pot-au-feu: French; a common stew, containing meat, vegetables, and almost anything else.

merkin: an artificial female pudendum, or its false hair.

a la gamine: French; in imitation of a cute young girl.

mairie: French; town hall.

melanic: pigmented; hence, black or dark.

baba: although it is Franco-Russian for a ring-shaped pastry imbued with rum, Nabokov intends it otherwise: " 'Baba' colloquially means in Russian any female on the common side; a blousy, vulgar woman. It is also used metaphorically for certain thick, sturdy, columellar, menhirlike, compact things, such as the pastry romovaya baba (but this has nothing to do with its meaning here). Originally, baba meant a peasant woman."

I felt like Marat ... stab me: Jean-Paul Marat (17431793), French revolutionist stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday; the subject of a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassine (1793). The "original" tub can be seen at both Madame Tussaud's Wax Works in London and at Paris's wax museum, Musee Grevin. In Pale Fire, John Shade imagines how his biographer would describe him shaving in his bath: "... he'd / Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed" (lines 893894). On his travels, student Van Veen is shown "the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool" (Ada, p. 171)-a combination of Murad (from Tolstoy's Hadji Murad), General Murat (Napoleon's brother-in-law and king of Naples), and Marat.

Paris-Soir: a sensationalistic daily newspaper; now France-Soir, and an excellent example of how a small quotidian detail can telescope a character's sensibility. In Nabokov's story "The Assistant Producer" (1943), set in emigre Paris of the thirties, General Golubkov, head of the vicious, vulgar, Ur-Hitleristic right-wing White Warriors Union, "escorts[s] his wife to her dressmaker, [and] sat there for a while reading the Paris-Soir" (Nabokov's Dozen, p. 87).

Estampe: a print or engraving. H.H.'s "moral apotheosis" at the end of the book parallels the way the landscape evolves from this flat, unpeopled, cliched scene to the rich landscape depicted here. The reader is reminded that a landscape is a construct, a symbolic unit-while "nature" is random phenomena.

mon oncle d'Amerique: French; the proverbial rich American uncle who dies, leaving one a fortune; a curtain line in many old-fashioned melodramas.

Nansen ... passport: the special passport issued to emigres in Europe before World War II; the document figures prominently in the story, " 'That in Aleppo Once ...' " in Nabokov's Dozen (1958).

prefecture: French; police headquarters.

"Mais qui est-ce?": French; "But who is it?"

quite a scholar: the ten-volume Jean Christophe (19041912), by the Frenchman Romain Rolland (18661944), is a panoramic novel of society, admired no more by Nabokov than by H.H. (see Pnin, p. 142).

j'ai demannde pardonne: French; "I beg your pardon." The tense is incorrect (should be "je"); and the wrong spelling-an extra n in both words-indicates a Russian accent.

gredin: French; scoundrel, villain.

Maximovich ... taxies back to me: see here.

fructuate: rare; to bear fruit, to fructify.

Agatha Christie: A Murder Is Announced is the actual title of a 1950 novel by Agatha Christie (18911976), the well-known English mystery writer. A murder is announced on the next page (Clare Quilty's; see The Murdered Playwright).

Percy Elphinstone: Elphinstone and his books are also genuine, according to Nabokov, though it has been impossible to document this. Nabokov recalled finding A Vagabond in Italy "in a hospital library, the nearest thing to a prison library." But the town of Elphinstone is invented. H.H. calls Annabel "the initial fateful elf in my life" (p. 18); and Lolita's original home town in the Midwest was "Pisky," another form of pixie or elf. H.H. allows how "elfish chance offered me the sight of a delightful child of Lolita's age." When H.H. deposits Lolita in the Elphinstone Hospital, it is the last time he will see the nymphic incarnation of his initial "elf"; for him, the "fairy tale" (and he imagines himself a "fairy-tale nurse") ends in Elph's Stone just as it had begun in the town of "elf." Quilty in pursuit is seen as the "Erlkonig," the king of the elves in Goethe's poem of that name (see heterosexual Erlkonig in pursuit). At The Enchanted Hunters hotel, on the night that H.H. first possesses Lolita, he notes, "Nothing could have been more childish than ... the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairy tale vampire had feasted." Quilty's Pavor [Latin: fear, panic] Manor turns out to be on Grimm Road (p. 291), and when H.H. goes to kill him, the door "swung open as in a medieval fairy tale." As a birthday present, H.H. gives Lolita a de luxe edition of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (The Little Mermaid); and allusions are made to Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, The Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor's New Clothes (Hansel and Gretel), and Bluebeard (sister Ann). "What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was!" declares H.H. The simplicity of Lolita's "story," such as it is-"plot," in the conventional sense, may be paraphrased in three sentences-and the themes of deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis are akin to the fairy tale (see not human, but nymphic); while the recurrence of places and motifs and the presence of three principal characters recall the formalistic design and symmetry of those archetypal tales (see Never will Emma rally ... timely tear). But the fate of Nabokov's "fairy princess" and the novel's denouement reverse the fairy-tale process, even though H.H. offers Lolita the opportunity of a formulaic fairy-tale ending: "we shall live happily ever after."

