After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one-may strike me, in fact-as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed; and the autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to blend.

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as "What is the author's purpose?" or still worse "What is the guy trying to say?" Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination-which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. The impulse record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not translated into English, and all are prohibited for political reasons in Russia). The man was a Central European, the anonymous nymphet was French, and the loci were Paris and Provence. I had him marry the little girl's sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted attempt to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a truck. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends-Mark Aldanov, two social revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940.

Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English-the language of my first governess in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home. The nymphet, now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying-her-mother idea also subsisted; but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel.

The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of 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, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best. Other books intervened. Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.

Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens are deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The locality labels pinned under these butterflies will be a boon to some twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. I finished copying the thing out in longhand in the spring of 1954, and at once began casting around for a publisher.

At first, on the advice of a wary old friend, I was meek enough to stipulate that the book be brought out anonymously. I doubt that I shall ever regret that soon afterwards, realizing how likely a mask was to betray my own cause, I decided to sign Lolita. The four American publishers, W, X, Y, Z, who in turn were offered the typescript and had their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita to a degree that even my wary old friend F.P. had not expected.

While it is true that in ancient Europe, and well into the eighteenth century (obvious examples come from France), deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a fine poet in a wanton mood, it is also true that in modern times the term "pornography" connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient. Old rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel-stories where, if you do not watch out, the real murderer may turn out to be, to the fan's disgust, artistic originality (who for instance would want a detective story without a single dialogue in it?). Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of cliches. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must know they exist in order not to feel cheated (a mentality stemming from the routine of "true" fairy tales in childhood). Moreover, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants (in a Sade play they call the gardener in), and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with lewd lore than the first chapters.

Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita (Humbert's Journal, for example) misled some of my first readers into assuming that this was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, "realistic" sentences ("He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy." Etc.). Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as "Old Europe debauching young America," while another flipper saw in it "Young America debauching old Europe." Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond here, had the naivete to write me that Part Two was too long. Publisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good people in the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown. I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called "powerful" and "stark" by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Another charge which some readers have made is that Lolita is anti-American. This is something that pains me considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considerations of depth and perspective (a suburban lawn, a mountain meadow) led me to build a number of North American sets. I needed a certain exhilarating milieu. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. But in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no intrinsic difference between Palearctic manners and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian from Chicago can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke. I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy. On the other hand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him. And all my Russian readers know that my old worlds-Russian, British, German, French-are just as fantastic and personal as my new one is.

Lest the little statement I am making here seem an airing of grudges, I must hasten to add that besides the lambs who read the typescript of Lolita or its Olympia Press edition in a spirit of "Why did he have to write it?" or "Why should I read about maniacs?" there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my book much better than I can explain its mechanism here.

Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one's private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one's book. I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying "waterproof," or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert's gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted-although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita, was sincerely worried that I (I!) should be living "among such depressing people"-when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos.

After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

November 12, 1956

Notes.

The word or passage in the text to which each annotation refers is indicated by two numbers, the first giving the page and the second the number in the margin of the text. The numbering begins anew on each page and disregards chapter divisions. All page references to other Nabokov books are to the Vintage paperback editions.

FOREWORD.

two titles: the term "white widowed male" occurs in the case histories of psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating confessional novel, such as John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography (see Duk Duk). Although Nabokov could hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel's being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe and other "eighteenth-century sexcapades" (to use Clare Quilty's description of Sade's Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la vertu [... The Misfortunes of Virtue]).

preambulates: to make a preamble, introduce.

