just between you and me.

  grand Dieu: French; good God!

  La Petite … Ridicule: The Sleeping Maiden or the Ridiculous Lover. There is no picture by this name. The mock-title and subject matter parody eighteenth-century genre engravings.

  someone … beyond our bathroom: Clare Quilty (see a few paces from Lolita’s pillow). Quilty also creates a “waterfall” on brief waterfall. For a summary of his appearances, see Quilty, Clare.

  A breeze from wonderland: there are several references to Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (1832–1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept (see Alice-in-Wonderland). “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” said Nabokov, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” Nabokov translated Alice into Russian (Berlin, 1923). “I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany),” he recalls (Speak, Memory, p. 283). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a character speaks “in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar” (p. 123), while in Ada, “Ada in Wonderland” (p. 129), “Ada’s adventures in Adaland” (p. 568), and the “titles” Palace in Wonderland (p. 53) and Alice in the Camera Obscura (p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original title of Laughter in the Dark). “In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll,” he said in the Wisconsin Studies interview. “No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots with mine [in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” But it might seem as though Nabokov did allude to Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called “the photography theme”: H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as “photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs. Asked about this, Nabokov replied, “I did not consciously think of Carroll’s hobby when I referred to the use of photography in Lolita.”

  “I have only words to play with,” moans H.H., and several readers have been tempted to call the ensuing wordplay “Joycean”—loosely enough, since “Carrollian” might do almost as well, given Nabokov’s fondness for auditory wordplay and portmanteau words, and the fact that the latter usage was coined by Carroll. The family line is nicely established on Sebastian. Knight’s neatest book shelf, where Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses stand side by side, along with works by some of Nabokov’s other favorite writers (Stevenson, Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Wells, and Shakespeare, who encloses the shelf at either end with Hamlet and King Lear [p. 41]). For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare.

  metamorphosing: see not human, but nymphic.

  CHAPTER 30

  emeritus read to by a boy: an echo of the opening of Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy …” See pastiches.

  shoat: a young pig; a hog.

  callypygean slave … onyx: or callipygian; “having shapely buttocks.” Onyx is a variety of agate, a semiprecious stone. H.H. is no doubt here referring to onyx marble (alabaster). See boat to Onyx or Eryx.

  gonadal glow: a gonad is a sexual gland; an ovary or testis.
H.H. is evoking the neon tubing on the nether region of a 1947 Wurlitzer jukebox, an expensive “collectible” in 1991.

  canoeing, Coranting: the latter is the participle of H.H.’s variant of courant, “a dance of Italian origin marked by quick running steps,” and also dialectal English for “romping” and “carousing.” H.H. is still in Volume C of the Girl’s Encyclopedia (see p. 92).

  CHAPTER 31

  Roman law … girl may marry at twelve: the legal opinions offered in this paragraph move from fact to fiction (see Children … 1933). The first is true, though the legal question and its history are far more complex than H.H. would suggest. See Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage (1930), pp. 51–52.

  adopted by the Church: also true; see Bouscaren and Ellis, Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (1957), p. 513.

  still preserved … in some of the United States: only in ten states (Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Virginia, Idaho, Kansas, and Louisiana). See Vernier, American Family Laws (1931), pp. 115–117.

  fifteen is lawful everywhere: not in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Wyoming, where the age is sixteen, or in New Hampshire or New Jersey, where it is eighteen. But there are exceptions granted if the girl is pregnant or if she is willing, over twelve, and the marriage has been consummated. Since none of these (save the consummation) apply to Lolita, it seems that H.H.’s confident legal scholarship has given way to dissembling. See Vernier, ibid., pp. 116–118. Of course these laws pertain to H.H.’s day, and may have changed.

  CHAPTER 32

  die Kleine: German; the little one.

  moue: grimace, facial contraction.

  sapphic diversions: reference to the reputed lesbianism of the group associated with Sappho, Greek lyric poetess of Lesbos (c. 600 B.C.).

  Miranda twins: in Lolita’s class list, (see Beale).

  boat to Onyx or Eryx: there are no such lakes. Onyx is often used for cameos, while Eryx refers to the ancient cult of Aphrodite (Venus) of Eryx, an Elymian settlement on a mountain above Drepana in western Sicily, built below their temple of Aphrodite (the goddess of love and beauty, to whom Lolita is often compared; “Venus came and went,” says H.H.; and the magazine picture of a surrealistic “plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand” metaphorically projects Lolita’s life with him). See Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss., where scholarly H.H. obliquely informs the reader that the priestesses at the Temple of Eryx were prostitutes.

  I would not talk to strangers: see Never Talk to Strangers and Do not talk to strangers, where the phrase echoes. The advice still holds.

  saturnalia: the festival of Saturn in ancient Rome, celebrated with feasting and revelry; a licentious spectacle.

  A fellow of my age: Quilty (see Quilty, Clare); the “blood-red armchair” should alert the reader. H.H. stresses their similar ages; see of my age … rosebud … mouth.

  Schwab’s drugstore: an author’s error has been corrected (a instead of o in the 1958 edition). The Schwab’s chain drugstores in Hollywood (now defunct) were a meeting place for film people and young aspirants. In the thirties and forties several subsequent stars were discovered there, some—according to folklore—while eating sundaes or drinking sodas.

  a fairytale vampire: for the fairy-tale theme, see Percy Elphinstone.

  le décòuvert: French; the nude.

  immortal daemon … child: see not human, but nymphic.

  Aunt Clare’s place: by mentioning Quilty’s first name, H.H., a sly teaser, throws the reader something more than a hint. See Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions.

  hypothetical hospital: “hypothetical” is the best word to use, since its name would be whatever H.H. chose to make it.

