paleopedology and Aeolian harps: respectively, the branch of pedology concerned with the soils of past geological ages, and a box-shaped musical instrument on which the wind produces varying harmonies (after Aeolus, Greek god of the winds). A favorite romantic metaphor for the poet's sensibility.

midge: a gnat-like insect. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

Sybil: or sibyl, from the Greek; any of several prophetesses credited to widely separate parts of the ancient world. H.H.'s aunt is well-named, since she predicts her own death.

Mirana: a heat-shimmer blend of "mirage," "se mirer" (French; to look at oneself; admire oneself), "Mirabella," and "Fata Morgana" (a kind of mirage most frequently seen in the Strait of Messina, and formerly considered the work of fairies who would thus lure sailors aground). Bewitching Lolita is often characterized as a fairy (see Percy Elphinstone); the latter word is derived from the Latin word fatum (fate, destiny), and H.H. is pursued by bedeviling "Aubrey McFate" (see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine).

Mon ... papa: French; my dear little Daddy.

Don Quixote: the famous novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel Cervantes (15471616); see Donald Quix. Les Miserables (1862) is by Victor Hugo (18021885), French novelist, playwright, and poet; see L'autre soir ... de ta vie?.

rose garden: see bodyguard of roses and Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine for more school-house roses.

La Beaute Humaine: French; "The Human Beauty." The book is invented, as is its author, whose name is a play on "nichon," a French (slang) epithet for the female breast.

lycee: the basic institution of French secondary education; a student attends a lycee for seven years (from age eleven to eighteen).

CHAPTER 3.

powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness: Poe's "Annabel Lee"; here it is spelled Lee. The Red Admirable (or Admiral) butterfly, which figures throughout Nabokov, is Vanessa atalanta, family Nymphalidae (for more on "nymph," see not human, but nymphic); and butterflies, as well as women, are "powdered." H.H. is also alluding to Jonathan Swift's (16671745) "Vanessa," as he called the young woman whose passion he awakened (for the Swift allusion, see also Keys, p. 96). Nabokov expands the dual allusion in Pale Fire. John Shade addresses "My dark Vanessa, Crimson-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly!..." (lines 270271); and, in his note to these lines, Charles Kinbote quotes from Swift's "Cadenus and Vanessa," though he doesn't identify it by name: "When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom / Advanced like Atalanta's star." He also alludes to "Vanessa" 's actual name thusly: "Van homrigh, Esther!" (p. 172)-thereby underscoring at least the alphabetical arrangement of Swift's anagramour (let me laugh a little, too, gentlemen, as H.H. says here). But in his succinct way, H.H. has already anticipated Kinbote ("van Ness"). A Red Admirable lands on Shade's arm the minute before he is killed (see lines 993995 and Kinbote's note for them) and the insect appears in King, Queen, Knave just after Nabokov has withdrawn his omniscience (p. 44). In the final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl; "there was some vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport," he writes (p. 306). When Van Veen casually mentions Ada's having pointed out "some accursed insect," the offended heroine parenthetically and angrily adds, "Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch's best known imitators" (p. 158). See John Ray, Jr..

solipsism: a central word in Lolita. An epistemological theory that the self knows only its present state and is the only existent thing, and that "reality" is subjective; concern with the self at the expense of social relationships. See safely solipsized.

plage: French; beach.

chocolat glace: French; in those days, an iced chocolate drink with whipped cream (today it means "chocolate ice cream").

red rocks: see Roches Roses and Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine.

lost pair of sunglasses: the sunglasses image connects Annabel and Lolita. H.H. first perceives her as his "Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses" (see Riviera love ... over dark glasses). See also Keys, p. 43 and p. 143n.

point of possessing: for a comment on the "traumatic" nature of this experience, see natural climax. "My darling" echoes line 39 of "Annabel Lee" (see of my darling ... my bride for the entire line, and Lo-lee-ta for the poem itself).

Corfu: Greek island.

CHAPTER 4.

haze of stars: see Gray Star. In one sense, the novel begins and ends in "Gray Star."

her spell: "spells" and "enchantments" are fundamental in Lolita. See not human, but nymphic, Little Carmen, and Cantrip ... Mimir.