"Humbert Humbert": in his Playboy interview (1964), Nabokov said, "The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns." Like James Joyce, Nabokov fashions his puns from literary sources, from any of the several languages available to him, from obsolete words, or the roots of arcane words. If the associations are rich enough, a pun succeeds in projecting a theme central to the fiction, in summarizing or commenting on the action. In both The Gift (1937) and the 1959 Foreword to the English translation of Invitation to a Beheading (19351936), Nabokov mentions Discours sur les ombres, by Pierre Delalande, "the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book ... [and] whom I invented." Delalande's Discours provided the epigraph for Invitation-"Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels" ["As a madman deems himself God, we deem ourselves mortal"]-and Nabokov's entire corpus might be described as a "Discourse on Shadows, or Shades." John Shade is the author of the poem Pale Fire. In a rejected draft of his poem, he writes, "I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish ..."-an accurate etymological pairing (hombre > ombre) and a resonant pun that figuratively places bombre in ombre-a card game popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-and sets man to playing in Nabokov's "game of worlds" (see this is only a game). Humbert was brought up on the French Riviera; pronounced with a French accent, his name partakes of these shadows and shades. By "solipsizing" Lolita, Humbert condemns her to the solitary confinement of his obsessional shadowland. "She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland," says Humbert, who, by choosing to chase the figurative shadows that play on the walls of his "cave," upends Plato's famous allegory. Although Humbert has had the benefit of a journey in the sunny "upper world"-a Riviera boyhood, in fact, and a full-sized wife or two-he nevertheless pursues the illusion that he can recapture what is inexorably lost. As Humbert demonstrates, illusions are realities in their ability to destroy us. "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane," writes John Shade in the opening lines of Pale Fire, while in Nabokov's poem "An Evening of Russian Poetry" (1945), the speaker says: My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.

False shadows turn to track me as I pass and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents, creep in to blot the freshly written page and read the blotter in the looking-glass.

And in the dark, under my bedroom window, until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day presses its starter, warily they linger or silently approach the door and ring the bell of memory and run away.

Seventeen years later in Pale Fire the Shadows are the Zemblan "regicidal organization" who dispatch Gradus, one of whose aliases is d'Argus, to assassinate the exiled King Charles (Kinbote). But the Shadows' secret agent accidentally kills Shade instead. Lolita offers the converse, for "Shade" (Humbert) purposely kills his "shadow" (Clare Quilty). Thus the delusive nature of identity and perception, the constricting burdens of memory, and a haunting sense of mutability are all capsuled in a reverberating pun.

solecism: an irregularity or impropriety in speech and diction, grammar or syntax. Also in conduct, and therefore not an unwarranted definition in Humbert's instance.

presented intact: it is important to recognize how Nabokov belies the illusion of "realism" which both Ray and Humbert seem to create. See Lolita, light of my life and I have only words to play with.

cognomen: its current definition, "a distinguishing nickname," is fundamental, and the humorous incongruity of using so high-toned a Latin-ate word is heightened by its original meaning: "The third or family name of a Roman citizen."

this mask: "Is 'mask' the keyword?" Humbert later asks. In his Foreword to Pale Fire, Kinbote says of Shade: "His whole being constituted a mask."

remain unlifted: not quite; although the "real" name is never revealed, the mask does slip. See Chapter Twenty-six, the shortest in the book.

her first name: Lolita's given name is "Dolores." See Dolores.

"H.H." 's crime: the murder of Clare Quilty (here); Humbert's grotesque alter ego and parodic Double. Humbert will henceforth be identified by his initials.

1952: a corrected author's error ("September-October 1952," instead of the 1958 edition's "September"). The following locations in the text contain corrections which are detailed in the Notes: [PART ONE] fwd.1, frw.2, c5.1, c6.1, c8.1, c8.2, c11.1, c13.1, c27.1, c27.2, c32.1, [PART TWO] c1.1, c2.1, c7.1, c10.1, c11.1, c11.2, c12.1, c14.1, c19.1, c20.1, c20.2, c24.1, c26.1, c26.2, c27.1, c36.1, and c36.2. The 1958 Putnam's edition was set in type from the 1955 Olympia Press edition. The latter contains many minuscule mistakes (e.g., punctuation) which were carried over into the Putnam's edition and identified only when the present text was in page proof. Although these errors have been corrected, it was impossible to describe them separately in the Notes. However, since the present edition follows the Putnam's format exactly, save for the pagination (each Putnam page is two higher), assiduous students of such textual matters can easily identify these corrections by collating the two texts, as follows, adding two to get the Putnam's page: p. 5, line sixteen; p. 31, line fourteen; p. 40, last line; p. 63, lines three and twenty-six; p. 73, line nineteen; p. 82, last line; p. 111, line seventeen; p. 136, line thirteen; p. 141, lines six and seven; p. 150, line twenty-five; p. 156, line six; p. 158, line sixteen; p. 161, line fifteen; p. 164, line nine; p. 179, line three; p. 180, line nine; p. 218, line ten; p. 226, line seven; p. 239, line thirteen; p. 243, line twenty-three; p. 255, line five; p. 262, line twenty-five; p. 275, line four; p. 276, line thirty-three; and p. 278, line two.