  CHAPTER 33

  gay … Lepingville: see Lepingville … nineteenth century. H.H.’s “lepping” is over; the town’s name and gaiety mark the fact that, as Part One ends, H.H. secures his capture.

  swooners: H.H.’s variant of the noun, its meaning expanded to include some garment that evokes a swoon. Teen-swooning, inspired by Frank Sinatra’s crooning, was much in the news in the forties.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 1

  pharisaic: self-righteous and censorious; resembling the Pharisees, a sect of the ancient Jews famed for its strict observance of ceremonies, rites, and traditions.

  earwitness: a dictionary word (used as early as 1594) but amusing because no one ever says it.

  nous connûmes: Flaubert uses the verb connaître in the literary tense passé simple when in Madame Bovary (1857) he is describing her unhappy experiments with all kinds of diversions, especially her lovers and their activities together. For other allusions, see le mot juste, Miss Emperor, and Never will Emma rally … timely tear. Nabokov intends no allusion to Frédéric Moreau’s travels in L’Education sentimentale (1869); “Not the education of the senses,” he said, “a poor novel which I only vaguely remember.” Bovary is funned in King, Queen, Knave and “Floeberg” burlesqued briefly in Ada (p. 128). Although Kinbote synchronizes Gradus’s travels through space and time and the stages of Shade’s composition of the poem Pale Fire, he nevertheless complains when Shade similarly alternates two themes: “the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce” (p. 196).

  Chateaubriandesque trees: the first European writers and painters who visited America were impressed by its great trees, and H.H. no doubt drew the image from Atala (1801), a separately published episode from Le Génie du christianisme (1802) by François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), whose arrival in America is mentioned in Pale Fire (p. 247). In the Eugene Onegin Commentary, Nabokov calls René, another episode from Le Génie, “a work of genius by the greatest French writer of his time” (Vol. III, p. 98). See Charlotte. Though unlabeled, there are many “Chateaubriandesque trees” in Ada’s Ardis Park, and by design, for Chateaubriand is to Ada what Poe and Mérimée are to Lolita. Van Veen reads Ada’s copy of Atala (p. 89), and René, with its “subtle perfume of incest” (Onegin Commentary, Vol. III, p. 100), is alluded to directly (pp. 131 and 133). Mlle. Larivière, the Veens’ grotesque governess, writes a novel and film scenario whose hero is named “René” (see pp. 198–199, 217, 249, and 424), and since “incest” and “insect” are anagrammatically linked (p. 85), a mosquito is named after Chateaubriand—Charles Chateaubriand, that is, “not related to the great poet and memoirist” (p. 106). For further discussion of Chateaubriand and Ada, see my article, “Ada Described,” TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). For another Chateaubriand allusion in Lolita, see le montagnard émigré.

  non-Laodicean: in Revelation 3:14–16, the Laodicean church is characterized as “lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold” in matters of religion.

  madamic: H.H.’s coinage, referring to the madam, or proprietress, of a brothel.

  instars: an insect or other anthropod in one of the forms assumed between molts. The pupa of a butterfly is an instar.

  do you remember, Miranda: an echo of the opening lines and refrain of “Tarantella” (1923), a poem by Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953); “Do you remember an Inn, / Miranda? / Do you remember an Inn?” See p. 185.

  the nasal voices: because “this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D.” (as H.H. says [p. 299]), readers not having had the benefit of a 1947–1952 adolescence may not be able to complete the names of the “invisibles” who serenaded her. “Rex” is a ringer, and “Sammy” refers to non-singer Sammy Kaye (1910–1087), whose very popular, very mediocre dance band featured a succession of lachrymose vocalists on hits such as 1947’s “I’m Laughing on the Outside (But Crying on the Inside),” a title that splendidly summarizes H.H.’s rhetorical mask. The other singers are Jo Stafford (date of birth a secret), Edwin Jack “Eddie” Fisher (1928–      ), Tony Bennett (born Anthony Benedetto: 1926–      ), Peggy Lee (born Norma Egstrom: 19
20–      ), Guy Mitchell (1925–      ), and Patti Page (born Clara Ann Fowler: 1927–      ), whose most successful recording, “The Tennessee Waltz” (1950), is commemorated in Ada with the mention of “a progressive poet in residence at Tennessee Waltz College” (p. 134). As Joyce says in Finnegans Wake, “Wipe your glosses with what you know.” But this information isn’t campy if you don’t know who these “invisibles” are, and that their sentimental songs of love and romance were very corny, and backed by ludicrously fulsome string arrangements. Because Nabokov often uses a kind of shorthand to eviscerate Lo’s popular culture, younger readers now need to be prepped; they actually believe that early fifties’ pop music was “soft” rock-and-roll—as on the TV show Happy Days.

  Study guide: Your Hit Parade, a series of record collections begun in 1988 by Time-Life Music, which will eventually cover every year of the forties and fifties. The disc for 1951 includes Patti Page’s “Detour,” Guy Mitchell’s “My Heart Cries for You,” and Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” The latter, an apostrophe to a cruel mistress, could be called a debased Petrarchan sonnet—just the kind of song H.H. would scorn. Play some of these hits while reading Lolita—as ironic descant, say, to the important reunion scene, where H.H. says that one of her songs was throbbing on the radio as they talked. For an illustrated survey of teen culture, see Time-Life’s volume, This Fabulous Century: 1950–1960 (1970), especially for its facsimile pages from the sort of movie magazines that Lo and her pals consumed. The programmatic innocence that was proffered by these publications will come as a big surprise to younger readers, who expect scandal, and to aging scholars who have never before seen such stuff and only now can complete their education—really, if they want to understand the full reach of Lolita. “Patty,” an author’s error in the 1958 edition, has been changed to “Patti.”