Lolita and Nabokov’s Art of Deception

1. Nabokov’s PUPPET SHOW

I have tried my best to show the workings of the book, at least some of its workings. Its charm, humour and pathos can only be appreciated by direct reading. But for enlightenment of those who felt baffled by its habit of metamorphosis, or merely disgusted at finding something incompatible with the idea of a “nice book” in the discovery of a book’s being an utterly new one, I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called “methods of composition.” It is as if a painter said: look, here I’m going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight¹

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The rich and aristocratic Nabokovs were not the “White Russian” stock figures of Western liberal demonology—all monocles, Fabergé snuffboxes, and reactionary opinions—but rather a family with a long tradition of high culture and public service. Nabokov’s grandfather was Minister of Justice under two tsars and implemented the court reforms, while Nabokov’s father was a distinguished jurist, a foe of anti-Semitism, a prolific journalist and scholar, a leader of the opposition party (the Kadets), and a member of the first parliament (Duma). In 1919 he took his family into exile, co-editing a liberal émigré daily in Berlin until his death in 1922 (at age fifty-two), at a political meeting, where he was shot while trying to shield the speaker from two monarchist assassins. Young Nabokov went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1922 taking an honors degree in Slavic and Romance Languages. For the next eighteen years he lived in Germany and France, writing prolifically in Russian. The spectral émigré communities of Europe were not large enough to sustain a writer, and Nabokov supported himself through translations, public readings of his works, lessons in English and tennis, and, fittingly, the first Russian crossword puzzles, which he composed for a daily émigré paper. In 1940 he and his wife and son moved to the United States, and Nabokov began to write in English. The frequently made comparison with Joseph Conrad denies Nabokov his signal achievement; for the Polish-born author was thirty when he started to write in English, and, unlike the middle-aged Nabokov, he had not written anything in his native language, let alone nine novels.¹

In America, Nabokov lectured on Russian literature at Wellesley (1941–1948) and Cornell (1948–1958), where his Masterpieces of European Fiction course proved immensely popular. While at Wellesley he also worked on Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Nabokov’s several books in English had meanwhile earned him the quiet respect of discerning readers, but Lolita was the first to attract wide attention. Its best-sellerdom and film sale in 1958 enabled Nabokov to resign his teaching position and devote himself to his writing in Montreux, Switzerland, where he took up residence in 1960. When the first edition of The Annotated Lolita went to press, he was working on a new novel (Transparent Things) and a history of the butterfly in Western art, and planning for the future publication of several works, including his Cornell lectures, his screenplay of Lolita (only parts of which were used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film), and a selection of his Russian poems, translated by Nabokov and about to be published, together with his chess problems, as Poems and Problems.

Lolita had made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov. Although praised by influential critics, Lolita was treated as a kind of miracle of spontaneous generation, for Nabokov’s oeuvre was like an iceberg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the visible peaks of Lolita and Pnin (1957). But in those eleven years since Putnam’s had published Lolita, twenty-one Nabokov titles had appeared, including six works translated from the Russian, three out-of-print novels, two collections of stories, Pale Fire (1962), the monumental four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene One-gin (1964), Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966)—a considerably revised and expanded version of the memoir first issued in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence—and Ada (1969), his fifteenth novel, whose publication celebrated his seventieth birthday. The publication of Mary (1926) and Glory (1931), then being Englished by, respectively, Michael Glenny and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, would complete the translation of his Russian novels.

This extraordinary outburst of Nabokoviana highlights the resolute spirit of the man who published his masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire, at the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three, respectively. Nabokov had endured the exigencies of being an émigré writer when the Western world seemed interested only in his inferior Soviet contemporaries, and emerged not only as a major Russian writer but as the most important living American novelist. No doubt some academic pigeonholers still worried about Nabokov’s nationality and where to “place” him, but John Updike had solved this synthetic problem when he described Nabokov as “the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship.”¹ Not since Henry James, an émigré in his own right, had an American citizen created so formidable a corpus of work.

Nabokov’s pronounced antipathy to Freud and the novel of society continued to alienate some critics during his lifetime, but there was a reason for the delay in achieving his proper status more basic than the unavailability of his early books or his failure to conform to some accepted school or Zeitgeist pattern: readers trained on the tenets of formalist criticism simply did not know what to make of works which resist the search for ordered mythic and symbolic “levels of meaning” and depart completely from post-Jamesian requisites for the “realistic” or “impressionistic” novel—that a fiction be the impersonal product of a pure aesthetic impulse, a self-contained illusion of reality rendered from a consistently held point of view and through a central intelligence from which all authorial comment has been exorcised. Quite the opposite happens in Nabokov’s fiction: his art must be seen as artifice, even when its verisimilitude is most convincing and compelling, as in Lolita; and the fantastic, a-realistic, and involuted forms toward which even his earliest fictions evolve make it clear that Nabokov had always gone his own way, and it was not the way of the novel’s Great Tradition according to F.R. Leavis. But Nabokov’s eminence signaled a radical shift in opinions about the novel and the novelist’s ethical responsibilities. A future historian of the novel may one day claim that it was Nabokov, more than any of his contemporaries, who kept alive an exhausted art form not only by demonstrating new possibilities for it but by reminding us, through his example, of the variegated aesthetic resources of his great forebears, such as Sterne and the Joyce who was a parodist rather than a symbolist.

In addition to its qualities as a memoir, Speak, Memory serves, along with Chapter Five in Gogol (1944), as the ideal introduction to Nabokov’s art, for some of the most lucid criticism of Nabokov is found in his own books. His most overtly parodic novels spiral in upon themselves and provide their own commentary; sections of The Gift (1937–1938) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) limpidly describe the narrative strategies of later novels. Nabokov’s preoccupations are perhaps best projected by bringing together the opening and closing sentences of Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye, the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” The Eye (1930) is well tided; the apprehension of “reality” (a word that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.” Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchantment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes about in Art and Illusion—everything is there, in sight (no symbols lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the trompe-l’oeil, which eventually reveals something totally different from what one had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled picture” has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has been expanded or created.

The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures.

Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Bebeading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters.

Although Speak, Memory clearly illuminates the self-parodic content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aesthetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily misunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in Speak, Memory Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of Speak, Memory with The Gift, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in Speak, Memory with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in Pale Fire Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, /I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré. Exile is a correlative for all human loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as Lolita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. “Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mirrors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant Producer” [1943], in Nabokov’s Dozen [1958]).

The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody … there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”.

An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new life: frozen in an, halted in space, now timeless, it can be lived with. When the clownish Gradus assassinates John Shade by mistake, in a novel published forty years after Nabokov’s father was similarly murdered, one may remember the butterfly which the seven-year-old Nabokov caught and then lost, but which was “finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion … near Boulder” (Speak, Memory). One recognizes how art makes life possible for Nabokov, and why he calls Invitation to a Beheading a “violin in a void.” His art records a constant process of becoming—the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation—and the cycle of insect metamorphosis is Nabokov’s controlling metaphor for the process, provided by a lifetime of biological investigations which established in his mind “links between butterflies and the central problems of nature.” Significantly, a butterfly or moth will often appear at the end of a Nabokov novel, when the artistic “cycle” of that book is complete.