The fairy-tale element has a significance far greater than its local importance to Lolita. Several of Nabokov's novels, stories, and poems are "fairy tales" in the sense that they are set in imaginary lands. These lands extend from five of his untranslated Russian works (19241940), to Bend Sinister's Padukgrad (1947), to Pale Fire's kingdom of Zembla (1962), culminating in Ada (1969), where the entire universe has been reimagined. Held captive in his own Zemblan palace, King Charles helplessly looks down upon "lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club" (p. 119); after making his escape, he stops at a warm farmhouse where he is "given a fairy-tale meal of bread and cheese" (p. 140). Because it is Nabokov's most extensive fantasia, Ada naturally abounds in fairy-tale references (see pp. 5 ["Lake Kitezh"], 87, 143, 164, 180, 191, 228 ["Cendrillon": Cinderella: "Ashette" on pp. 114 and 397], 281, and 287). God is called "Log" in Ada, and Hermann in Despair (1934) says that he cannot believe in God because "the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men ..." (p. 101102). When in Invitation to a Beheading (1936) Cincinnatus extolls the powers of the imagination, M'sieur Pierre answers, "Only in fairy tales do people escape from prison" (p. 114). "The Fairy's Daughter," an untranslated fantasy in verse for children, is collected in The Empyrean Path (1923, the same year that Nabokov translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian [see A breeze from wonderland]); and the emigre story "A Fairytale" (1926) tells of a timid, erotically obsessed man who imagines a harem for himself. He makes an arrangement with a woman who turns out to be the devil. She offers him a choice of as many women as he desires, so long as the total number is odd. But his hopes are dashed when he chooses the same girl twice (a nymphet), for a total of twelve instead of thirteen (translated as "A Nursery Tale," the story appears in Tyrants Destroyed, 1975). Before describing Hazel Shade's final poltergeist vigil, as imagined in his playlet The Haunted Barn, Kinbote notes, "There are always 'three nights' in fairy tales, and in this sad fairy tale there was a third one too" (Pale Fire, p. 190). "Speaking of novels," Kinbote says to Sybil Shade, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale" (pp. 161162); and mentioned in Ada are "the pretentious fairy tales" of "Osberg" (Borges; an anagram [p. 344]).

At Cornell (where the annotator was his student in 19531954), Nabokov would begin his first class by saying, "Great novels are above all great fairy tales.... Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. It is said that literature was born with the fable of the boy crying, 'Wolf! Wolf!' as he was being chased by the animal. This was not the birth of literature; it happened instead the day the lad cried 'Wolf!' and the tricked hunters saw no wolf ... the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf." As suggested in the Introduction, Nabokov goes to great lengths to show the reader that the boy has been crying "Wolf!" all along, and that the subject of Nabokov's art is in part the relationship between the old boy and the nonexistent wolf. See I have only words to play with.

dazzling coincidences ... poets love: evident everywhere in Nabokov's work is his "poet's love" of coincidence. The verbal figurations and "coincidences" limned in Who's Who in the Limelight are of great consequence, for H.H. alludes to "actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes" which prefigure the action of the novel. The three entries in this imaginary yearbook represent H.H., Lolita, and, obviously, Quilty. Although no "producer" is listed, it will shortly be seen that he reveals his name covertly (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), and shows his hand throughout. The importance of Who's Who in the Limelight is also discussed in the Introduction, here and here.

Pym, Roland: Pym is the title character in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838); he is also mentioned in Nabokov's poem, "The Refrigerator Awakes" (1942), in Poems (p. 12). The name suits H.H. well, because, like Pym's, his is a first-person narrative that begins in the spirit of hoax but evolves into something very different. See James ... Hoaxton for "Hoaxton." As for "Roland," Nabokov intended no allusions to the medieval Chanson de Roland, to the character in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, or to Browning's Childe Roland. For Poe, see Lo-lee-ta.

Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y.: both exist. The former, invoking Hamlet's castle, is a common name for a theater. Hamlet is often referred to in Nabokov. In Invitation to a Beheading, M'sieur Pierre and Cincinnatus are "identically clad in Elsinore jackets" (p. 182); in Ada, a reviewer of Van Veen's first book is called "the First Clown in Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly" (p. 343); and in Gogol, "Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar" (p. 140). Nabokov's own considerable Shakespearean scholarship is evident in Chapter Seven of Bend Sinister, which offers a totalitarian state version of the play. Nabokov himself glossed this chapter in his Introduction to the Time Reading Program edition (reprinted in the Vintage edition of Bend Sinister). The narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, who is Sebastian's half brother, demolishes a biography of Knight by demonstrating that the biographer, Mr. Goodman, has incorporated several bogus stories into his book, simply because the leg-pulling Sebastian had said they were so: "Third story: Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the student's father. Mr. Goodman misses the joke" (p. 62). Recognizing that Sebastian's trap telescopes Nabokov's methods, some readers will no doubt sympathize with hapless Mr. Goodman. For another Hamlet allusion in Lolita, see by Polonius. For further Shakespeare allusions, see here, here (The Taming of the Shrew), here (Romeo and Juliet), and here (King Lear), as well as Shakespeare ... New Mexico, interrelated combinations, as the Bard said (Macbeth), and, for a summary note, God or Shakespeare.