CHAPTER 5.

manque: French; unfulfilled.

uranists: H.H.'s own variant of the uncommon English word, uranism, derived from a Greek word for "spiritual" and meaning "homosexual." Havelock Ellis uses it in Chapter Five of Psychology of Sex (1938), and claims the term was invented by the nineteenth-century legal official Karl Ulrichs.

Deux Magots: the famous Left Bank cafe in Paris, where intellectuals congregate. Magot is a kind of monkey, but "magots de Saxe" means "statuettes of saxe [porcelain]" (eighteenth-century). Nabokov purposely seats his uranists in this particular cafe, because he wants to invoke the simian association and the image of the grotesque Chinese porcelain figures.

pastiches: the "quotation" is an assemblage including bits and pieces of "Gerontion" (1920), by T. S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet (18881965): "... Fraulein von Kulp / Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door" (lines 2728); "... De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled ..." (line 66); "... Gull against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle ..." (lines 6970). See depraved May and Because ... a sinner for other allusions to Eliot. Having small sympathy with some of Eliot's social prejudices, Nabokov ironically describes in Ada a "Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman" (p. 5), who later meets the late-blooming banker (Eliot's early vocation) Kithar Sween (= Eliot's "Sweeney"), author of "The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin [= Eliot's "Whispers of Immortality"], an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith" (p. 506). For The Four Quartets, see Pale Fire, lines 368379. Nabokov said, "I was never exposed in the 'twenties and 'thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did" (Playboy interview).

"Proustian theme ... Bailey": the letters of the English poet John Keats (17951821) to his close friend Benjamin Bailey (17911853) are among the important statements of Keats's poetic theory. In Pale Fire, Kinbote measures the progress of poetry "from the caveman to Keats" (p. 289). H.H.'s "Proustian theme" is no doubt on the nature of time and memory. Marcel Proust (18711922)-the great French novelist, the first half of whose a la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, 19131927) was to Nabokov one of the four "greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose" (see J'ai toujours ... Dublinois)-is also mentioned on here and here, and as noted Dolores Disparue and Proustianized and Procrusteanized. He appears too in Pale Fire, pp. 87, 161163, and 248, as well as in line 224 of Shade's poem (p. 41), where he envisions eternity, and "... talks / With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks." In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Knight's hack biographer, Mr. Goodman, mentions "the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied" (p. 114); and Knight himself parenthetically remarks in a letter, "I am [not] apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis" (p. 52)-a device H.H. consciously indulges, as when he parenthetically "prolong[s] these Proustian intonations." There are also many allusions to Proust in Ada (see pp. 9, 5556, 66, 73, 168169, 254, and 541).

"Histoire ... anglaise": French; "A Short History of English Poetry."

not human, but nymphic: like Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt" (Babbitt, 1922), Nabokov's "nymphet" has entered the language, though the latest dictionary entries which Lolita has inspired are as inelegant as they are inaccurate: nymph: "a woman of loose morals" (Webster's Third New International, echoed by the Random House Dictionary). The Penguin English Dictionary, G. N. Garmonsway, ed., gives under nymphet: "(coll.) very young but sexually attractive girl" (H.H., who strives so desperately to expropriate idiomatic English, would appreciate that "colloquial"). "Nymphet" continues to be loosely used. Witness People magazine: "She plays Kelly Bundy, the shopping-mall nymphet, on Fox's comedy hit Married ... with Children, but Christina Applegate says she-" reports the columnist, though the lovely eighteen-year-old actress in the photo could pass for twenty-five (September 24, 1990, p. 108). As for nymph, the mythological and zoological definitions are primary. In Greek and Roman mythology, a nymph is "One of the inferior divinities of nature represented as beautiful maidens dwelling in the mountains, waters, forests, etc." Nympholepsy, H.H.'s malady (hence, "nympholept"), is "a species of demoniac enthusiasm supposed to seize one bewitched by a nymph; a frenzy of emotion, as for some unattainable ideal" (more specifically, in Blakiston's New Gould Medical Dictionary, it is defined as "ecstasy of an erotic type"). Under the entry for "The Nymphs" in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969), Jorge Luis Borges notes that "Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs... [some] Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years ... The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand ... Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this." H.H. echoes these definitions. Here and on the following pages he alludes to "spells," "magic," "fantastic powers," and "deadly demons" (for various enchantments, see Mirana [Fata Morgana], it was Lilith [Lilith], Percy Elphinstone [elves], Little Carmen [Carmen], incubus [an incubus], and heterosexual Erlkonig in pursuit [king of the elves]). Lolita's "inhuman" and "bewitching charms" suggest that she is Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1819) in bobby socks (Nabokov translated the poem into Russian in The Empyrean Path, 1923), and that the novel is in part a unique variant of the archetypal tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural femme fatale, "The Lovely Lady Without Pity" of ballad, folk tale, and fairy tale. Nabokov calls Lolita a "fairy tale," and his nymph a "fairy princess"; see Percy Elphinstone.