Speak, Memory only reinforces what is suggested by Nabokov’s visibly active participation in the life of his fiction, as in Invitation to a Beheading when Cincinnatus strains to look out of his barred window and sees on the prison wall the telling, half-erased inscription, “You cannot see anything. I tried it too”, written in the neat, recognizable hand of the “prison director”—that is, the author—whose intrusions involute the book and deny it any reality except that of “book.” The word “involution” may trouble some readers, but one has only to extend the dictionary definition. An involuted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and “allégorique de lui-même”—allegorical of itself, to use Mallarmé’s description of one of his own poems. An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, “I am a sentence,” and John Barth’s short stories “Title,” “Life-Story,” and “Menelaiad” (in Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) come as close to this dubious ideal as any fiction possibly can. The components of “Title,” for example, sustain a miraculous discussion among themselves, sometimes even addressing the author: “Once upon a time you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of technique.”

Characters in involuted works often recognize that their authenticity is more than suspect. In Raymond Queneau’s Les Enfants du Limon (1938), Chambernac is a lycée headmaster who has been collecting material for a monumental work on “literary madmen,” L’Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes. By the last chapter he has abandoned hope of getting it published, but he then is approached in a café by “un type” (Queneau, as it turns out, who identifies himself by name) and offers to turn the manuscript over for use in a novel Queneau is writing, one of whose characters is a headmaster, and so forth. A similar infinite regress exists in Chapter Four of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872), the creator’s (and Creator’s) role now played by the sleeping Red King. When Alice moves to waken the King, Tweedledee stops her:

“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.” “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?” “Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.” “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.” “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry. A similar discussion occurs in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). “What is there to keep me here?” asks Clov. “The dialogue,” answers Hamm. More like the Tweedles than Alice are the three aging characters in Queneau’s Le Chiendent (1933). Having survived the long destructive Franco-Etruscan war, by the final pages they are ready for anything. When the queen is complimented, she says, “It wasn’t I who said that … It’s in the book.” Asked “What book?” she replies, “Well, this one. The one we’re in now, which repeats what we say as we say it and which follows us and tells about us, a genuine blotter which has been stuck on our lives.”¹ They then discuss the novel of which they are a part and agree to try to annihilate time and begin all over again. They go back to Paris, back in time. The last two sentences of the book are the first two sentences.

Although the philosophical implications are somewhat less interesting, the most patent examples of involution are found in comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. The creatures in cartoons used to be brought to life before one’s eyes: first, the tabula rasa of an empty screen, which is then seen to be a drawing board, over which the artist’s brush sweeps, a few strokes creating the characters, who only then begin to move. Or the convention of the magical ink bottle, framing the action fore and aft. The characters are sucked back into the bottle at the end, just as they had spilled out of it at the start. These devices describe the process of Le Chiendent, where one sees a silhouette from the first page fleshed-out more and more as the novel progresses, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959), where in the stillness of his room the narrator contemplates several objects, including a steel engraving, which is then “animated,” a fiction spinning out of it. “We create ourselves in time,” says one of the characters at the end of Le Chiendent, “and the old book snatches us up right away with its funny little scrawl [handwriting].”²

In involuted works, characters readily communicate with their creators, though the relationship is not always ideal. One may recall an early Bugs Bunny animated cartoon (c. 1943) in which there is a wild running battle between the rabbit and the artist, whose visible hand alternately wields an eraser and a drawing pencil, terrible weapons which at one moment remove the rabbit’s feet so that he cannot escape, and at another give him a duck’s bill so that he cannot talk back, not unlike the lot of the characters in Invitation to a Beheading, who are taken apart, rearranged, and reassembled at will. But characters are not always as uncomplaining as Cincinnatus. In the next-to-last box of a 1936 daily strip, Chester Gould pictured his hero trapped horribly in a mine shaft, its entrance blocked by a huge boulder. The balloon above Dick Tracy’s stricken face said, “Gould, you have gone too far.” The concluding box was to have shown a kindly eraser-bearing hand, descending to remove the boulder; but The Chicago Tribune’s Captain Patterson, no doubt a disciple of Dr. Leavis, thought Gould had indeed gone too far, and rejected that strip. Considerably less desperate is Shakespeare’s direct address to Joyce in Nighttown: “How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun,” that moment being Bloomsday, this book, and Joyce’s stab at greatness.¹ “O Jamesy let me up out of this,” pleads Molly Bloom to Joyce,² and in the hallucinated Nighttown section the shade of Virag says, “That suits your book, eh?” When in acknowledgment his throat is made to twitch, Virag says, “Slapbang! There he goes again.”³ Virga is quite right to speak directly to Joyce, because the phantasmagoria of Nighttown are the artist’s. Virag accepts the truth that he is another’s creation, and does so far more gracefully than Alice or poor Krug in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, who is instantaneously rendered insane by the realization. On the other hand, this perception steels Cincinnatus, who is waiting to be beheaded, since it means he cannot really “die.”

Nabokov’s remarks on Gogol help to underscore this analogical definition of involution. “All reality is a mask,” he writes, and Nabokov’s narratives are masques, stagings of his own inventions rather than recreations of the naturalistic world. But, since the latter is what most readers expect and demand of fiction, many still do not understand what Nabokov is doing. They are not accustomed to “the allusions to something else behind the crudely painted screens”, where the “real plots behind the obvious ones are taking place.” There are thus at least two “plots” in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the consciousness of the creator above it—the “real plot” which is visible in the “gaps” and “holes” in the narrative. These are best described in Chapter Fourteen of Speak, Memory, when Nabokov discusses “the loneliest and most arrogant” of the émigré writers, Sirin (his émigré pen name): “The real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic [Nabokov?] has compared to windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” The contiguous world is the mind and spirit of the author, whose identity, psychic survival, and “manifold awareness” are ultimately both the subject and the product of the book. In whatever way they are opened, the “windows” always reveal that “the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus” of everything.

From its birth in King, Queen, Knave (1928), to its full maturation in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), to its apotheosis in the “involute abode” of Pale Fire (1962), the strategy of involution has determined the structure and meaning of Nabokov’s novels. One must always be aware of the imprint of “that master thumb,” to quote Frank Lane in Pale Fire, “that made the whole involuted boggling thing one beautiful straight line,” for only then does it become possible to see how the “obvious plots” spiral in and out of the “real” ones. Although other writers have created involuted works, Nabokov’s self-consciousness is supreme; and the range and scale of his effects, his mastery and control, make him unique. Not including autobiographic themes, the involution is achieved in seven basic ways, all closely interrelated, but schematized here for the sake of clarity:

PARODY. As willful artifice, parody provides the main basis for Nabokov’s involution, the “springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion,” as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight says of Knight’s novels. Because its referents are either other works of art or itself, parody denies the possibility of a naturalistic fiction. Only an authorial sensibility can be responsible for the texture of parody and self-parody; it is a verbal vaudeville, a series of literary impersonations performed by the author. When Nabokov calls a character or even a window shade “a parody,” it is in the sense that his creation can possess no other “reality.” In a novel such as Lolita, which has the fewest “gaps” of any novel after Despair (1934), and is seemingly his most realistic, the involution is sustained by the parody and the verbal patterning.

