d. the pangs of conscience and/or fear that have made him discard the idea of poison and/or murder in general; or
e. the hope against hope that he has succeeded in simply willing her demise.
8. All of the above merge in the kaleidoscope of a mad mind.
Did the man actually enter the pharmacy? Here, as elsewhere, my translatorial ethics would prohibit adding to Father’s text to make things more explicit in English than they are in Russian. The text’s multilevel, pleasingly elliptical form is an integral part of its character. If VN had wanted to be more specific here, he would have done so in the original.
Time and place are purposely left imprecise in the story, which is essentially timeless and placeless. One might presume that the 1930s are nearly over, and, as Nabokov later confirmed,[19] that we are in Paris, and then en route to the south of France. There is also a brief detour to a small city not very far from the capital. The only character mentioned by name in the text[20] is the least important one: the female servant, in that provincial city, who helps the ill-fated child pack and shoos away the chicks as the car, containing protagonist and prey united at last, speeds away.
I shall leave to the studious—among whom exist some superbly sensitive readers of Nabokov—the detailed identification and the documentation of themes and levels (straight narrative, tricky metaphor, romantic poetry, sexuality, fairy-tale sublimation, mathematics, conscience, compassion, fear of being strung up by the heels), as well as the search for hidden parallels with The Song of Igor’s Campaign or Moby Dick. Father would have put Freudians on guard against rejoicing at the ephemeral mention of a sister, the girl’s curious regression into infancy at the end, or the elaborate walking stick (which is unabashedly and entertainingly phallic but, on a totally distinct plane, visually evocative as well of the appetizing, “valuable” objects—another example is the rare, blank-faced watch—with which Nabokov sometimes liked to endow his characters).
Certain other compressed images and locutions should, possibly, be explained, since it would be a pity if they were wasted. Here are a few “special” examples, given, unlike those singled out above, in proper order.
The “black salad devouring a green rabbit” (this page; one of a number (see below) of visual aberrations that, on one level, give the story a surreal, enchanted aura while, on another, describing with utmost economy and directness how a character’s perception of reality is momentarily distorted by a state of being (in this case, the protagonist’s overpowering, thwarted, barely concealed excitement).
The “little Japanese steps” (this page): many if not all readers must have seen, on the big screen or the little one, or at the opera, or perhaps in the real Orient, the geisha-style walk—short, mincing steps on high platform sandals—to which Nabokov likens the girl’s progress on skates whose wheels refuse to roll on the gravel.
A potentially more cryptic passage is that of the “strange, nailless finger” scrawled on the fence (this page). Here, again, deliberate ambiguity, concurrent images and ideas, and multiple levels of interpretation are at play. To spell this one out: The “definite goal” that emerges from a substratum of the man’s brain is access to the girl via marriage to the mother. The imagined graffito on the fence is a hybrid of the forefinger pointing the way on old-fashioned signs and of some joker’s phallic doodle that the digit’s stylized, nailless shape simultaneously suggests to a mind bent, basically, on depravity, but not devoid of self-reproaching flashes of objectivity. This ambiguous finger simultaneously indicates, in the fleeting image, the path of courtship (of the mother), the secret parts of the yearned-for girl, and the protagonist’s own vulgarity that no amount of rationalization can explain away.
“Cuff” (this page) as in “cufflinks.” It is clearly implied that the poor woman is still playing hard to get. The wordplay, with an oblique echo of the work’s Russian title, whose most direct meaning is “magician,” refers to a card up the conjuror’s sleeve—the superficial trappings of marriage—plus the actual, live, presumably loving husband, “the live ace of hearts.” There is also a parallel, introspective nuance here: the cynical trick that this travesty of a marriage represents to the protagonist. He shares this underlying joke with the perceptive reader, though not, of course, with his bride-to-be. We have the same kind of multiple compression here as in the graffito image.
“Compass rose” (this page): The early Italian nautical compass card, more stylized than today’s, and indicating, as compass roses still do, the principal and subsidiary compass points (which also identified the directions from which winds blew) was called rosa dei venti, “rose of the winds,” because of its flowerlike appearance and because wind directions were of paramount concern to navigators; the Italian term survives to this day. A nice fillip is gained in translation (for a minority of readers perhaps—those who navigate and those who know Italian), since the image refers to drafts coming from various directions through windows opened by the charwoman.
“The 32nd” (this page): another beautifully concentrated image that it is almost a pity to deaden by bookish explication. His violent emotions—anticipation of finally encountering the girl alone, the infuriating surprise and disappointment of finding the bustling char—have simply imparted a moist blur to his vision and made him see an absurd date. The month is immaterial. A Nabokovian irony is there, but a bit of compassion for the monster seeps through as well.
A “doubling cat” (this page) is a cat seen by a child so tired that she has difficulty keeping her eyes focused. It is, optically, akin to “32nd” and the “green rabbit.”