"real people"... "true story": in the Afterword, Nabokov mentions his "impersonation of suave John Ray"; but by mocking the conventional reader's desire for verisimilitude, as Nabokov does in the opening paragraphs of Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift, Dr. Ray here expresses the concerns of a novelist rather than psychologist, suggesting that the mask has not remained totally in place. There are subtle oscillations between the shrill locutions and behavioristic homilies of Ray and the quite reasonable statements of an authorial voice projected, as it were, from the wings. Note "Vivian Darkbloom" underlines this, while moral apotheosis and Blanche Schwarzmannhis singing violin suggest other instances of that presence.

sophomore: a corrected misprint (a period instead of the 1958 edition's semicolon after "sophomore").

Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller": Lolita's married name, first revealed here. The covert disclosure of Lolita's death is significant, for the announcement that the three main characters are now dead challenges the "old-fashioned reader" 's idea of "story": to reveal the outcome before the story even begins is of course to ruin it. The heroine of "The Beauty" (1934), an untranslated Nabokov story, also dies in childbirth within a year after her marriage (noted by Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Act [Boston, 1967], p. 330).

1952: for a hermetic allusion to this crucial year, see interrelated combinations.

Gray Star: it is most remote, for there is no town by this name anywhere in the world. Nabokov calls it "the capital town of the book." A gray star is one veiled by haze (Lolita's surname), and H.H. recalls "the haze of stars" that has always "remained with me." See haze of stars and fly to Jupiter.

"Vivian Darkbloom" ... "My Cue": "Vivian Darkbloom" is Clare Quilty's mistress and an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov" (see my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, p. 216, and my 1968 Denver Quarterly article, p. 32 [see bibliography]). "Vivian Darkbloom" is the author of "Notes to Ada," which is appended to the 1970 Penguin paperback edition and the 1990 Vintage edition. Among her alphabetical cousins are "Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine," who appears in Speak, Memory (p. 218), and "Mr. Vivian Badlook," a photographer and teacher of English in the 1968 translation of the 1928 novel King, Queen, Knave (p. 153)-and they all descend from "Vivian Calmbrood" (see Field, op. cit., p. 73), the alleged author of The Wanderers, an uncompleted play written by Nabokov in Russian (the anagram is helped along by the fact that in Cyrillic, the c is a k). One act of it was published in the emigre almanac Facets (1923), as an English play written by Vivian Calmbrood in 1768 and translated by V. Sirin (the pen name under which all of Nabokov's Russian work appeared). In a discussion in Ada (1969) of Van Veen's first novel, Letters from Terra, mention is made of the influence "of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine" (p. 344).

As for H.H. and John Ray, unless characters in a novel can be said to have miraculously fashioned their creators, someone else must be responsible for an anagram of the author's name, and such phenomena undermine the narrative's realistic base by pointing beyond the book to Nabokov, the stage manager, ventriloquist, and puppeteer, who might simply state, "My cue." Because Nabokov considered publishing Lolita anonymously (see here), there was also a purely utilitarian reason for anagrammatizing his name, as proof of authorship. "Cue" is also the cognomen of Clare Quilty, who pursues H.H. throughout the novel. But who is Quilty?-a question the reader will surely ask (see the Introduction, here, and Quilty, Clare). As with H.H. and Lolita (nee Dolores Haze), Quilty's name lends itself to wordplay by turns jocose (see Ne manque ... Qu'il t'y) and significant, since H.H. suggests that Clare Quilty is clearly guilty. Clare is also a town in Michigan (see town ... first name), and, although Nabokov did not know it until this note came into being, Quilty is a town in County Clare, Ireland, appropriate to a verbally playful novel in which there are several apt references to James Joyce. See outspoken book.

etiolated: to blanch or whiten a plant by exclusion of sunlight.

outspoken book: Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce (18821941), Irish novelist and poet. Judge Woolsey's historic decision paved the way for the 1934 American publication of Ulysses, and his decision, along with a statement by Morris Ernst, prefaces the Modern Library edition of the novel. Ray's parenthetical allusion echoes and compresses its complete title: "THE MONUMENTAL DECISION OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT RENDERED DECEMBER 6, 1933, BY HON. JOHN M. WOOLSEY LIFTING THE BAN ON 'ULYSSES.' " Ray's Foreword in part burlesques the expert opinions which have inevitably prefaced subsequent "controversial" novels. For other allusions to Joyce, see crooner's mug, seva ascendes ... quidquam, sly quip ... Rigger, Dr. Ilse Tristramson, J'ai toujours ... Dublinois, children-colors ... a passage in James Joyce, fountain pen ... repressed undinist ... water nymphs in the Styx, portrait ... as a ... brute, and God or Shakespeare.

moral apotheosis: a just description of H.H.'s realization at the end of the novel: "the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."