COINCIDENCE. Speak, Memory is filled with examples of Nabokov’s love of coincidence. Because they are drawn from his life, these incidents demonstrate how Nabokov’s imagination responds to coincidence, using it in his fiction to trace the pattern of a life’s design, to achieve shattering interpenetrations of space and time. “Some law of logic,” writes Nabokov in Ada (1969), “should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth”. Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze’s house at 342 Lawn Street; he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit cross-country tour in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters hotel; and in one year on the road they register in 342 motels and hotels. Given the endless mathematical combinations possible, the numbers seem to signal his entrapment by McFate (to use Humbert’s personification). But they are also a patent, purposeful contrivance, like the copy of the 1946 Who’s Who in the Limelight which Humbert would have us believe he found in the prison library on the night previous to his writing the chapter we are now reading. The yearbook not only prefigures the novel’s action, but under Lolita’s mock-entry of “Dolores Quine” we are informed that she “Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers”—and in the closing paragraph of the novel, almost three hundred pages later, Humbert advises the absent Lolita, “Do not talk to strangers,” a detail that exhibits extraordinary narrative control for an allegedly unrevised, first-draft confessional, written during fifty-six chaotic days. Clearly, “Someone else is in the know,” to quote a mysterious voice that interrupts the narration of Bend Sinister. It is no coincidence when coincidences extend from book to book. Creations from one “reality” continually turn up in another: the imaginary writer Pierre Delalande is quoted in The Gift and provides the epigraph for Invitation to a Beheading; Pnin and another character mention “Vladimir Vladimirovich” and dismiss his entomology as an affectation; “Hurricane Lolita” is mentioned in Pale Fire, and Pnin is glimpsed in the university library. Mythic or prosaic names and certain fatidic numbers recur with slight variation in many books, carrying no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that someone beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of one master pattern.

PATTERNING. Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidoptery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist; thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. Chess motifs are woven into several narratives, and even in The Defense (1930), a most naturalistically ordered early novel, the chess patterning points to forces beyond Grandmaster Luzhin’s comprehension (“Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board,” writes Nabokov in the Foreword). The importance of the lepidopteral motif has already been suggested, and it spirals freely in and out of Nabokov’s books: in Invitationto a Beheading, just before he is scheduled to die, Cincinnatus gently strokes a giant moth; in Pale Fire a butterfly alights on John Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed; in Ada, when Van Veen arrives for a duel, a transparent white butterfly floats past and Van is certain he has only minutes to live; in the final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls seeing in Paris, just before the war, a live butterfly being promenaded on a leash of thread; at the end of Bend Sinister the masked author intrudes and suspends the “obvious plot,” and as the book closes he looks out of the window and decides, as a moth twangs against the screen, that it is “A good night for mothing.” Bend Sinister was published in 1947, and it is no accident that in Nabokov’s next novel (1955) Humbert meets Lolita back in 1947, thus sustaining the author’s “fictive time” without interruption and enabling him to pursue that moth’s lovely diurnal Double through the substratum of the new novel in the most fantastic butterfly hunt of his career. “I confess I do not believe in time,” writes Nabokov at the end of the ecstatic butterfly chapter in Speak, Memory. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”

ALLUSION. Humbert’s references to art and literature are consistent with his mind and education, but in other novels and stories such cultural allusions point to Nabokov. In Invitation to a Beheading, for instance, Cincinnatus, imprisoned by the State, cannot identify the bits and pieces from Baudelaire’s poem L’Invitation au voyage (1855) that echo in his consciousness, inform the novel’s garden motif, and sound in the book’s title. They’re emanating from the mind of his maker, who especially cherishes Baudelaire’s utopia of the spirit as he writes the book at hand in Nazi Germany, in 1934—Hitler’s voice echoing across nocturnal Berlin from rooftop loudspeakers at the very moment that Nabokov defies dystopia by writing the farcical, and finally joyous, Invitation to a Beheading.

THE WORK-WITHIN-THE-WORK. The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and Who’s Who in the Limelight and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of Lolita. The a-novelistic components of Pale Fire—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator. Pale Fire realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of The Gift. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within Hamlet, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”¹ THE STAGING OF THE NOVEL. Nabokov wrote the screenplay of Lolita, as well as nine plays in Russian, including one of his several forays into science fiction, The Waltz Invention (1938), which was translated and published in 1966. It is not surprising, then, that his novels should proliferate with “theatrical” effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks. And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book is being manipulated than by seeming to stage it? In Invitation to a Beheading, “A Summer thunderstorm, simply yet tastefully staged, was performed outside.” When Quilty finally dies in Lolita, Humbert says, “This was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”; and in Laughter in the Dark (1932), “The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting Proteus.” Nabokov the protean impersonator is always a masked presence in his fiction: as impresario, scenarist, director, warden, dictator, landlord, and even as bit player (the seventh Hunter in Quilty’s play within Lolita, a Young Poet who insists that everything in the play is his invention)—to name only a few of the disguises he has donned as a secret agent who moves among his own creations like Prospero in The Tempest. Shakespeare is very much an ancestor (he and Nabokov even share a birthday), and the creaking, splintering noise made by the stage setting as it disintegrates at the end of Invitation to a Beheading is Nabokov’s version of the snapping of Prospero’s wand and his speech to the players (“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air”; IV.i).

AUTHORIAL VOICE. All the involuted effects spiral into the authorial voice—“an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,” Nabokov calls it—which intrudes continually in all of his novels after Despair, most strikingly at the end, when it completely takes over the book (Lolita is a notable exception). It is this “deity” who is responsible for everything: who begins a narrative only to stop and retell the passage differently; halts a scene to “rerun” it on the chapter’s screen, or turns a reversed lantern slide around to project it properly; intrudes to give stage directions, to compliment or exhort the actors, to have a prop moved; who reveals that the characters have “cotton-padded bodies” and are the author’s puppets, that all is a fiction; and who widens the “gaps” and “holes” in the narrative until it breaks apart at “the end,” when the vectors are removed, the cast of characters is dismissed, and even the fiction fades away—at most leaving behind an imprint on space in the form of a précis of “an old-fashioned [stage] melodrama” the “deity” may one day write, and which describes (as in the case of Pale Fire) the book we’ve just finished reading.

The vertiginous conclusion of a Nabokov novel calls for a complicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of other possibilities, as their art reveals. My own children, then three and six years old, reminded me of this one summer when they inadvertently demonstrated that, unless they change, they will be among Nabokov’s ideal readers. One afternoon my wife and I built them a puppet theater. After propping the theater on the top edge of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The couch and the theater’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire theater, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth—leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch’s rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before—and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness.

