The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  fundament jigging: buttocks.

  a crumpled envelope: the letter was from Quilty.

  chassé-croisé: side stepping and re-side stepping each other.

  “Je croyais … doux”: “I thought that it was a bill—not a love-note” (a pun on bill and billet doux).

  Deseret News: an actual newspaper in Utah.

  sister Ann: it will be clear in a moment that H.H. is alluding to Charles Perrault’s (1628–1703) fairy tale about Bluebeard, who murdered six wives. Hoping to be rescued by her two brothers, his seventh wife posts her sister Ann as sentinel; “Sister Ann, do you see anyone coming?” is her constant refrain. She finally does, and the “brutal brothers” slay Bluebeard. See also Keys, p. 48. When I was writing this note, I called to my wife in the adjacent room, asking her if she remembered all the details in Bluebeard. “I know the story,” replied Karen, my seven-year-old daughter, running into the room (this was in 1967). I showed her the passage in Lolita, and, after helpfully identifying Sister Ann, she read H.H.’s dirge for Bluebeard. “Poor Bluebeard,” she quoted. “Poor Bluebeard? He was awful! What kind of book is this?” For allusions to Bluebeard in Ada, see pp. 164 and 180, and in King, Queen, Knave, pp. 263–264. See Percy Elphinstone.

  Est-ce que … Carmen: “Do you not love me any more, my Carmen?” José says this to Carmen in their penultimate confrontation (Chapter Three). José’s very next beseechment is also quoted by H.H. (Changeons … séparés). For Mérimée, see Little Carmen.

  plotting in Basque: Carmen and José plot in Basque in the presence of her rich, uncomprehending English lover, whom José kills.

  Zemfirian: “gypsy”; H.H.’s coinage, from the heroine of The Gypsies (1824, published 1827), the long poem by Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). Another “Carmen” story, its hero Aleko kills both the treacherous Zemfira and her lover (also see Keys, p. 49). The poem is also an affirmation of a gypsy’s freedom, which is another reason why H.H. says that the conspiratorial girls are speaking “Zemfirian,” as well as Basque. Carmen is a gypsy too, and in her last moments proclaims this freedom; Ada is cast as Dolores, the fatal gypsy dancing girl in the film Don Juan’s Last Fling (Ada, pp. 488–490).

  double game: a pun; Nabokov is also playing it by leading the reader on with a Doppelgänger situation that parodies itself. See Introduction.

  father-substitute: Quilty; a parody of the Freudian “transference” theory, whereby the daughter transfers her affections from her father to another, similar man, thus exorcising her Oedipal tension. Quilty is said to have indulged “snow”—argot for cocaine.

  gitanilla: a diminutive of gitana, Spanish for “Gypsy girl,” used often in Mérimée’s Carmen. In Ada, “Osberg” (Borges) is the author of The Gitanilla, a novel reminiscent of Lolita (see Lolita, light of my life), and several allusions to Osberg and his influence on Van Veen are jokes aimed at the critics who yoke Nabokov and Borges. A revolving paperback stand (p. 371) offers The Gitanilla along with several volumes no doubt as racy (Our Laddies and Clichy Clichés, joke titles aimed at the pornographic works produced by Lolita’s first publisher, the Olympia Press).

  une belle … en bleu: a beautiful lady all dressed in blue (a vision of the Virgin). “Visionary” nurse Mary is of Basque descent, and the Hautes-Pyrénées of her ancestors is in the same département (state) as Lourdes, where many little French girls have experienced visions of the blue-garbed Virgin, phenomena duly celebrated in the press and popular literature. Nabokov mocks a best-selling romance on the subject in Bend Sinister, Chapter Three: “… that remarkable cross between a certain kind of wafer and a lollipop, Louis Sontag’s Annunciata, which started so well in the Caves of St. Barthelemy and ended in the funnies” (the object of this parody is Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette).

  a saint: the lines which follow parody the first half of the fourth stanza of Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842):

  Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores

  Squats outside the Convent bank

  With Sanchicha, telling stories,

  Steeping tresses in the tank …

  For a summary of “While brown” gamesmanship, see Bill Brown … Dolores. For Browning, see frock-fold … Browning and Pim … Pippa.

  a great holiday: Fourth of July, 1949. “Independence Day—for Lolita,” said Nabokov.

  like some sly fairy: Frank may also have dallied with his Mrs. “Haze” (Hays). His tattoo of an elfin nymphet evokes the novel-length fairy-tale motif. See fructuate: rare for a summary. Her nakedness and “flower–crowned head” are in turn evocative of Polynesia.

