The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Starasil: an actual ointment.

  trochaic lilt: in prosody, a trochee is a foot of two syllables, the first stressed or half-stressed, and the second unstressed.

  Huncan Dines: the spoonerism hardly conceals Duncan Hines (1880–1959), author of such guidebooks as Adventures in Good Eating, Lodging for a Night, and Duncan Hines’ Food Odyssey.

  chère Dolorès: French; dear Dolores—an insulting translation for bilingual readers.

  comme … gentille: French; as you know too well, my sweet one.

  rapist … therapist: a slight variation of earlier wordplay; see psychotherapist … rapist. In Ada, thinkers who speculate on the existence of Terra are called “terrapists” (p. 341).

  by Polonius: the talkative and complacent old man of Hamlet. The reference is probably to the warnings he gives his daughter, Ophelia, about the slippery ways of men. See Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y..

  Mann Act: the obvious “dreadful pun” is Mann: man. “Act” was not capitalized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected here.

  my Lolita … her Catullus: the Latin love-poem motif; see Catullus … forever.

  c’est tout: French; that is all.

  thirty-nine other dopes: forty, including Lo; the same number as the Ramsdale class, and the sleepless nights—plotted “coincidences” all.

  crazy quilt of forty-eight states: it is appropriate that Part Two’s first allusion to Quilty should be this geographical metaphor, since H.H. and his nemesis pursue each other back and forth across “the crazy quilt.” When all the journeys are ended, he is “quilted Quilty” and, once more, “the crazy quilt.”

  inutile: French; useless, unprofitable.

  Lorrain clouds: Claude Gelée, known as Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), French painter who settled in Rome and established landscape painting as a respectable form. His open vistas and lyrical evocations of light and atmosphere influenced Poussin, among others. A character in King, Queen, Knave (1928) points at something “with the air of Rembrandt indicating a Claude Lorraine” (p. 91), a reminder of the consistency of Nabokov’s vision.

  El Greco horizon … mummy-necked farmer: the famous painter (1541?–1614?), born in Greece, schooled in Italy, resident of Spain. H.H. discovers in Kansas the turbulent Toledo landscapes of Greco and describes the farmer as though he were an “El Greco”—his elongated “mummy neck” is optically distorted in the manner of this artist. Since many early readers, especially the British and French, thought Lolita resolutely “anti-American,” Nabokov urged me to note the book’s tender landscape details, and the tribute paid to “the lovely, trustful, enormous country.” H.H.’s tributes are of central importance. The “moral apotheosis” correctly sighted by John Ray is congruent with H.H.’s most rapturous description of the countryside, though the landscape described here remains “two-dimensional” (H.H.’s phrase) because it is essentially unpeopled (the farmer isn’t human)—a purely aesthetic spectacle as opposed to the three-dimensional landscape here. There, Nabokov completes the picture as a novelist rather than a dandy landscape artist or artificer.

  samara: a dry, winged fruit, usually one-seeded, as in the ash or elm.

  ce qu’on appelle: French; what one calls.

  CHAPTER 2

  partie de plaisir: French; outing, picnic.

  raison d’ětre: French; the reason for being, the justification.

  John Galsworthy: English novelist (1867–1933), author of The Forsyte Saga (1922).

  canthus: the inner corner of the eye where the upper and lower eyelids meet.

  “Kurort” type: German; health resort, watering place.

  roan back … an orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets: Roan is a color: chestnut interspersed with gray or white—said of a horse; also a low-grade sheepskin tanned and colored to imitate ungrained Morocco. Zoot suits were a “hep” male fashion of the forties that originated with the Hispanic “pachuco” gangs of Los Angeles in 1942. A zoot suit consisted of a porkpie hat, a wide-shouldered, thigh-length jacket, and billowy trousers that were tapered and “pegged” (bloused) at the bottom. A long watch-chain was optional. The humor of H.H.’s verbal cartoon turns on one’s knowing that a sixteen-piece jazz band contained four or five trumpeters at most. Zoot, the saxophone-playing puppet on The Muppets, is not a tribute to fashion but to John Haley (Zoot) Sims (1925–1985), the great tenor saxophonist.