When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Montreux, to interview him for Wisconsin Studies and in regard to my critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how for me it defined literary involution and the response which he hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly, exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.”

In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform, spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total design of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his characters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling toward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them—an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison. He is its creator, and is above it, in control of a book, as in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabokov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,” in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best described in Speak, Memory, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on the disinclination of

… physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the whereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again. The ultimate detachment of an “outside” view of a novel inspires our wonder and enlarges our potential for compassion because, “in the spiral unwinding of things,” such compassion is extended to include the mind of an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man’s ability to confront and order chaos.

2. BACKGROUNDS OF LOLITA

Critics too often treat Nabokov’s twelfth novel as a special case quite apart from the rest of his work, when actually it concerns, profoundly and in their darkest and yet most comic form, the themes which have always occupied him. Although Lolita may still be a shocking novel to several aging non-readers, the exact circumstances of its troubled publication and reception may not be familiar to younger readers. After four American publishers refused it, Madame Ergaz, of Bureau Littéraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted Lolita to Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris.¹ Although Girodias must be credited with the publication of several estimable if controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, his main fare was the infamous Travellers Companion series, the green-backed books once so familiar and dear to the eagle-eyed inspectors of the U.S. Customs. But Nabokov did not know this and, because of one of Girodias’ previous publishing ventures, the “Editions du Chêne,” thought him a publisher of “fine editions.” Cast in two volumes and bound in the requisite green, Lolita was quietly published in Paris in September 1955.

Because it seemed to confirm the judgment of those nervous American publishers, the Girodias imprimatur became one more obstacle for Lolita to overcome, though the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems remote today, and was definitively settled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953–1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of Until She Screams and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, I found Lolita. Although I thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Literature 311–312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as Ulysses and Madame Bovary (the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the B when mentioning the latter). I brought Lolita back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo … lita, light … of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The … tip of the … tongue … taking … a trip …’—Damn!” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “It’s God-damn Litachure!!” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.

At a double remove from the usual review media, Lolita went generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of 1956 Graham Greene in England recommended Lolita as one of the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a columnist in the Sunday Express, which moved Greene to respond in The Spectator. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint tempest in an old teapot), The New York Times Book Review of February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling Lolita “a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name. Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of mail,” The Times devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject, quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground existence of Lolita, which became public in the summer of 1957 when the Anchor Review in New York devoted 112 of its pages to Nabokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita. “When Putnam’s brought out the American edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertisements with an array of statements by respectable and even distinguished literary names, though Lolita’s fast climb to the top of the best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire [1. 680]), also creating storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, including an editorial in The New Republic; but, since these at best belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be detailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the daily New York Times of August 18, 1958, has a charm that should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”¹ Prescott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in The Southern Quarterly Review (January 1852), who found an earlier, somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolerable: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners, is a monstrous bore….”

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. …” Although the passage¹ seems to anticipate Lolita (“It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works,” says Fyodor), 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 to pages 315–316 are particularly recommended). Now please turn to page 311.

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.¹ 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. 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…. 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. 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.”¹ 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 this 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.”¹

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.”¹ 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,”² 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.”³ 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 self-conscious 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 balk 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 Brace’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Brace’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.”¹ 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.²

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, Russian, 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.

When queried about Nabokov, friends and former colleagues at Cornell invariably comment on the seemingly paradoxical manner in which the encyclopedic Nabokov mind could be enthralled by the trivial as well as the serious. One professor, at least twenty years Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, remembers how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ultimately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize life as an uninterrupted series of crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Recalling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On easier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a faculty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately engaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the comparable “obligatory scene” in Lolita, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle” (p. 299).

Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (Playboy interview).

Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalled visiting the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly vulgar and garish home of an absent professor of Agriculture. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” said Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and living with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commercial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their circumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remembered that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime stories,¹ and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie, Father Divine’s newspaper, New Day—all of which should recall James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common. Joyce regularly read The Police Gazette, the shoddy magazine Titbits (as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended burlesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically obscene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of the execrable lady lending-library novelists of the fin de siècle as he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and Paris and writing Ulysses, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course, Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally encyclopedic mind was able to store.

Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at random and then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cornell lectures on Ulysses suggest.¹ In singling out the flaws in what is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the “needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabokov also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the rich textures of Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada a most “Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fiction writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning. Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, or those unclassifiable masterpieces such as Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy, and Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which the writer makes fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxtapositions—for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A hostile review of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin offered as typical of the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum; but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of early nineteenth-century Russia and is an excellent example of the anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justification of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Monday morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, staggering beneath a run of The Edinburgh Review, which Nabokov had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelous ads!” explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that enabled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of Onegin Commentary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson, Sterne, and Joyce—an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane discourse, in its own right a transcendent work of imagination.

Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces in his novels as early as The Defense (1930), as when Luzhin’s means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper—just about to fall off into the abyss”—a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film, Safety Last. Although present throughout his work of the thirties, and culminating logically in The Gift, his last novel in Russian, Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American culture and American university libraries. Thus the richly variegated but sometimes crowded texture of Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s first truly “American” novel,¹ looks forward to Lolita, his next novel. Bend Sinister’s literary pastiche is by turns broad and hermetic. Titles by Remarque and Sholokov are combined to produce All Quiet on the Don, and Chapter Twelve offers this “famous American poem”:

A curious sight—these bashful bears,These timid warrior whalemenAnd now the time of tide has come;The ship casts off her cablesIt is not shown on any map;True places never areThis lovely light, it lights not me;All loveliness is anguish— No poem at all, it is formed, said Nabokov, by random “iambic incidents culled from the prose of Moby-Dick.” Such effects receive their fullest orchestration in Lolita, as the Notes to this volume will suggest.

If the Onegin Commentary (1964) is the culmination, then Lolita represents the apogee in fiction of Nabokov’s proclivities as anatomist and as such is a further reminder that the novel extends and develops themes and methods present in his work all along. Ranging from Dante to Dick Tracy, the allusions, puns, parodies, and pastiches in Lolita are controlled with a mastery unequaled by any writer since Joyce (who died in 1941). Readers should not be disarmed by the presence of so many kinds of “real” materials in a novel by a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of the imagination; as Kinbote says in Pale Fire, “ ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye”.

By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in The Magic Christian (1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “Ned Litam”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in Lolita he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel.

Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality. In short, she is the essence of American poshlust, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in Gogol, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term.” Poshlust: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard”. More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive”.¹ It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in Huckleberry Finn (earlier American poshlust), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.