12%: such "sextistics" (as H.H. or Quilty might call them) poke fun at the work of Alfred Kinsey (18941956) and his Indiana University Institute for Sex Research.

Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz is German for "black"; her name is "White Blackman," because, to Nabokov, Freudians figuratively see no colors other than black and white (see a case history). "White blackman" also describes the attire of a recently "white widowed male" (see two titles). For a similarly hued lady, see p. 302 and "Melanie Weiss."

a mixture of ... supreme misery: an accurate description of the pain at the center of H.H.'s playfulness.

his singing violin: another gap in the texture of Ray's rhetoric reveals the voice of his maker. In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov calls the novel a "violin in a void," and in Speak, Memory he calls the poet Boris Poplavski "a far violin among near balalaikas" (p. 287).

a case history: among other things, Lolita parodies such studies, and Nabokov's quarrel with psychoanalysis is well-known. No Foreword to his translated novels seems complete unless a few words are addressed to "the Viennese delegation," who are also invoked frequently throughout the works. Asked in a 1966 National Educational Television interview why he "detest[ed] Dr. Freud," Nabokov replied: "I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons" (this half-hour interview may be rented for a nominal fee from the Audio-Visual Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401; the film, notes their catalog, is "available to responsible individuals and groups both in and out of Indiana"). When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he could rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: "Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care" (Wisconsin Studies interview).

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls having seen from a Biarritz window "a huge custard-colored balloon ... being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut" (p. 156); and "the police state of sexual myth" (p. 300) is in Ada called "psykitsch" (p. 29). The good doctor's paronomastic avatars are "Dr. Sig Heiler" (p. 28), and "A Dr. Froid ... who may have been an emigre brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu" (p. 27). Since no parodist could improve on Erich Fromm's realization that "The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation" (from The Forgotten Language, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar Pfister's felicitously expressed thought that "When a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole ... the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies" (from The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in Pale Fire (p. 271). See Lolita, [PART ONE] c9.1, [PART TWO] c3.1, c11.1, c23.1, and c32.1; and patients ... had witnessed their own conception, King Sigmund, auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, and Viennese medicine man.

John Ray, Jr.: the first John Ray (16271705) was an English naturalist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany (Historia plantarium, 16861704). He was the first to attempt a definition of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1713), is based on the concept of metamorphosis (see not human, but nymphic). The reference to Ray is no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in "Lolita Lepidoptera," New World Writing 16 [1960], p. 63). Nabokov was a distinguished lepi-dopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (19421948), and published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots's standard work, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (1951), and, opening it, pointed to the first sentence of the section on "Genus Lycaeides Scudder: The Orange Margined Blues," which reads: "The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus" (p. 164). "That's real fame," said the author of Lolita. "That means more than anything a literary critic could say." In Speak, Memory (Chapter Six), he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting moments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butterflies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem "A Discovery" (1943; from Poems, p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he said to me more than two decades later: I found it in a legendary land all rocks and lavender and tufted grass, where it was settled on some sodden sand hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new to science: shape and shade-the special tinge, akin to moonlight, tempering its blue, the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex; corroded tissues could no longer hide that priceless mote now dimpling the convex and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist two ambered hooks symmetrically slope, or scales like battledores of amethyst cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer-and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep), and safe from creeping relatives and rust, in the secluded stronghold where we keep type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly.