  I would stay in bed all day: like a king, especially if “I felt … Polynesian.” The latter is a reference to the traditional family and clan division of Polynesian society, and the wide–ranging and complicated networks of ties overseen by the head of the clan who on some of the isles is a king over several islands. A good clan chief would certainly look into the disappearance of a daughter. The humor of the reference is also predicated on the importance of their incest taboos, which H.H. would obviously bypass. H.H. has doubtless read Margaret Mead’s omnibus volume, From the South Seas (1939).

  Mr. Gustave … spaniel pup: Lolita has told Quilty that H.H. has mistaken him for his uncle (or cousin), Gustave Trapp; Quilty has known this for some time (see G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.). Lolita liked the old lady’s cocker spaniel at The Enchanted Hunters (here; commented upon by H.H., spaniel … baptized), which eavesdropper Quilty may have recalled and thus bought her this pup. But one of his three hobbies is “pets.” For references to him, see Quilty, Clare.

  Caddy Lack: an obvious pun, but young readers, especially in A.D. 2000, may not know that in the 1947–1952 period the Cadillac was by far the most luxurious American car, and a “status symbol,” though H.H. uses its vulgar diminutive (“Caddy”) to suggest otherwise.

  maquette: a small, preliminary model of something planned, such as a stage set.

  telestically: with the projection of a purpose, with a definite end in view, inwardly expressed.

  bemazed: archaic; bewildered, stupefied.

  my brother: Quilty; see your brother and Ted Hunter, Cane, NH..

  CHAPTER 23

  fiend’s spoor: Quilty’s trail; a “spoor” is the track of a wild animal. The evil selves in Poe and Stevenson Double tales are of course animallike. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1845) it is an animal.

  comme il faut: French; good manners, decorum.

  Kawtagain: “Caught again.” Needless to say, there is no such town.

  342: see 342 and A key (342!) for the patterned “coincidence.”

  N. Petit … Ill.: abbreviated title of the illustrated French dictionary, Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré. Lucette’s “Little Larousse” in Ada is a pun on the French rousse, “red hair” (p. 368).

  a few paces from Lolita’s pillow: see someone … beyond our bathroom.

  Ponderosa Lodge: the return address on the letter received here.

  Dr. Gratiano … Mirandola, N.Y.: in the commedia dell’ arte, Doctor Gratiano is a philosopher, astronomer, man of letters, cabalist, barrister, grammarian, diplomat, and physician. When the doctor speaks, one cannot tell whether it is Latin or Low Breton, and he frequently delivers badly mangled quotations in Latin and Greek. His audiences usually must interrupt and thrash him in order to arrest the tide of “eloquence.” The nonexistent “town” Mirandola has nothing to do with Pico, the Italian humanist, Nabokov said; like Forbeson, he was a minor character in Italian comedy. Nor, said Nabokov, did he intend any allusion to Mirandolina, the heroine of Mine Hostess, by Carlo Goldoni, Italian playwright. See Clowns and Columbines … Tennis.

  your brother: H.H. has already said this of Quilty.

  an impossible balance: a very important passage. The verbal figurations throughout Lolita demonstrate how Nabokov appears everywhere in the texture but never in the text, though the impersonator “come[s] damn close to it” (see a seventh Hunter
), especially in the “cryptogrammic paper chase” on the next two pages. “Trapp” ’s balancing act lucidly describes the performance of both the narrator and his creator, while the “thrashing anguish” also belongs to John Ray’s “old-fashioned readers.”

  logodaedaly and logomancy: to prove that he is versed in logodaedaly (the arbitrary or capricious coining of words), H.H. the logomachist creates his own word from logo (word) plus the suffix -mancy (“divination in a [specified] manner”).