In the course of showing us our landscape in all its natural beauty, Humber satirizes American songs, ads, movies, magazines, brand names, tourist attractions, summer camps, Dude Ranches, hotels, and motels, as well as the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome (Your Home Is You is one of Charlotte Haze’s essential volumes) and the cant of progressive educationist and child-guidance pontificators.² Nabokov offers us a grotesque parody of a “good relationship,” for Humbert and Lo are “pals” with a vengeance; Know Your Own Daughter is one of the books which Humbert consults (the title exists). Yet Humbert’s terrible demands notwithstanding, she is as insensitive as children are to their parents; sexuality aside, she demands anxious parental placation in a too typically American way, and, since it is Lolita “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster”, she affords Nabokov an ideal opportunity to comment on the Teen and Sub-teen Tyranny. “Tristram in Movie-love,” remarks Humbert, and Nabokov has responded to those various travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as tenable examples of reality. A gloss on this aspect of Lolita is provided by “Ode to a Model,” a poem which Nabokov published the same year as the Olympia Press edition of Lolita (1955):

I have followed you, model,in magazine ads through all seasons,from dead leaf on the sodto red leaf on the breeze,from your lily-white armpitto the tip of your butterfly eyelash,charming and pitiful,silly and stylish.Or in kneesocks and tartanstanding there like some fabulous symbol,parted feet pointed outward —pedal form of akimbo.On a lawn, in a parodyof Spring and its cherry-tree,near a vase and a parapet,virgin practising archery.Ballerina, black-masked,near a parapet of alabaster. “Can one”—somebody asked— “rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”Can one picture a blackbirdas the negative of a small firebird?Can a record, run backward,turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?Can one marry a model?Kill your past, make you real, raise a family,by removing you bodilyfrom back numbers of Sham?

Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (Playboy interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.

Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores are satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels. The Eye parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while Laughter in the Dark is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle; Despair is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and The Gift parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers. Invitation to a Beheading is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s We (1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers. Pnin masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from Dead Souls (1842), just as the last paragraph of The Gift conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to another writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He parodies not only narrative clichés and outworn subject matter but genres and prototypes of the novel; Ada parodically surveys nothing less than the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of The Gift is a mock literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a verifiable truth—the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis, the detective story—and these generic “quests” will coalesce in one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a parody, as in Lolita and Pale Fire.

In form, Pale Fire is a grotesque scholarly edition, while Lolita is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the Doppelgänger tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with a black imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight says of his half brother’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s:

As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, “But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard”, says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.

With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge and sometimes coincide. Joyce comes closest to this in Ulysses (1922), not in the coldly brilliant “Oxen of the Sun” section but in the “Cyclops” episode in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which oscillates between parodic passages and a straightforward rendering of the dialogue and action; in the “Nausicäa” episode on the beach, which first projects Gerry MacDowell’s point of view in a style parodying sentimental ladies; magazine fiction, and midway shifts to Bloom’s non-parodic stream-of-consciousness; and in parts of the “Hades” Nighttown section, especially the closing apparition of Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. Nabokov has gone beyond Joyce in developing parody as a novelistic form, for in Lolita and Pale Fire, which are totally parodic in form and may be the finest comic novels since Ulysses, the parody and pathos are always congruent, rather than adjacent to one another—as though the entire “Nausicäa” or “Cyclops” episodes were cast as parody, without in any way diminishing our sense of Bloom’s suffering, or that Joyce had been able to express something of the humanity of Bloom or Mrs. Purefoy in the “Oxen of the Sun” tour de force. Nabokov has summarized in a phrase his triumph in Lolita and Pale Fire. Just before Humbert takes Lolita into their room at The Enchanted Hunters hotel in what is to be the most crucial event in his life, Humbert comments, “Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death”. To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s well-known line that poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Nabokov’s “poem” is a parody of death with real suffering in it. With characteristic self-awareness, Nabokov defines in The Gift the essence of his own art: “The spirit of parody always goes along with genuine Poetry.”

This spirit in Nabokov represents not merely a set of techniques but, as suggested above, an attitude toward experience, a means of discovering the nature of experience. The Prismatic Bezel is aptly titled: a “bezel” is the sloping edge on a cutting tool or the oblique side of a gem, and the luminous bezel of Nabokov’s parody can cut in any direction, often turning in upon itself as self-parody.

To stress the satiric (rather than parodic) elements of Lolita above all others is as limited a response as to stop short with its sexual content. “Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude—all this is something I find too tedious for words,” Nabokov told an interviewer from Playboy, and his Cornell lectures on Joyce further indicate that he was not interested in sexual oddities for their own sake. On May 10, 1954, in his opening lecture on Ulysses (delivered, as it turns out, at the time he was completing Lolita), Nabokov said of Leopold Bloom, “Joyce intended the portrait of an ordinary person. [His] sexual deportment [is] extremely perverse … Bloom indulges in acts and dreams sub-normal in an evolutionary sense, affecting both individual and species. … In Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) mind, the theme of sex is mixed with theme of latrine. Supposed to be ordinary citizen: mind of ordinary citizen does not dwell where Bloom’s does. Sexual affairs heap indecency upon indecency …” Coming from the creator of Humbert Humbert, the fervent tone and the rather old-fashioned sense of normalcy may seem unexpected. On May 28, the last class of the term and concluding lecture on Joyce, he discussed the flaws in Ulysses, complaining that there is an “Obnoxious, overdone preoccupation with sex organs, as illustrated in Molly’s stream-of-consciousness. Perverse attitudes exhibited.”¹ In spite of the transcriptions in notebookese, one gets a firm idea of Nabokov’s attitude toward the explicit detailing of sexuality, and his remarks imply a good deal about his intentions in Lolita. The “nerves of the novel” revealed in the Afterword underscore these intentions by generalizing Humbert’s passion. That the seemingly inscrutable Nabokov would even write this essay, let alone reprint it in magazines and append it to the twenty-five translations of Lolita, surely suggests the dismay he must have felt to see how many readers, including some old friends, had taken the book solely on an erotic level. Those exposed “nerves” should make it clear that insofar as it has a definable subject, Lolita is not merely about pedophilia. As Humbert says, rather than describing the details of the seduction at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, “Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets”. Humbert’s desires are those of a poet as well as a pervert, and not surprisingly, since they reflect, darkly, in a crooked enough mirror, the artistic desires of his creator.

Humbert’s is a nightmare vision of the ineffable bliss variously sought by one Nabokov character after another. For a resonant summary phrase, one turns to Agaspher (1923), a verse drama written when Nabokov was twenty-four. An adaptation of the legend of the Wandering Jew, only its Prologue was published. Tormented by “dreams of earthly beauty,” Nabokov’s wanderer exclaims, “I shall catch you / catch you, Maria my inexpressible dream / from age to age!”² Near the end of another early work, the novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), an itinerant photographer walks down the street, ignored by the crowd, “yelling into the wind: ‘The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnadete artist is coming!’”—a yell that ironically refers to the novel’s unrealized artist, businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and announces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chessplayer Luzhin in The Defense (1930), the butterfly collector Pilgram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and critic Albert Albinus in Laughter in the Dark (1932), the imprisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz in The Waltz Invention (1938), and the philosopher Krug in Bend Sinister (1947), as well as poets manqués such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift (1937–1938), Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and John Shade in Pale Fire (1962). When perceived by the reader, the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in Nabokov’s work.

Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special, too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps nothing is more personal by implication and hence more relevant than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the closing moments of Lolita, and he speaks for more than one of Nabokov’s characters.