There are many references to butterflies in Lolita, but it must be remembered that it is Nabokov, and not H.H., who is the expert. As Nabokov said, "H.H. knows nothing about Lepidoptera. In fact, I went out of my way to indicate [here and here] that he confuses the hawk-moths visiting flowers at dusk with 'gray hummingbirds.' " The author has implored the unscientific annotator to omit references to Lepidoptera, "a tricky subject." Only the most specific lepidopterological allusions will be noted, though even this modest trove will make it clear how the butterfly motif enables Nabokov to leave behind on H.H.'s pages a trail of his own phosphorescent fingerprints. For entomological allusions, see Dolores, midge, powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness, not human, but nymphic, predator ... prey, Pisky, Miss Phalen, moth or butterfly, Lepingville ... nineteenth century, powdered bugs, gay ... Lepingville, lousy with ... flies, hundreds of ... hummingbirds, Avis Chapman, Edusa Gold, Felis tigris goldsmithi, that bug, Melmoth, Electra, butterfly, burning ... Tigermoth, mulberry moth, 58 Inchkeith Ave., Schmetterling, Palearctic ... Nearctic, and tinkling sounds ... Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov.

1955: a corrected author's error (the date was not included in the 1958 edition).

PART ONE.

CHAPTER 1.

Lolita, light of my life: her name is the first word in the Foreword, as well as the first and last words of the novel. Such symmetries and carefully effected alliterations and rhythms undermine the credibility of H.H.'s "point of view," since the narrative is presented as an unrevised first draft, mistakes intact, started in a psychiatric ward and completed in a prison cell, the product of the fifty-six frenzied final days of H.H.'s life (see his reminder and I have only words to play with and The reader will regret to learn ... I had another bout with insanity). When asked how her name occurred to him, Nabokov replied, "For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is 'L.' The suffix '-ita' has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as ... most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy 'L' and a long 'O.' No, the first syllable should be as in 'lollipop,' the 'L' liquid and delicate, the 'lee' not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in 'Dolores' [see Dolores]. My little girl's heart-rending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname 'Haze,' where Irish mists blend with a German bunny-I mean a small German hare [= base]" (Playboy interview). Since most everything is in a name, Nabokov both memorializes and instructs in Ada: "For the big picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday ... the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy [see Carmen note, gitanilla-A.A.] of that name in Osberg's novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish 't,' not a thick English one) ..." (p. 77). Lolita's name is lovingly celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his poem, "To Vladimir Nabokov on His Seventieth Birthday," in TriQuarterly, of. 17 (Winter 1970): That nymphet's beauty lay less on her bones Than in her name's proclaimed two allophones.

A boned veracity slow to be found In all the channels of recorded sound.

Lo-lee-ta: the middle syllable alludes to "Annabel Lee" (1849), by Edgar Allan Poe (18091849). H.H. will lead one to believe that "Annabel Leigh" is the cause of his misery: "Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta," he says. References to Poe are noted in Pym, Roland, Virginia ... Edgar, "Edgar"... "writer and explorer", Vee ... and Bea, Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, Edgar, and Favor; while "Annabel Lee" is variously invoked here, here, and here, and otherwise as noted princedom by the sea, noble-winged seraphs, envied, powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness, point of possessing, Riviera love ... over dark glasses, phocine, of my darling ... my bride, ribald sea monsters, and Frigid Queen ... Princess. But rather than identify every "Annabel Lee" echo occurring in the first chapter and elsewhere, the text of the poem is provided: It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;- And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee- With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her high-born kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me:- Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling And killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we- Of many far wiser than we- And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:- For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea- In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe is referred to more than twenty times in Lolita (echoes of "my darling" haven't been counted), far more than any other writer (followed by Merimee, Shakespeare, and Joyce, in that order). Not surprisingly, Poe allusions have been the most readily identifiable to readers and earlier commentators (I pointed out several in my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody" [see bibliography]). See also the earlier articles by Elizabeth Phillips ("The Hocus-Pocus of Lolita, "Literature and Psychology, X [Summer 1960], 97101) and Arthur F. DuBois ("Poe and Lolita," CEA Critic, XXVI [No. 6, 1963], 1, 7). More recent is Carl R. Proffer's thorough compilation in Keys to Lolita (henceforth called Keys), pp. 3445.