It would of course have been possible to give a minute explanation of every challenging passage, but that would have produced a scholarly apparatus longer than the text itself. These little puzzles, which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling Lolita.
The things I love about the story are, among others, the suspense (how will reality betray the dream?) and the corollary of a surprise on every page; the eerie humor (the grotesque wedding night; the suspicious chauffeur who vaguely foreshadows Clare Quilty; the Shakespearean clown of a night porter; the protagonist’s desperate search for the misplaced room—will he emerge, as in “A Visit to the Museum,”[21] into a totally different town or will the old porter, whom he comes upon at last, react as if seeing him for the first time in his life?); the descriptions (the forest hopping from hill to hill only to trip over the highway, and much else); the preliminary glimpses of people and things with a parallel life of their own that will, incidentally or crucially, recur; the trucks ominously thundering in the night; the splendidly innovative use of Russian in the original; the cinematic imagery of the surreal conclusion and the frenzied pace, a kind of stretta finale, that accelerates toward the crashing climax.
The English title chosen by Father has, of course, a not-so-secret echo in The Enchanted Hunters of Lolita. I shall leave to others the search for additional Easter eggs of this kind. One should be wary, however, of exaggerating the significance of superficial similarities. Nabokov considered The Enchanter a totally distinct work, only distantly connected to Lolita. It may have contained, as he put it, “the first little throb” of the later novel—and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his—but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works; various literary compositions come to mind, such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Or, conversely, there may be a subsequent mini-version, a final distillation such as Massenet’s Portrait of Manon. In any case, Volshebnik is certainly not a Portrait of Lolita: the differences between the two are clearly greater than the similarities. Whether or not the later novel is a love affair between the author and the English language, a love affair between Europe and Ameri
ca, a jaundiced view of the motel scene and the surrounding landscape, a modern-day “free translation of Onegin” (these and a multitude of other hypotheses have been advanced, eagerly but with varying degrees of seriousness and credibility), Lolita is unquestionably the product of very new and different artistic stimuli.
On the premise that it is preferable to be angelic than foolish in approaching the genesis of a complex artistic work, I shall not venture to assess the importance to Lolita of Nabokov’s study of Lewis Carroll; of his observations in Palo Alto in 1941; or of Havelock Ellis’s transcription, circa 1912, of a Ukrainian pedophile’s confessions, which have been translated from the original French by Donald Rayfield (who, despite a haunting echo of the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in Lolita, is a very real British scholar). Rayfield theorizes, amid certain less convincing assertions, that the pseudonymous Victor, via Ellis, deserves credit “for his contribution to the theme and plot of Lolita and the strange sensuous and intellectual character of Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov’s finest English-language novel.” And, while acknowledging the previous composition of The Enchanter (whose title he translates literally as “The Magician”), he further conjectures that the unfortunate Ukrainian’s account provided the final impetus for the emergence of “Lolita’s central theme.”[22] This hypothesis might merit consideration, were it not for certain chronological facts that I must nevertheless point out: It was not until 1948 that Edmund Wilson sent the Ellis transcription to Nabokov, who had had no previous acquaintance with it—while Volshebnik, which does contain what might be called the “central theme” (if little else) of Lolita, was completed in 1939.
As for The Enchanter’s contribution, occasional ideas and images from it are indeed echoed in Lolita. But, as I—and many others—have noted in the past, themes and details of various kinds often recur in Nabokov’s novels, stories, poems, and plays. In this case, the echoes are distant and the dissimilarities substantial: setting (geographically but, above all, artistically remote); characters (reflected on occasion, but dimly at best); development and dénouement (totally different).
Perhaps a girl in a European park, fleetingly recalled by Humbert on an early page of Lolita, is Nabokov’s way of acknowledging the little heroine of The Enchanter, but also of relegating her forever to the category of very distant relative.
Dolores Haze may, as Nabokov says, be “very much the same lass” as the Enchanter’s victim, but only in an inspirational, conceptual sense. In other ways the earlier child is very different—perverse only in the madman’s eyes; innocently incapable of anything like the Quilty intrigue; sexually unawakened and physically immature, which is perhaps why Weidle recalled her as a ten-year-old.
It would be a serious mistake to roll away, on that protonymphet’s skates, into a garden of parallel primrose paths.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1889. 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 THE TRANSLATOR
Dmitri Nabokov was born in 1934 in Berlin and came to the United States as a small child with his parents. He graduated from Harvard, served in the U.S. Army, and then began the vocal studies that led him to become an opera and concert performer—a basso—around the world. He has translated most of his father’s Russian short stories and plays and many of his novels into English.
Vintage International Books
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
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/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3
THE EYE
The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1
THE GIFT
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5
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. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but 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.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0
LOLITA
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE
As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhi
n’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4
PALE FIRE
Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward 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/978-0-679-72342-4
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 the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2
SPEAK, MEMORY
Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.
Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
The Enchanter Page 8