It was the major émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich who first pointed out, more than fifty years ago, that whatever their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the artist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the creative process.¹ Khodasevich died in 1939, and until the 1960s, his criticism remained untranslated. If it had been available earlier, Nabokov’s English and American readers would have recognized his deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of Lolita, where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not obscured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But what may have been a brilliant formulation in the thirties should be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a commonplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about itself (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau, Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Fellini’s film 8½—to name but a baker’s dozen). What is not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of involution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strategies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations.

3. THE ARTIFICE OF LOLITA

Although Lolita has received much serious attention (see this edition’s selected bibliography), the criticism which it has elicited usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommodate the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described in the Notes to this edition, makes Lolita one of the few supremely original novels of the century. It is difficult to imagine, say, that Lord Jim could have been achieved without the example of Henry James’s narrative strategies, or that The Sound and the Fury would be the same novel if Faulkner had not read Ulysses. But like The Castle, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Pale Fire, Lolita is one of those transcendent works of the imagination which defy the neat continuum maintained so carefully by literary historians. At most, it is one of those works which create their own precursors, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s winning phrase.

Because Nabokov continually parodies the conventions of “realistic” and “impressionistic” fiction, readers must accept or reject him on his own terms. Many of his novels become all but meaningless in any other terms. At the same time, however, even Nabokov’s most ardent admirers must sometimes wonder about the smaller, more hermetic components of Nabokov’s artifice—the multifarious puns, allusions, and butterfly references which proliferate in novels such as Pale Fire and Lolita. Are they organic? Do they coalesce to form any meaningful pattern? Humbert’s wide-ranging literary allusions more than “challenge [our] scholarship,” as H.H. says of Quilty’s similar performance. Several of Humbert’s allusions are woven so subtly into the texture of the narrative as to elude all but the most compulsive exegetes. Many allusions, however, are direct and available, and these are most frequently to nineteenth-century writers; an early Note will suggest that this is of considerable importance. But unlike the allusions, which are sometimes only a matter of fun, the patterned verbal cross-references are always fundamental, defining a dimension of the novel that has escaped critical notice.

The verbal figurae in Lolita limn the novel’s involuted design and establish the basis of its artifice. As indicated in the Foreword, no total interpretation of Lolita will be propounded here. The following remarks on artifice and game are not intended to suggest that this “level” of the novel is the most important; they are offered because no one has fully recognized the magnitude of this verbal patterning, or its significance.¹ Just as Nabokov’s Afterword was read in advance of the novel, so the following pages might well be reread after the annotations, many of which they anticipate.

Although Lolita is less dramatically anti-realistic than Pale Fire, in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not immediately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized” character since Luzhin (1930), and Lolita the first novel since the early thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabokov said that The Enchanter, the 1939 story containing the central idea of Lolita, went unpublished not because of its subject matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe-l’oeil. Lolita is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes).

As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to manipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alternately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths, Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol begging to have them removed—“Please lift them, lift them, keep them away!”—and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabokov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Nabokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a little longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius.”

A great deal has been written about “unreliable narrators,” but too little about unreliable readers. Although editor John Ray, Jr., serves fair enough warning to those “old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of ‘real’ people beyond the ‘true story,’” virtually every “move” in the “true story” of Lolita seems to be structured with their predictable responses in mind; and the game-element depends on such reflexive action, for it tests the reader in so many ways. By calling out “Reader! Bruder!”, Humbert echoes Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Les Fleurs du mal (“Hypocrite reader!—My fellow man—My brother!”); and, indeed, the entire novel constitutes an ironic upending of Baudelaire and a good many other writers who would enlist the reader’s full participation in the work. “I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay,” says Humbert, but such illicit participation will find the reader in constant danger of check, or even rougher treatment: “As greater authors than I have put it: ‘Let readers imagine’ etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants”. Humbert addresses the reader directly no less than twenty-nine times,¹ drawing him into one trap after another. In Nabokov’s hands the novel thus becomes a gameboard on which, through parody, he assaults his readers’ worst assumptions, pretensions, and intellectual conventions, realizing and formulating through game his version of Flaubert’s dream of an Encyclopédie des idées reçues, a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game,” says Nabokov, and although the more obvious sallies in Lolita could be called satiric (e.g., those against Headmistress Pratt), the most telling are achieved through the games implemented by parody. By creating a surface that is rich in “psychological” clues, but which finally resists and then openly mocks the interpretations of depth psychology, Nabokov is able to dispatch any Freudians who choose to “play” in the blitzkrieg game that is the novel’s first sixty-or-so pages. The traps are baited with tempting “false scents” drawn from what Nabokov in Speak, Memory calls the “police state of sexual myth.” The synthetic incest of Humbert and Lolita seems to suggest a classical Oedipal situation, but Humbert later calls it a “parody of incest.” Nabokov further implies that the story works out the “transference” theory, whereby the daughter transfers her affections to another, similar man, but not her father, thus exorcising her Oedipal tension. If Freudians have interpreted Lolita’s elopement with Quilty in this way, then they stop short in the hospital scene when Humbert says of the nurse, “I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo”. The boyish qualities of a nymphet tempt the reader into interpreting Humbert’s quest as essentially homosexual, but we may be less absolute in our judgment and practice of pop psychoanalysis when Humbert tells how during one of his incarcerations he trifled with psychiatrists, “teasing them with fake ‘primal scenes.’ ” “By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me ‘potentially homosexual’ ”. If the clinical-minded have accepted Humbert’s explanation of the adolescent “trauma” which accounts for his pedophilia—interrupted coitus—then they should feel the force of the attack and their own form of loss when Lolita must leave Quilty’s play “a week before its natural climax”. Humbert’s “trauma” affords a further trap for the clinical mind, for the incident seems to be a sly fictive transmutation of Nabokov’s own considerably more innocent childhood infatuation with Colette (Chapter Seven, Speak, Memory); and such hints as the butterfly and the Carmen allusions shared by that chapter and Lolita only reinforce the more obvious similarities. When earnest readers, nurtured on the “standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket”, leap to make the association between the two episodes—as several have done—and immediately conclude that Lolita is autobiographical in the most literal sense, then the trap has been sprung: their wantonly reductive gesture justifies the need for just such a parody as Nabokov’s. With a cold literary perversity, Nabokov has demonstrated the falseness of their “truth”; the implications are considerable. Even the exegetic act of searching for the “meaning” of Lolita by trying to unfold the butterfly pattern becomes a parody of the expectations of the most sophisticated reader, who finds he is chasing a mocking inversion of the “normal” Freudian direction of symbols which, once identified, may still remain mysterious, explain very little, or, like the game of Word Golf in Pale Fire, reveal nothing.

Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of “guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything”. Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confession,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,” and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,” which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it.

Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty, who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque. For a while Humbert is certain that his “shadow” and nemesis is his Swiss cousin, Detective Trapp, and when Lolita agrees and says, “Perhaps he is Trapp,” she is summarizing Quilty’s role in the novel. Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate. Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psychological Double; “Lo was playing a double game,” says Humbert, punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Doppelgänger parody, and the function of parody as game.