Although my Notes seldom discuss in detail the significance of the literary allusions they limn, Poe's conspicuous presence surely calls for a few general remarks; subsequent Notes will establish the most specific-and obvious-links between H.H. and Poe (e.g., their "child brides"; see Virginia ... Edgar). Poe is appropriate for many reasons. He wrote the kind of Doppelganger tale ("William Wilson") which the H.H.-Quilty relationship seemingly parallels but ultimately upends, and he of course "fathered" the detective tale. Although, as a reader, Nabokov abhorred the detective story, he was not alone in recognizing that the genre's properties are well-suited to the fictive treatment of metaphysical questions and problems of identity and perception. Thus-along with other contemporary writers such as Graham Greene (Brighton Rock, 1938), Raymond Queneau (Pierrot mon ami [Pierrot], 1942), Jorge Luis Borges ("Death and the Compass," "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," "The Garden of Forking Paths" [first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine], and "The South"), Alain Robbe-Grillet (Les Gommes [The Erasers], 1953), Michel Butor (L'Emploi du temps [Passing Time], 1956), and Thomas Pynchon (V., 1963)-Nabokov often transmuted or parodied the forms, techniques, and themes of the detective story, as in Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and, less directly, in The Eye, where, Nabokov said, "The texture of the tale mimics that of detective fiction." The reader of Lolita is invited to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve the mystery of Quilty's identity, which in part makes Lolita a "tale of ratiocination," to use Poe's phrase (see Quilty, Clare). Early in the novel one is told that H.H. is a murderer. Has he killed Charlotte? Or Lolita? (See also Keys, p. 39.) The reader is led to expect both possibilities, and his various attempts at ratiocination should ultimately tell the reader as much about his own mind as about the "crimes," "identities," or "psychological development" of fictional characters. For allusions to detective story writers other than Poe, see Agatha (Agatha Christie), Shirley Holmes (Conan Doyle), and detective tale and Arsene Lupin (Maurice Leblanc).

It is also in part through Poe that Nabokov manages to suggest some consistently held attitudes toward language and literature. H.H. says of his artistic labors, "The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?." The rhetorical question is coy enough, because he has answered it at the beginning of his narrative; he hasn't failed, but neither can he ever be entirely successful, because "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"-an admission many Romantic and Symbolist writers would not make. Nabokov's remark about Joyce's giving "too much verbal body to words" (Playboy interview) succinctly defines the burden the post-Romantics placed on the word, as though it were an endlessly resonant object rather than one component in a referential system of signs (see seva ascendes ... quidquam for a parody of Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing). H.H.'s acknowledgment of the limitations of language leaves many writers open to criticism, especially Romantic poets such as Poe. "When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville," said Nabokov; "I tore apart the fantasies of Poe," writes John Shade in Pale Fire (line 632 of the poem); the implications are clear enough. In Lolita, his choice of both subject matter and narrator parody Poe's designation, in "The Philosophy of Composition," of the "most poetical topic in the world"; "the death of a beautiful woman ... and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover" (see also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., p. 236). Both Annabel Lee and Lolita "die," the latter figuratively as well as literally, in terms of her fading nymphic qualities and escape from H.H., who seems to invoke yet another of Poe's lost ladies when he calls Lolita "Lenore" (though the primary allusion is to Burger's poem, said Nabokov; see Lenore).

The speaker in Poe's "Lenore" gropes for the right elegiac chord: "How shall the ritual, then, be read?-the requiem how be sung/By you-by yours, the evil eye,-by yours, the slanderous tongue / That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?" How shall it be "sung" is also the main question in Lolita, and Nabokov found his answer in a parodic style that seems to parody all styles, including the novel's own. "You talk like a book, Dad," Lolita tells H.H.; and, in order to protect his own efforts to capture her essence, he tries to exhaust the "fictional gestures," such as Edgar Poe's, which would reduce the nym-phet's ineffable qualities to a convention of language or literature. "Well-read Humbert" thus toys with one writer after another, as though only through parody and caricature can he rule out the possibility of his memoir's finally being nothing more than what the authorial voice in Invitation to a Beheading suggests to its captive creation: "Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus?" (p. 139).

four feet ten: see 58 Inchkeith Ave. for an involuted conversion to inches.

Lola: in addition to being a diminutive of "Dolores," it is the name of the young cabaret entertainer who enchants a middle-aged professor in the German film, The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. Nabokov never saw the film (though he did see still photos from it) and doubted that he had the association in mind. Lola was played by Marlene Dietrich (1904 ), and it is worth noting that H.H. describes Lolita's mother as having "features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich" and, after he reports her death, bids "Adieu, Marlene!." In Ada, Van Veen visits a don and his family, "a charming wife and a triplet of charming twelve-year-old daughters, Ala, Lola and Lalage-especially Lalage" ["the age"-twelve, a nymphet's prime (p. 353)].