One of Nabokov's lepidopterological finds is known as "Nabokov's Wood-Nymph" (belonging to the family Nymphalidae; see powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness), and he is not unaware that a "nymph" is also defined as "a pupa," or "the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis." Crucial to an understanding of Lolita is some sense of the various but simultaneous metamorphoses undergone by Lolita, H.H., the book, the author, and the reader, who is manipulated by the novel's game-element and illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov's creations-an experience which is bound to change him. The butterfly is thus a controlling metaphor that enriches Lolita in a more fundamental and organic manner than, say, the Odyssey does Joyce's Ulysses. Just as the nymph undergoes a metamorphosis in becoming the butterfly, so everything in Lolita is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, including the novel itself-a set of "notes" being compiled by an imprisoned man during a fifty-six-day period for possible use at his trial, emerging as a book after his death, and then only after it has passed through yet another stage, the nominal "editorship" of John Ray, Jr. As Lolita turns from a girl into a woman, so H.H.'s lust becomes love. His sense of a "safely solipsized" Lolita is replaced by his awareness that she was his "own creation" with "no will, no consciousness-indeed, no life of her own", that he did not know her (here), and that their sexual intimacy only isolated him more completely from the helpless girl. These "metamorphoses" enable H.H. to transform a "crime" into a redeeming work of art, and the reader watches the chrysalis come to life. "And a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch," says Nabokov in Gogol (p. 43), referring to etymological rather than entomological phenomena (see A key (342!) and Chestnut Court; also follow the multifarious permutations of "Humbert").

On his first night with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, H.H. experiences "a confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyes-pots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush", and, anticipating the design and progression of Lolita, the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) mentions the readers who "felt baffled by [The Prismatic Bezel's] habit of metamorphosis" (p. 93; for the complete passage, see the epigraph to the Introduction). When Nabokov in his lectures at Cornell discussed "the theme of transformation" in R. L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol's The Overcoat, and Kafka's The Metamorphosis, he said that Stevenson's tale is a "thriller and mystery only in respect to artistic creativity. It is a phenomenon of style, a transformation through the art of writing." He likened the Jekyll-Hyde transformation to the metamorphosis of the larva into the pupa into the butterfly, and imagined Jekyll's final emergence from the melting and blackened features of the evil Hyde as "the rush of panic" which must accompany "the feeling of hatching." Once again, as in his book on Gogol, Nabokov described his own performance by defining the art of another. As a metaphor for the artistic process, the nymph's cycle suggests a transcendent design. See Introduction, here. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

bubble of hot poison: see pink bubble; the bubble breaks.

faunlet: in mythology, the faun is a woodland deity represented as a man having the ears, horns, tail, and hind legs of a goat; a satyr. The diminutive form is H.H.'s coinage. See Nabokov's letter in New Statesman, Nov. 17, 1967, p. 680.

fateful elf: see Percy Elphinstone for a summary of elves and the novel as fairy-tale.

pollutive: H.H.'s variant of pollution; the less common meaning, "emission of semen at other times than in coitus."

pseudolibidoes: H.H.'s usage (see here for "libidream") of libido: the sexual impulse; to Freud, the instinctual drive behind all human activities.

Children ... 1933: the Act actually reads: " 'Child' means a person under the age of fourteen years ... 'Young Person' means a person who has attained the age of fourteen years and is under the age of seventeen years." From Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 23 & 24 Geo. 5, c. 12, 107 (1). No specific definition of girl-child is given; but, even if H.H.'s quotation is wrong, he is a sound legal scholar, for a child must be eight years old to incur criminal liability. See here.

Massachusetts... "a wayward child"... immoral persons: an accurate transcription; the parenthetical phrase is also a direct quotation from Mass. Anno. Laws ch. 119 52 (1957).