The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov, from the early thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark (where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on through Bend Sinister, the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, which offers a monumental doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most intricate and profound of all Doppelgänger novels, written at precisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been exhausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lolita, which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another literary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was now worn to a thread” (Sebastian Knight).

By making Clare Quilty too clearly guilty,¹ Nabokov is assaulting the convention of the good and evil “dual selves” found in the traditional Double tale. Humbert would let some of us believe that when he kills Quilty in Chapter Thirty-five, Part Two, the good poet has exorcised the bad monster, but the two are finally not to be clearly distinguished: when Humbert and Quilty wrestle, “I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.” Although the parody culminates in this “silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati”, it is sustained throughout the novel. In traditional Doppelgänger fiction the Double representing the reprehensible self is often described as an ape. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871), Stavrogin tells Verkhovensky, “you’re my ape”; in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Hyde plays “ape-like tricks,” attacks and kills with “apelike fury” and “apelike spite”; and in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1845), the criminal self is literally an ape. But “good” Humbert undermines the doubling by often calling himself an ape, rather than Quilty, and when the two face one another, Quilty also calls Humbert an ape. This transference is forcefully underscored when Humbert refers to himself as running along like “Mr. Hyde,” his “talons still tingling”. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Kurtz is Marlow’s “shadow” and “shade.” Although Humbert calls Quilty his “shadow,” the pun on Humbert’s name (ombre = shadow) suggests that he is as much a shadow as Quilty, and like the shadow self who pursues the professor in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1850), Humbert is dressed all in black. Quilty in fact first regards Humbert as possibly being “some familiar and innocuous hallucination” of his own; and in the novel’s closing moments the masked narrator addresses Lolita and completes this transferral: “And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.” The book might have been told by “C.Q.,” the doubling reversed; “H.H.” is simply a better artist, more likely to possess the “secret of durable pigments.”

If the Humbert-Quilty doubling is a conscious parody of “William Wilson” (1839), it is with good reason, for Poe’s story is unusual among Doppelgänger tales in that it presents a reversal of the conventional situation: the weak and evil self is the main character, pursued by the moral self, whom he kills. Nabokov goes further and with one vertiginous sweep stands the convention on its head: in terms of the nineteenth-century Double tale, it should not even be necessary to kill Quilty and what he represents, for Humbert has already declared his love for Lolita before he goes to Quilty’s Pavor Manor, and, in asking the no longer nymphic Lolita to go away with him, he has transcended his obsession. Although Humbert’s unqualified expression of “guilt” comes at the end of the novel, in the chronology of events it too occurs before he kills Quilty. As a “symbolic” act, the killing is gratuitous; the parodic design is complete.

Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die”. Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished”. The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.

The parodic references to R. L. Stevenson suggest that Nabokov had in mind Henry Jekyll’s painfully earnest discovery of the “truth” that “man is not only one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines.” The “serial selves” of Pale Fire “outstrip” Stevenson and a good many other writers, and rather than undermining Humbert’s guilt, the Double parody in Lolita locks Humbert within that prison of mirrors where the “real self” and its masks blend into one another, the refracted outlines of good and evil becoming terrifyingly confused.

Humbert’s search for the whereabouts and identity of Detective Trapp (Quilty) invites the reader to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve this mystery, a process which both parallels and parodies the Poe “tale of ratiocination.” When Humbert finds Lolita and presses her for her abductor’s name,

She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well it was—”And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. Even here Humbert withholds Quilty’s identity, though the “astute reader” may recognize that “Waterproof” is a clue which leads back to an early scene at the lake, in which Charlotte had said that Humbert’s watch was waterproof and Jean Farlow had alluded to Quilty’s Uncle Ivor (by his first name only), and then had almost mentioned Clare Quilty by name: Ivor “told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” But she is interrupted and the chapter ends. This teasing exercise in ratiocination—“peace” indeed!—is the detective trap, another parody of the reader’s assumptions and expectations, as though even the most astute reader could ever fully discover the identity of Quilty, Humbert, or of himself.

Provided with Quilty’s name, Humbert now makes his way to Pavor Manor, that latter-day House of Usher on Grimm Road, where the extended and variegated parodies of Poe are laid to rest. All the novel’s parodic themes are concluded in this chapter. Its importance is telescoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”. In form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a summary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “staging” underscores once more the game-element central to the book.

Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he and Lolita literally traverse. Foolish John Ray describes Humbert’s as “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis” and, amazingly enough, he turns out to be right. The reader sees Humbert move beyond his obsessional passion to a not altogether straightforward declaration of genuine love and, finally, to a realization of the loss suffered not by him but by Lolita. It is expressed on the next to the last page in a long and eloquent passage that, for the first time in the novel, is in no way undercut by parody or qualified by irony. Midway through this “last mirage of wonder and hopelessness,” the reader is invoked again, because Humbert’s moral apotheosis, so uniquely straightforward, constitutes the end game and Nabokov’s final trompe-l’oeil. If the reader has long since decided that there is no “moral reality” in the novel, and in his sophisticated way has accepted that, he may well miss this unexpected move in the farthest corner of the board and lose the game after all. It is the last time the reader will be addressed directly, for the game is about over, as is the novel.

In addition to sustaining the game-element, the authorial patterning reminds us that Lolita is but one part of that universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Nabokov, who would join Humbert in his lament that words do indeed have their limitations, and that “the past is the past”; to live in it, as Humbert tried, is to die. That the author of Speak, Memory should suggest this surely establishes the moral dimension of Lolita; and in the light of Johan Huizinga’s remark that “play is outside the range of good and bad,”¹ Lolita becomes an even more extraordinary achievement.

When in The Gift Nabokov writes of Fyodor’s poem, “At the same time he had to take great pains not to lose either his control of the game, or the viewpoint of the plaything,” he is defining the difficulties he faced in writing novels whose full meaning depends on the reader’s having a spatial view of the book. It should be evident by now how the parody and patterning create the distance necessary for a clear view of the “plaything,” and Nabokov reinforces one’s sense of the novel-as-gameboard by having an actual game in progress within Lolita: the seemingly continuous match between Humbert and Gaston Godin—a localized, foreground action which in turn telescopes both the Humbert-Quilty “Double game” being played back and forth across the gameboard of America and the overriding contest waged above the novel, between the author and the reader.² Humbert and Gaston play chess “two or three times weekly” in Humbert’s study, and several times Nabokov carefully links Lolita with the Queen in their game. One evening while they are playing, Humbert gets a telephone call from Lolita’s music teacher informing him that Lolita has again missed her lesson, the boldest lie he has caught her in, indicating that he is soon to lose her:

As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgily bunched fingers—dying to take that juicy queen and not daring—and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw.. In their respective ways, all the players want to capture “that juicy queen”: poor homosexual Gaston, quite literally; pornographer Quilty, for only one purpose; pervert and poet Humbert, in two ways, first carnally but then artistically, out of love; and the common reader, who would either rescue Lolita by judging and condemning Humbert, or else participate vicariously, which would make him of Quilty’s party—though there is every reason to think that the attentive reader will sooner or later share Humbert’s perspective: “In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud”.