Dolores: derived from the Latin, dolor: sorrow, pain (see Delectatio morosa ... dolors). Traditionally an allusion to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, and the Seven Sorrows concerning the life of Jesus. H.H. observes a church, "Mission Dolores," and takes advantage of the ready-made pun; "good title for book" (p. 158). Less spiritual are the sorrows detailed in "Dolores" (1866), by Algernon Swinburne (18371909), English poet (see also Keys, p. 28). "Our Lady of Pain" is its constant refrain, and her father is Priap, whom H.H. mentions several times (see Priap). The name Dolores is in two ways "closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book," as John Ray says. When in the Afterword Nabokov defines the "nerves of the novel," he concludes with "the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov)". Diana Butler, in "Lolita Lepidoptera," op. cit., p. 62, notes that this important capture was made at Telluride, Colorado (see here), and that in his paper on it, Nabokov identifies Telluride as a "cul-de-sac ... at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores" (The Lepidopterists' News, VI, 1952). Dolores is in fact everywhere in that region: river, town, and county are so named. When H.H. finally confronts Quilty, he asks, "do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?." "Dolly" is an appropriate diminutive ("you / took a dull doll to pieces / and threw its head away," writes H.H. of Quilty). For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. On shipboard in Ada, Van Veen sees a film of Don Juan's Last Fling in which Dolores the dancing girl turns out to be Ada (pp. 488490). Ada later gives Van "a sidelong 'Dolores' glance" (p. 513).

in point of fact: the childhood "trauma" which H.H. will soon offer as the psychological explanation of his condition (see p. 13). H.H.'s first chapter is so extraordinarily short in order to mock the traditional novel's expository opening. How reassuring, by comparison, are the initial paragraphs of those conventional novels-so anachronistic to Nabokov-which prepare the reader for the story about to unfold by supplying him with the complete psychological, social, and moral pre-histories of the characters. Anticipating such needs, H.H. poses the reader's questions ("Did she have a precursor?"; "Oh when?"), and parodies more than that kind of reader dependence on such exposition. It may seem surprising in a supposedly "confessional" novel that this should be the narrator's initial concern; but it is by way of a challenge to play, like the good-humored cry of "Avanti" with which Luzhin greets Turati in The Defense, before they begin their great match game. H.H.'s "point of fact" mocks the "scientific" certitude of psychiatrists who have turned intensely private myths and symbols-in short, fictions-into hard fact. The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own specific "trauma" by projecting it in fragments of another man's verse; literary allusions, after all, point away from the unique, inviolable, formative "inner reality" of a neurotic or psychotic consciousness. Annabel Leigh, the object of H.H.'s unconsummated love, has no reality other than literary. See also Keys, p. 45.

princedom by the sea: a variant of the most famous line in "Annabel Lee." Poe's "kingdom" has been changed to accommodate the fact that H.H. is always an aspirant, never an absolute monarch. He calls Lolita "My Frigid Princess."

noble-winged seraphs, envied: a pastiche composed of a phrase from line 11 of "Annabel Lee" and a verb from line 22. "Seraphs" are the highest of the nine orders of angels; in the Bible they have six wings, as well as hands and feet, and a human voice (Isaiah 6:2). "The seraph with his six flamingo wings" is invoked by John Shade in Pale Fire (line 225 of the poem).

tangle of thorns: another H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.'s tone rather than his deeds. When H.H. addresses the "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," as he will do so often, he summarizes the judicial proclivities of those literal-minded and moralistic readers who, having soberly considered what John Ray, Jr., has said, already hate "Humbert the Horrible." H.H. calls Lolita "crucified"-a verb that sincerely projects his "moral apotheosis."

CHAPTER 2.

Jerome Dunn, the alpinist: in a novel so allusive as Lolita it is only natural to be suspicious of the most innocuous references, and to search for allusions under every bush. Anticipating the efforts of future exegetes, I will occasionally offer non-notes-"anti-annotations" which simply state that Nabokov intended no allusion whatsoever. Thus, "Jerome Dunn" is non-allusive, as are "Clarence Choate Clark," H.H.'s lawyer, and John Ray's residence of "Widworth, Mass.." For important caveats in Nabokov's own words, see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine and Orange ... and Emerald.