  author of “Trees”: Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), American poet, best known for the sentimental poem which H.H. refers to here.

  bronzed owner of an expensive car: although Quilty-hunters may find this man suspect, Nabokov said it is definitely not Quilty.

  lousy with … flies: noted Nabokov: “The insects that poor Humbert mistakes for ‘creeping white flies’ are the biologically fascinating little moths of the genus Pronuba whose amiable and indispensable females transport the pollen that fertilizes the yucca flowers (see, what Humbert failed to do, ‘Yucca Moth’ in any good encyclopedia).” For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  Independence … Abilene: also a juxtaposition of the “starting points” of successive American presidents: Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969).

  lilac … phallic: H.H. continually reminds us that he has “only words to play with.” His phallic is built on the semantic constituents of lilac and Pharaonic (of or pertaining to Pharaoh, the title of the sovereigns of ancient Egypt).

  lanugo: anatomical word; in a restricted sense, the downy growth which covers the young of Otherwise non-hairy animals.

  rufous: a bright russet or brownish-orange hue.

  lucerne: a deep-rooted European herb with bluish-purple flowers; in the United States usually called alfalfa.

  comme on dit: French; as they say.

  hundreds of … hummingbirds: these are not birds, noted Nabokov, “but hawkmoths which do move exactly like hummingbirds (which are neither gray nor nocturnal).” For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  Shakespeare … New Mexico: not invented; a mining town founded c. 1870 on property that had previously been involved in one of the largest unsuccessful mining speculations of the period in the Southwest. Now a “ghost town,” it is no longer listed in any atlas.

  Florentine Bea’s … contemporary: Dante’s Beatrice (see Dante … month of May). A thirteenth-century mummy.

  Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon: see those calls.

  winery in California … wine barrel: it exists. Crossing over into Death Valley from Nevada, H.H. and Lolita travel down to Los Angeles and then wend their way northward up the California coast to Oregon (Crater Lake). Most of H.H.’s observation’s of “local color”(Nabokov’s phrase) will not be glossed unless they’re particularly colorful or obscure.

  Scotty’s Castle: an enormous and grotesque structure built in the twenties by Walter (“Death Valley”) Scott, formerly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It is only half-completed because he ran out of funds when a mysterious “gold mine” was exhausted.

  R. L. Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano: the Scottish writer (1850–1895) followed the woman he loved to California, where he lived for a year (1870–1880). In From Scotland to Silverado, James D. Hart, ed. (1966), collects his writing about the state. Stevenson is buried on the volcanic Mount Vaea in Samoa; but H.H., who may or may not know that, is here referring to his honeymoon stay on Mount St. Helena, California, generally thought to be an extinct volcano (it is in fact not one). There is a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial there, but he left no actual footprint. H.H., having just noted “The ugly villas of handsome actresses,” was no doubt more impressed by the footprints and handprints of movie stars immortalized in the cement pavements outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. For further Stevenson allusions, see Treasure Island and Mr. Hyde.

  Mission Dolores: good title for book: this book, of course. The mission observed by H.H. exists, in San Francisco.

  festoons: in architecture, a molded or carved ornament represen
ting a festoon (a garland or wreath hanging in a curve). H.H. is observing the coastline of Monterey.

  Russian Gulch State Park: in Sonoma, California; named by Russian colonists.

