The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Read online

  First Vintage Books Edition, April 1991

  Copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov

  Annotated edition copyright © 1970, 1991 by Alfred Appel, Jr.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in somewhat different form by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1955. This annotated edition by Alfred Appel, Jr., was originally published in somewhat different form by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1970. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov and with Alfred Appel, Jr.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.

  [Lolita]

  The annotated Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov; edited, with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. — 1st Vintage books

  ed.

  p. cm. —

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78808-5

  I. Appel, Alfred. II. Title.

  PS3527.A15L6 1991

  813′–54 — dc20 90–50264

  v3.1

  to Véra

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following for permission to quote: The New Yorker, in whose pages the poems first appeared, for “A Discovery” and “Ode to a Model,” Copyright © 1943, 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov; New Directions, for passages from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov’s Copyright by New Directions, 1941. Part II of my own article, “Nabokov’s Puppet Show,” is reprinted by permission of The New Republic, Copyright © 1967 by Harrison-Blaine of New Jersey, Inc. The University of Wisconsin Press has kindly allowed me to reprint portions of my article, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (Spring 1967), and passages from “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” ibid. (© 1967 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin). I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Karen Appel, Richard Appel, Frank Cady, Eli Cohen, Patricia McKea, Raymond Nelson, Stephen Oshman, Professor Fred C. Robinson, and Bruce Sattler.

  —A.A.

  Preface

  In the decades since its American publication (in 1958), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has emerged as a classic of contemporary literature. This annotated edition, a corrected and chastely revised version of the edition first published in 1970, is designed for the general reader and particularly for use in college literature courses. It has developed out of my own experiences in teaching and writing about Lolita, which have demonstrated that many readers are more troubled by Humbert Humbert’s use of language and lore than by his abuse of Lolita and law. Their sense of intimidation is not unwarranted; Lolita is surely the most allusive and linguistically playful novel in English since Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and, if its involuted and constantly evolving means bring to mind any previous novel, it should be that most elusive of works, The Confidence-Man (1857) by Herman Melville. As with Joyce and Melville, the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its overall “meaning,” while at the same time having to struggle with the difficulties posed by the recondite materials and rich, elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edition is to solve such local problems and to show how they contribute to the total design of the novel. Neither the Introduction nor the Notes attempts a total interpretation of Lolita.

  The annotations keep in mind the specific needs of college students. Many kinds of allusions are identified: literary, historical, mythological, Biblical, anatomical, zoological, botanical, and geographical. Writers and artists long out of fashion (e.g., Maeterlinck) receive fuller treatment than more familiar names. Selective cross-references to identical or related allusions in other Nabokov works (a sort of mini-concordance) will help to place Lolita in a wider context and, one hopes, may be of some assistance to future critics of Nabokov. Many of the novel’s most important motifs are limned by brief cross-references. Humbert’s vocabulary is extraordinary, its range enlarged by the many portmanteau words he creates. Puns, coinages, and comic etymologies, as well as foreign, archaic, rare, or unusual words are defined. Although some of the “unusual” words are in collegiate dictionaries, they are nevertheless annotated as a matter of convenience. Not every neologism is identified (e.g., “truckster”), but many that should be obvious enough are noted, because the rapidly moving eye may well miss the vowel on which such a pun depends (speed-readers of the world, beware! Lolita is not the book for you). Because many American students have little or no French, virtually all the interpolations in French are translated. In a few instances, readers may feel an annotation belabors the obvious; I well remember my own resentment, as a college sophomore, when a textbook reference to Douglas MacArthur was garnished by the footnote “Famous American general (1880–      ).” Yet the commonplace may turn out to be obscure. For instance, early in Lolita Humbert mentions that his first wife Valeria was “deep in Paris-Soir.” When in 1967 I asked a Stanford University class of some eighty students if they knew what Paris-Soir was, sixty of them had no idea, twenty reasonably guessed it to be a magazine or newspaper, but no one knew specifically that it was a newspaper which featured lurid reportage, and that the detail formulates Valeria’s puerility and Humbert’s contempt for her. In 1967, most of them knew what a “zoot suit” and “crooner” are; this is no longer true, so they’ve been glossed (only twelve of one hundred 1990 Northwestern University students could define a crooner or zoot suit, a new wrinkle in The Crisis in the Humanities). Several notes are thus predicated on the premise that one epoch’s “popular culture” is another’s esoterica (see Note the nasal voices).

