The annotated Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov.

to Vera.

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], 2532), 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. Charles 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.

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, Faberge 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 emigre 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 emigre 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 emigre 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 (19411948) and Cornell (19481958), 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 emigre 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 emigre 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 (19371938) 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.

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 Beheading (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 emigre. 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 art, 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 "allegorique de lui-mme"-allegorical of itself, to use Mallarme'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 lycee headmaster who has been collecting material for a monumental work on "literary madmen," L'Encyclopedie des sciences inexactes. By the last chapter he has abandoned hope of getting it published, but he then is approached in a cafe 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."4 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]."5 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.6 "O Jamesy let me up out of this," pleads Molly Bloom to Joyce,7 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."8 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 (p. 148), 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" (p. 142), 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 emigre writers, Sirin (his emigre 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" (p. 361). Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze's house at 342 Lawn Street; he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit crosscountry 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 Invitation to 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."9 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 precis 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 Litteraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted Lolita to Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press in Paris.10 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 Chne," 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 19531954, 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 311312 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."11 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...." (pp. 17677) Although the passage12 seems to anticipate Lolita ("It's queer, I seem to remember my future works," says Fyodor [p. 194]), 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 Palearctic ... Nearctic through My private tragedy ... my natural idiom are particularly recommended). Now please turn to the Afterword.

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.13 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. (pp. 2628) 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.... (pp. 8182) 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 (pp. 119133). 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."14 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."15 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."16 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,"17 and thus a nymphet was born.

Perspicacious "research" aside, it was a remarkable imaginative feat for a European emigre 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."18 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 selfconscious 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 balls 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 Bruce's name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce'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."19 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.20 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."

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,21 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 siecle 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.22 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,23 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 whalemen And now the time of tide has come; The ship casts off her cables It is not shown on any map; True places never are This 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" (p. 130).

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" (p. 63). More precisely, it "is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive" (p. 70).24 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.25 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 Movielove," 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 sod to red leaf on the breeze, from your lily-white armpit to the tip of your butterfly eyelash, charming and pitiful, silly and stylish.

Or in kneesocks and tartan standing there like some fabulous symbol, parted feet pointed outward -pedal form of akimbo.

On a lawn, in a parody of 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 blackbird as 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 bodily from 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 cliches 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.