Humbert is being too modest at the outset of Lolita when he says “it is only a game,” for it is one in which everything on the board “breath[es] with life,” as Nabokov writes of the match between Luzhin and Turati in The Defense. Radical and dizzying shifts in focus are created in the reader’s mind as he oscillates between a sense that he is by turns confronting characters in a novel and pieces in a game—as if a telescope were being spun 360 degrees on its axis, allowing one to look alternately through one end and then the other. The various “levels” of Lolita are of course not the New Criticism’s “levels of meaning,” for the telescopic and global views of the “plaything” should enable one to perceive these levels or dimensions as instantaneous—as though, to adapt freely an image used by Mary McCarthy to describe Pale Fire, one were looking down on three or more games being played simultaneously by two chess masters on several separate glass boards, each arranged successively above the other.¹ A first reading of Lolita rarely affords this limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a totally new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions. What Jorge Luis Borges says of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, surely holds for Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita: he “has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading.”

ALFRED APPEL, JR.

Palo Alto, California
January 31, 1968

Wilmette, Illinois
May 21, 1990

Alfred Appel, Jr., “Introduction,” in Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., Penguin Books, 1995. Annotated edition copyright © Alfred Appel, Jr., 1970, 1991.

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Notes

¹ New York, 1941, p. 93. Henceforth, page references will be placed in parentheses in the text, and pertain to the Vintage editions of Nabokov’s novels, interviews, and autobiography, and to the hardcover editions of his other work.

¹ Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990), the first volume in an anticipated two-volume biography, is recommended.

¹ John Updike, “Grandmaster Nabokov,” New Republic, CLI (September 26, 1964), 15. Reprinted in Updike’s Assorted Prose (New York, 1965).

¹ Raymond Queneau, Le Chiendent (Paris, 1933), p. 294. The above translations are mine—A.A.

²Ibid.

¹ James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 567.

²Ibid., p. 769.

³Ibid., p. 513.

¹ J. L. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 196. For an excellent analysis of involuted or self-reflexive fiction, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975).

¹See Nabokov’s article “Lolita and Mr. Girodias,” Evergreen Review, XI (February 1967), 37–41.

¹In a manner similar to Joyce’s, Nabokov four years later paid his respects to Prescott, though not by name, by having the assassin Gradus carefully read The New York Times: “A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers” (Pale Fire, p. 275). This was actually culled from the newspaper.

¹Also pointed out by Andrew Field, in Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967), p. 325, and Carl R. Proffer, Keys to Lolita (Bloomington, 1968), p. 3.

¹New York, 1986.

¹One should remember that the story would have been read by a Russian émigré audience, notes Andrew Field, who quoted the same two passages in his own translation, op. cit., pp. 328–329. Strongly erotic (as opposed to pornographic) themes have been used “seriously” far more frequently by Russian writers than by their English and American counterparts. Field points to Dostoevsky (the suppressed chapter of The Possessed), Leskov, Sologub, Kuzmin, Rozanov, Kuprin, Pilnyak, Babel, and Bunin (ibid., p. 332).

¹And speaking specifically of the writing of Lolita, he says, “She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.”

¹Penelope Gilliatt, “Nabokov,” Vogue, No. 2170 (December 1966), p. 280.

²Ibid.

³Anthony Burgess, “Poet and Pedant,” The Spectator, March 24, 1967, p. 336. Reprinted in Urgent Copy (New York, 1969).

¹A photograph of these drawings appears in Time, May 23, 1969, p. 83.

²For several reminiscences of Nabokov, see Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, edited by Peter Quennell (New York, 1980).

¹ In Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote spies John Shade seated in his car, “reading a tabloid newspaper which I had thought no poet would deign to touch” (p. 22).

¹The course in question is Literature 311–312, “Masterpieces of European Fiction,” MWF, 12 (first term: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dickens’s Bleak House, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyicb; second term: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol’s The Overcoat, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Ulysses, in that order). The quotations are from the annotator’s class notes of 1953–1954 and can be supplemented now by Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980).

¹Although published in New York in 1941, a year after Nabokov’s emigration, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was in fact written in Paris in 1938 (in English). Students of chronology should also note that Lolita precedes Pnin (1957). The date of the former’s American publication (1958) has proved misleading.

¹For Nabokov’s later description of poshlost (as he then transliterated it), see his Paris Review interview, collected in Strong Opinions (New York, 1973), pp. 100–101.

²Satirized too is the romantic myth of the child, extending from Wordsworth to Salinger. “The McCoo girl?” responds Lolita kindly. “Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.” If the origin of modern sentimentality about the child’s innocence can be dated at 1760, with the publication of Mother Goose’s Melodies, then surely Lolita marks its death in 1955.

¹From the annotator’s class notes, 1953–1954.

²Translated and quoted by Andrew Field, op. cit., p. 79.

¹Vladislav Khodasevich, “On Sirin” (1937), translated by Michael H. Walker, edited by Simon Karlinsky and Robert P. Hughes, TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970).

¹I have elsewhere discussed the novel as a novel, as well as an artifice; see my article “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (Spring 1967), 204–241. Reprinted in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison, 1967).

¹See several parts of the novel—not to mention Humbert’s several interjections to the jury, to mankind in general (“Human beings, attend!”), and to his car (“Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow”). One waxes statistical here because H.H.’s direct address is an important part of the narrative, and important too in the way that it demonstrates a paradoxically new technique. In regard to literary forms and devices, there is almost nothing new under the sun (to paraphrase a poet); it is contexts and combinations that are continually being made new. One epoch’s realism is another’s surrealism. To the Elizabethan playgoer or the reader of Cervantes, the work-within-the-work was a convention; to an audience accustomed to nineteenth-century realism, it is fantastic, perplexing, and strangely affecting. The same can be said of the reintroduction of “old-fashioned” direct address, revived and transmogrified at a moment in literary history when the post-Jamesian novelists seemed to have forever ruled out such self-conscious devices by refining the newer “impressionistic” conventions (the effaced narrator, the “central intelligence,” the consistent if “unreliable” narrative persona, and so forth). “This new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism,” writes J. L. Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” an essential text on the subject (Labyrinths, p. 44); and cinematic equivalents are readily available in the work of the directors who reintroduced silent film techniques (notably François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Richard Lester) in the 1950s and 1960s.

¹The pun is also pointed out by Page Stegner in Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1966), p. 104.

¹Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1955 [1st ed. 1944]), p. 11. An excellent introduction to Nabokov, even if he is not mentioned.

²This aspect of Lolita is nicely visualized in Tenniel’s drawing of a landscaped chessboard (or chessbored landscape) for Chapter Two of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which a chess game is literally woven into the narrative. For more on Carroll and Nabokov, see Note 131/1.

¹Mary McCarthy, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Encounter, XIX (October 1962), p. 76.