  Most of the Introduction is drawn from parts of my previously published articles in The New Republic (“Nabokov’s Puppet Show—Part II,” CLVI [January 21, 1967], 25–32), Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (1967), The Denver Quarterly (1968), and TriQuarterly (1970). Several Notes are adapted from the two middle articles and my interview with Nabokov in Wisconsin Studies (see bibliography for full entries). The first edition was completed in 1968, save for eleventh-hour allusions to Ada, and published in 1969, but the vagaries and vagrancies of publishing delayed its appearance. In the meantime, Carl R. Proffer’s Keys to Lolita was published (1968). Two enchanted hunters (see Note The Enchanted Hunters) working independently of each other, Mr. Proffer and I arrived at many similar identifications, and, excepting those which are readily apparent, I have tried to indicate where he anticipated me.

  The text of Lolita is that of the 1989 Vintage edition. It contains many corrections made over time, some of which are identified in the Notes. All were approved by Nabokov. Like the first American edition of 1958, this variorum edition concludes with Nabokov’s Afterword, which, along with its Notes, should be read in conjunction with the Introduction (where the reader will be offered exact instructions as to this procedure).

  Given the length of the Notes and the fact that they are at the back of the book, the reader would do well to consider the question of how best to use these annotations. An old reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo. A more balanced method is to read through a chapter and then read its annotations, or vice versa. Each reader, however, has to decide for himself which is the most comfortable procedure. In a more perfect world, this edition would be in two volumes, text in one, Notes in the other; placed adjacent to one another, they could be read concurrently. Charl
es Kinbote in his Foreword to Pale Fire (1962) suggests a solution that closely approximates this arrangement, and the reader is directed to his sensible remarks, which are doubly remarkable in view of his insanity (this edition, In Place of a Note on the Text).

  Although there are some nine hundred notes to this text, the initial annotated edition of a work should never be offered as “definitive,” and that claim will not be made here. As it is, The Annotated Lolita was the first annotated edition of a modern novel to have been published during its author’s lifetime—A Tale of a Tub for our time. Vladimir Nabokov was occasionally consulted and, in some cases, commented on the annotations. In such instances his contribution is acknowledged. He asked me to mention that in several instances his interpretation of Lolita did not necessarily coincide with mine, and I have tried to point out such cases; the literary allusions, however, have been deemed accurate. Every allusion newly identified in the second edition of 1991 was double-checked with Nabokov during the last years of his life.

  This edition—now, as in 1970—is analogous to what Pale Fire might have been like if poor John Shade had been given the opportunity to comment on Charles Kinbote’s Commentary. Of course, the annotator and editor of a novel written by the creator of Kinbote and John Ray, Jr., runs the real risk of being mistaken for another fiction, when at most he resembles those gentlemen only figuratively. But the annotator exists; he is a veteran and a grandfather, a teacher and taxpayer, and has not been invented by Vladimir Nabokov.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Introduction

  Selected Bibliography

  1. Checklist of Nabokov’s writing

  2. Criticism of Lolita

  3. Nabokov Studies

  In Place of a Note on the Text—from Pale Fire

  Lolita

  Foreword

  Part One

  Part Two

  Vladimir Nabokov: On a Book Entitled Lolita

  Notes

  About the Author

  About the Editor

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  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.2

  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 Onegin (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.”3 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 pr
oduct 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 titled; 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.