  The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single: H.H. conflates a series of roadside advertising signs erected by the Burma Shave Company, or invents his own version. “The first form of sequential advertising,” report Sally Henderson and Robert Landau in Billboard Art (1981), “the Burma Shave signs spoke to the public in a new way with both humor and wit. The small signs, installed at the roadside in sets of six, took approximately eighteen seconds to read when the car was traveling at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour.” Burma Shave signs dotted the countryside from 1925 to 1963. Lolita would have been more interested in this cognate series: “The Bearded Lady / Tried AJar / She’s Now a Famous / Movie Star / Burma Shave.” Weathered old Burma Shave signs turn up today in “antique” stores, bathed in a very warm light indeed. Now that the old roads and their kitsch and clutter have given way to sleek super-highways and standardized conveniences, the once despised diners, gas stations, and one-of-a kind motels of the past have been deemed vernacular art and archeology by grieving nostalgists and students of a democratic culture. Picture-books such as John. Margolies’s The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America (1981) and Michael Wallis’s Route 66: The Mother Road (1990), may also serve to document the vanishing cross-country quotidian world of Lolita and Jack Kerouac’s more romanticized On the Road (1957). The photographs in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) complement H.H.’s most melancholy rooms and ruminations, as he would put it.

  Christopher Columbus’ flagship: the zoo exists, in Evansville, Indiana. Its monkeys—kept out-of-doors on the ship from April to November—continue to be the zoo’s most popular attraction.

  Little Rock, near a school: rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov called it “nicely prophetic” (the larger “row” over school desegregation, September 1957). For further “prophecy,” see bearded scholar.

  à propos de rien: French; not in relation to anything else; casually.

  town … first name: “his” refers to Quilty. Clare, Michigan; an actual town.

  species … Homo pollex: H.H. combines the familiar Latin homo, “the genus of mammals consisting of mankind,” with pollex, or “thumb.”

  viatic: H.H. sustains his “scientific” vocabulary; a coinage from the Latin root via. Viaticum is English—an allowance for traveling expenses—but H.H. has gone back to the Latin word viaticus, which specifically refers to the road.

  priapically: from Priapus, the god of procreation; see Priap.

  man of my age … face à claques: Quilty, with a “face that deserves to be slapped; an ugly, mischievous face.” For an index to his appearances, see Quilty, Clare.

  concupiscence: lustfulness.

  coulant un regard: French; casting a sly glance.

  slow truck … road: see gigantic truck … impossible to pass; after an encounter with “Trapp” (Quilty), H.H. finds himself behind such a truck.

  natatoriums: swimming pools.

  matitudinal: H.H.’s coinage, from matin, an ecclesiastical duty performed early in the morning; or, though its usage is rare, a morning call or song (of birds).

  mais je divague: French; but I am wandering away from the point; rambling.

  les yeux perdus: French; a lost look in the eyes.

  oh Baudelaire!: Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), French poet. The image of the dream and the French phrases, “brun adolescent” (“dark [brown-haired] adolescent”) and “se tordre” (“to undergo contortions” [erotic]), are drawn from Baudelaire’s Le Crépuscule du matin, or “MorningTwilight” (1852): “C’était l’heure où l’essaim des rěves malfaisants / Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents” (“It was the hour when a swarm of evil dreams contorts [or twists] dark [or swarthy] adolescents on their pillows”). For other Baudelaire allusions, see Reader! Bruder! and shorn Baudelaire. “Poor Baudelaire” is evoked in a variant from Shade’s poem in Pale Fire (p. 167); and Kinbote’s gardener aspires “to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas” (p. 291). The title of Invitation to a Beheading is drawn from Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage, which is variously evoked throughout the novel. The poem’s opening lines are quoted and toyed with in Ada (p. 106).

  a famous coach … with a harem of ball boys: a tennis star of the twenties (1893–1953), as famous in his sport as Red Grange and Babe Ruth were in theirs; winner of the American championship seven times, the Wimbledon title three times, and the U.S. doubles championship five times. In 1946 he was jailed on a morals charge, and H.H. and Lolita meet him after his tragic double life has become public knowledge, and only a few years before his death. Given the context, the prosaic phrase and vocation of “ball boy” becomes a pun. When asked if the deceased player should be identified by name, Nabokov imagined him now “consorting with ball boys … on Elysian turf. Shall we spare his shade?”