  Quelquepart: French; somewhere. Quilty must be there. See Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island.

  fountain pen … repressed undinist … water nymphs in the Styx: a most liquid passage. An undine is a female water spirit who could acquire a soul by marrying a mortal. “But,” added Nabokov, “the main point here is that ‘undinist’ is a person (generally male) who is erotically excited by another person’s (generally female) making water (Havelock Ellis was an ‘undinist,’ or ‘fountainist,’ and so was Leopold Bloom).” Ellis was the first to use the word this way, and H.H.—like Quilty, “an amateur of sex lore”—no doubt has read the section on “Undinism” in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VII. In Greek mythology, the Styx is the main river of the lower world.

  passion … cryptogrammic paper chase: Quilty is indeed a tease, but so is H.H., who punningly alludes to the “melancholy truth” about Quilty’s virtual impotence. Thus H.H. refers to Cue’s “teasing,” his “passion for tantalization” (that is, his main passion), and the “ejaculat[ion]” of “his fiendish conundrum.” The summary word “cryptogrammic” includes “cryptogamic” (“belonging or relating to the non-flowering plants”), which alludes to his sexuality, as well as his cryptogames. These games may be more gratifying than some, since Quilty’s literary sources are so broadly hinted at in the text.

  Arsène Lupin: the creation of Maurice Leblanc (see detective tale). See also Keys, p. 12. Most of the allusions in the two-page “paper chase” are also identified in Keys, pp. 12–19. Arsène Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes (1908) and Les Confidences d’Arsène Lupin (1914) are typical of the many Lupin volumes. For Conan Doyle, see Shirley Holmes. Hermann, the narrator of Despair, wonders, “But what are they—Doyle, Dostoevsky, Leblanc, Wallace—what are all the great novelists who wrote of nimble criminals … in comparison with me? Blundering fools!” (p. 122).

  A. Person, Porlock: in the note which he affixed to “Kubla Khan” (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the English poet, explains how his dream was interrupted: “At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock.…” H.H.’s “dream” has been interrupted with equal finality by Quilty. In “The Vane Sisters” (1959; in Nabokov’s Quartet and Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories), a story about psychic phenomena, there is an eccentric librarian named Porlock, “who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of ‘I’ for the second ‘h’ in the word ‘hither.’ ”

  touché, reader!: H.H. grants that the reader “got” these “easy” pokes; Rimbaud’s poem Le Bâteau ivre (see ramparts of ancient Europe and parapets of Europe) and Maurice Maeterlinck’s play L’Oiseau bleu have been transposed (see Maeterlinck). H.H. has written a book on “Rainbow” (see Peacock, Rainbow for the garbled newspaper report, which Quilty has evidently read). Schmetterling is German for butterfly (see here), and Maeterlinck was in fact an amateur entomologist.

  D. Orgon, Elmira, NY: Orgon is the husband of Elmire in Tartuffe (1664), by Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin [1622–1673]), French playwright and actor. The title character tries to seduce her. “Elmira” is of course an actual town, and the location of a college for women. Quilty was born in New Jersey and educated in New York (here), and “D. Orgon” is an accurately transcribed phonetic rendering of the regional accent.

  Bumper, Sheridan: Bumper is a character in The School for Scandal (1777), by Richard Sheridan (1751–1816), Irish playwright.

  Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH: in mythology, Phineas provided Jason the directions to find the Golden Fleece; while Phineas Quimby (1802–1866) was an American pioneer in the field of mental healing, born in Lebanon, N.H. He initially specialized in mesmerism, and for several years gave public hypnotic exhibitions (1838–1847). H.H.’s coercion of both Lolita and the reader make him a latter-day specialist, and here he says that “Mesmer Mesmer” was one of the possible pseudonyms he had considered for his narrative.

  Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.: for Kitzler—H.H.’s tag, miraculously picked up by Quilty—see kitzelans; for Eryx, the cult of Aphrodite, where “religious prostitution” was indeed practiced, see boat to Onyx or Eryx. The abbreviated form of Mississippi adds to the pun cluster an incongruous note of formality; “translated,” it reads “Dr. Clitoris, Venus, Miss”—and “Miss Venus” is the archetypal if not the ultimate beauty contest winner.

  living vacationists: “Johnny Randall of Ramble was a real person, I think (as was also Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble, p. 252),” said Nabokov, but the two are linked to form another verbal “coincidence.”

  N.S. Aristoff … NY: Catagela is the comic name of a town in the play The Acharnians (425 B.C.), by Aristophanes (445–385 B.C.). It is from a Greek word meaning “to deride.”

  James … Hoaxton: James Mavor Morell is one of the main characters in Candida (1894), a play by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Hoxton (Shaw’s spelling) is a place name therein. The additional a is well in the spirit of this “cryptogrammic paper chase,” since Quilty is a permanent resident of “hoax town,” and his maker has passed through that town more than once. Dreyer reads Candida in King, Queen, Knave (p. 263).