Hugh Broughton: controversial Puritan divine and pamphleteer (15491612). The allusion is to his A Consent of Scripture (1588), an eccentric discourse on Biblical chronology.

Rahab: the Canaanite prostitute of Joshua 2: 121.

Virgil ... perineum: the Latin poet (7019 B.C.). The perineum includes the urinogenital passages and the rectum. In the 1958 edition it read peritonium (the double serous membrane which lines the cavity of the abdomen). Although H.H.'s grotesque error is intentional on Nabokov's part, he decided to correct it here because the mistake, if discerned, might be taken for the author's, or remain ambiguous.

King Akhnaten's ... Nile daughters: Akhnaten of Egypt (reigned 13751358 B.C.) and Nefertiti had a total of seven daughters. On his monuments, the king is shown with six. H.H. also loses a "daughter."

fascinum: Latin; a penis of ivory used in certain ancient erotic rites.

East Indian provinces: the Lepchas are a Mongoloid people of Sikkim and the Darjeeling district of India. What H.H. says is true, and Nabokov thought H.H. may have got it from somewhere in Havelock Ellis's monumental, many-volumed Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1891).

Dante ... month of May: Dante was born between May 15 and June 15, 1265. He was therefore nine years old when he met Beatrice in 1274, and she was supposedly eight. There was no romance.

Petrarch ... Laureen: Petrarch was born July 20, 1304. He was therefore twenty-three when he met Laura on April 6, 1327. She remains unknown to this day, and all attempts to identify her with historical persons are purely speculative. Her age therefore cannot be determined.

hills of Vaucluse: an area in Southeastern France, the capital of which is Avignon. It was Petrarch's favorite home, but he found that natural beauty there only added to the sense of his loss of Laura.

"enfant ... fourbe": French; "sly and lovely child."

it was Lilith: in Jewish legend, Lilith was Adam's wife before Eve. Also a female demon who attacked children and a famous witch in the demonology of the Middle Ages. In Pale Fire, a Zemblan "society sculptor" finds in Charles the Beloved's sister "what he sought and ... used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam" (p. 108). See not human, but nymphic for more on enchantments.

tiddles: H.H. here completes his reference to a game of tiddlywinks on the previous page: "I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup." A player "winks" the tiddle (a small piece) into the cup in tiddlywinks, so these "tiddles" are a metaphor for H.H.'s collected thoughts about nymphets. Tiddles also means "trifles"; from tiddle, an obsolete verb except in dialect or slang; to fondle, to fuss or trifle.

this is only a game: in the Wisconsin Studies interview, Nabokov said, "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game." The pun on H.H.'s name includes the game of ombre (see "Humbert Humbert"), which is played in Canto III of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714); see lines 87100. Also see the games H.H. plays here, here, and here.

metro: the Paris subway.

CHAPTER 6.

voluptas: Latin; sensual pleasures.

the Madeleine: a church in Paris (a very prominent landmark), and the fact that H.H. encounters a streetwalker here slyly alludes to the fact that the church is named after Mary Magdelene, the repentant prostitute.

fretillement: French; a wiggle.

"Cent": French; one hundred (francs).

"Tant pis": French; "Too bad!"

petit cadeau: French; small gift.

"dix-huit": French; "eighteen" (years old).

"Oui, ce n'est pas bien": French; "Yes, that is not nice."

grues: French; slang word for prostitutes.

"Il etait malin ... truc-la": French; "The man who invented this trick was a smart one."

poser un lapin: French; to stand someone up.

"Tu es ... de dire ca": French; "You are very nice to say that."

avant qu'on se couche: French; before we go to bed.

"Je vais m'acheter des bas": French; "I am going to buy myself some stockings."

"Regardez-moi ... brune": French; "Take a look at this beautiful brunette." The 1958 edition omitted the period after the parenthesis.

qui pourrait arranger la chose: French; who could fix it.

son argent: French; her money.

lui: French; himself (pronoun which is redundant and serves to emphasize a noun).

Marie ... stellar name: derived from the Virgin's name; to Biblical commentators, it means stellamaris, star of the sea. H.H. has more fun with "stellar" later (see Murphy-Fantasia).

CHAPTER 7.

tachycardia: a term from pathology; abnormal rapidity of the heart's action.

mes malheurs: French; my misfortunes.

francais moyen: French; the average Frenchman, the man in the street.

CHAPTER 8.