  Gobbert: a corrected author’s error (one b in the 1958 edition). André H. Gobbert was a French tennis champion c. World War I. “I saw him beaten by Patterson in 1919 or 1920 at Wimbledon,” recalled Nabokov.“He had a tremendous (old-fashioned) serve, but would double fault up to four times in a game. Big dark fellow, doubled with Decugis against Brookes and Patterson, I think” (see Decugis or Borman).

  ange gauche: French; awkward angel.

  simulacrum: an unreal semblance (a favorite word of H.H.’s; see here and here).

  a tall man: a mirage of Quilty. The subsequent teasing ambiguity as to whether H.H.’s pursuer is “real” or an autoscopic hallucination (see here) parodies Golyadkin, Jr., and the central problem of Dostoevsky’s The Double (the narrator of Despair considers The Double as a title for his book, “But Russian literature possessed one already,” he says [p. 201]). For Quilty, see Quilty, Clare.

  diaphanous: delicate to the extent of being transparent or translucent.

  pavonine: like a peacock; iridescent.

  oculate: eye-spotted.

  ramparts of ancient Europe: translation and paraphrase of line 84 of Rimbaud’s Le Bâteau ivre (“The Drunken Boat” [1871]): “Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets” (“I long for Europe with its ancient quays” [ramparts]). Rimbaud’s use of “parapets” is shortly reinforced in an echo of the phrase (parapets of Europe). See touché, reader! for another allusion to this poem. Nabokov translated it into Russian in The Rudder, December 16, 1928. Rimbaud’s poem is transmuted, along with almost everything else, in Ada’s anti-world; Van Veen receives a message “in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan [Veen] thought that it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!)” (p. 331). Ada and Van know by heart Rimbaud’s Mémoire, and it is one of two texts they use for their coded letters (p. 161). For more on Rimbaud, see Peacock, Rainbow.

  caravansaries: from a Persian word; in the East, an inn in the form of a bare building surrounding a court, where caravans stop for the night.

  well-drawn … bobby-soxer: Penny, the comic strip created by Harry Haenigsen in 1943. For other allusions to comic strips, see Jutting Chin … funnies, Comics, and gagoon … kiddoid gnomide. As responsive as he was scholarly, Nabokov the literary anatomist was also amused and delighted by “lower” forms of art, and was not above making selective use of such materials in his writing. No one, he laments in the Foreword to the revised Speak, Memory, “discovered the name [in the first edition] of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of Section Two, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself” (p. 15). The tribute is to Otto Soglow, creator of The Little King: “The ranks of words I reviewed were again so glowing, with their puffed-out little chests and trim uniforms … [italics mine—A.A.]” (p. 219). John Held, Jr., is also alluded to (p. 265). “Who will bother to notice,” wonders Nabokov in the Introduction to Bend Sinist
er, “that the urchins in the yard (Chapter Seven) have been drawn by Saul Steinberg” (p. xviii). In Ada, an 1871 Sunday supplement of the Kaluga Gazette “feature[s] on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)”—based, in reality, on an old French comic strip (p. 6). At the end of Ada, ninety-seven-year-old Van Veen describes how he “look[s] forward with juvenile zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood” (p. 570).

  areolas: the more-or-less shaded narrow areas around the nipples.

  recedent: a heraldic term, to match pursuant.

  “We … in this bottle”: the “quip” derives from the fact that the mariners could not possibly know they lived in the Middle Ages, just as the reader of this annotation has no idea what the twenty-sixth century will call our epoch.

  CHAPTER 3

  umber … Humberland: the pun (see “Humbert Humbert”) turns on the not-uncommon place name of Northumberland (England; New Hampshire; Virginia; Pennsylvania).

  Frigid Queen … Princess: the actual name of a milk bar, recorded by Nabokov in a little black notebook. The “Princess” alludes to “Annabel Lee” (princedom by the sea), who, fused with Freud, is once more in the novel’s foreground: “the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot.”

  hors concours: out of the competition: when something is exhibited at a show (e.g., livestock, tulips) but is so superior to the rest of the exhibition that it is barred from receiving the awards or prizes.

  leporine fascination: like a hare. The “able psychiatrist” is being hypnotized as a rabbit is by a serpent (H.H.).