  G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.: H.H.’s relative is Swiss, so nationalistic Quilty chooses a city found in America as well as in Switzerland.

  Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island: “Aubrey McFate” (Aubrey McFate … devil of mine) and the Beardsleyan motif (McFate, Aubrey; Gaston Godin) are finally united by Quilty in “Quelquepàrt”—that is, “somewhere.” This French mirrors a Mérimée tag that lies ahead (Changeons … séparés).

  Lucas Picador: in Mérimée’s novella, Lucas the picador is Carmen’s last lover; José, tired of killing her lovers, kills Carmen (see Little Carmen). In bullfighting, the picador is the member of the company who uses a lance to annoy and weaken the bull just prior to the kill. Although Quilty seems to cast himself as the picador, it is the tired bull who will ultimately make the kill.

  Merrymay, Pa.… my Carmen: a pun; Mérimée. The abbreviated Pennsylvania is a pun that nicely capsules Lolita’s insulting, mock-familiar tone, as though she were saying, “the merry May festival is now being celebrated by Quilty, Dad.” H.H.’s betrayed “pathetic endearments” are his frequent epithets from Carmen.

  Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.: Quilty echoes H.H., whose “forsooth” acknowledges the “coincidence”; see a saint (“Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores”) and Bill Brown … Dolores. For “Dolores, Colo.,” see Dolores and Dolores, Colo..

  Harold Haze: Lolita’s deceased father.

  Donald Quix: this pseudonym is appropriate to the Sierras, because they constitute so elevated a target for a windmill-tilter such as Quixote.

  bodkin: a stiletto or dagger.

  Chestnut Lodge: although H.H. is very sensitive to numerical and verbal “combinations,” he is no match for Quilty, who is acute enough to have had miraculous access to H.H.’s previous pages: “Chestnut Lodge” completes H.H.’s cycle of changes on “Chestnut” (see Chestnut Court and Chestnuts and Colts); the key to the Lodge is held by Nabokov.

  Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.: an anagram of “Enchanted Hunter” (see The Enchanted Hunters), it is as expertly done as “Vivian Darkbloom.” Quilty’s punning allusion to Cain is appropriate and indeed perceptive, since H.H. has just referred to him as his brother (see my brother).

  interrelated combinations: the letters and numerals on the first two license plates offer William Shakespeare’s monograms and dates of birth and death (156
4–1616). For Shakespeare, see Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. and God or Shakespeare. The letters on the second set of plates refer to Quilty and his nickname (“Cue”). Less obvious and most literally “cryptogrammic” are the numbers, which add up to a highly significant fifty-two. H.H. and Lolita spent a year on the road—that is, fifty-two weeks—and there are as many lines in the poem addressed to her here. Ray’s Foreword indicates that Lolita, H.H., and Quilty all die in 1952 (see p. 4). There are fifty-two cards in a deck, and the author of King, Queen, Knave still has a few up his sleeve, as he demonstrates here.

  cunningly contrived … a common denominator: cunning or not, it is revealed, for it is quite impossible that either H.H. or Quilty could realize the full significance of the number fifty-two; only one person can, and the “common denominator” points to the author. The “paper chase” is contrived in the same spirit as Ray’s Foreword (see “real people”), the entomological motif (see John Ray, Jr.), the opening chapter (see Lolita, light of my life and in point of fact), Who’s Who in the Limelight (see I have only words to play with and The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity), and the Ramsdale class list (see her class at … school and McFate, Aubrey)—to name only the main clusters and interlacements of Nabokov’s grand anthemion. Of course, many of the allusions are within Quilty’s reach, and there are plausible explanations for his knowing certain things. But other details are extraordinary, and it is not simply a matter of Quilty’s brain having “affinities with my own,” as H.H. says. How could Quilty know that earlier in these pages H.H. had used “Kitzler,” identified “Aubrey” as his “McFate,” toyed with Chestnuts, alluded to Eryx (and Venus), and quoted “While brown Dolores”? Quilty knows all this—and everything else—because Nabokov wants him to know it, and because Quilty and H.H. can be said to “exist” only insofar as they have been created by the same man. In its concentrated effect, the “paper chase” is to the last part of the novel what Who’s Who is to the first.