Made debut in Sunburst: see here, where H.H. refers to Charlotte Haze's impending death as "the ultimate sunburst," for it will indeed allow him to make his debut with her daughter. Unless they are annotated, the titles in the Who's Who entries are non-allusive and of no significance.

The Strange Mushroom: it is a "dazzling coincidence" that "Pym" should appear in a play authored by Quilty (see next entry). As for the specific origin of the "mushroom" image, literary history may be served by the strange fact related by Nabokov: "Somewhere, in a collection of 'cases,' I found a little girl who referred to her uncle's organ as 'his mushroom.' " The plant is in fact a sex symbol in many cultures. In Ada (p. 405), a photo reveals "the type of tight-capped toadstool called in Scots law ... 'the Lord of Erection.' "

Quilty, Clare: although alluded to by John Ray, Jr., in the "Foreword" (see "Vivian Darkbloom"), this is the first time that the omnipresent Quilty will be identified by his complete name (Quilty's role is discussed in the Introduction, here passim.). H.H. withholds Quilty's identity until almost the end of Lolita, and adducing it by virtue of the trail of clues is one of the novel's special pleasures. His importance is most vividly demonstrated by gathering together all the Quilty references and hints as follows: [PART ONE] fwd.1, c08.1, c08.2, c11.1, c14.1, c14.2, c16.1, c18.1, c20.1, c27.1, c27.2, c28.1, c29.1, c32.1, c32.2; [Part Two] c01.1, c02.1, c02.2, c03.1, c08.1, c11.1, c13.1, c14.1, c14.2, c16.1, c16.2, c16.3, c18, c19.1, c19.2, c20.1, c20.2, c21, c22.1, c22.2, c22.3c23.1, c26.1, c29.1c29.2, c29.3, c31.1, c33.1, c35, c36.1, c36.2, and c36.3. Each appearance or allusion to Quilty will be duly noted below, but a reader armed only with this telescopic list should be able to identify Quilty whenever he appears or is evoked on a page. This compilation also appears in my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody" (p. 225), and there is more on Quilty in my 1968 Denver Quarterly article, "The Art of Nabokov's Artifice" (see bibliography). See also Keys, pp. 5778. An excellent ancillary text is Stories of the Double, Albert J. Guerard, ed.

The killing of Quilty was written well out of sequence, early in the composition of Lolita. "His death had to be clear in my mind in order to control his earlier appearances," said Nabokov. Nabokov removed from the final version of Lolita three scenes in which Quilty figured conspicuously: a talk before Charlotte Haze's club (see 4640 Roosevelt Blvd.... mattress); a meeting with Lolita's friend Mona; and an appearance at a rehearsal of his own play, featuring Lolita. All three scenes were omitted because such foreground appearances interrupted the structure and rhythm of Quilty's pursuit of Lolita, and undermined the mystery surrounding his identity. Moreover, the latter two scenes created a most awkward narrative problem. Since H.H. couldn't narrate these scenes, Nabokov had to wait and let Lolita do it during their important confrontation scene (here), and that proved unwieldy. See house ... burned down for mention of another omitted scene.

The Little Nymph: like Fatherly Love (in the same entry), this is an appropriate work for H.H.'s sinister alter ego to have authored.

The Lady Who Loved Lightning: Nabokov confirmed the deduction that this is the unnamed play which H.H. and Lolita attend in Wace, here. Lolita says, "I am not a lady and do not like lightning." Although H.H.'s mother was killed by lightning, Nabokov intends no cross-reference; he grants, however, that "the connection is cozy and tempting." The Who in the play's title was not capitalized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom: at the very least she must be called Quilty's collaborator, since "she" is an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov" ("Vivian Darkbloom").

Dark Age: see Dark Age, where H.H. alludes to its author.

The Strange Mushroom: see above, The Strange Mushroom.

traveled 14,000 ... New York: H.H. "doubles" Quilty for a change, for he will travel some 27,000 miles with the little nymph (see here), while Quilty's "play" of that name consumes virtually half of that distance.

Hobbies ... pets: the three "hobbies" prefigure Quilty's pursuit of H.H. and Lolita ("fast cars"), his love of dogs (see Mr. Gustave ... spaniel pup), and the pornographic movies he will force his favorite "pet" to act in (see Duk Duk).

Quine, Dolores: "Dolores" is Lolita's given name (see Dolores), while "Quine" echoes Quilty, sets up an internal rhyme which condemns him (Quine the Swine ... my Lolita), and is French for two fives at a game of tric-trac (a form of backgammon). Although Nabokov said he did not intend any allusion, "Une quine a la loterie" is a bid prize, an advantage, which describes the way H.H. and Quilty variously bid for Lolita, and the way the book's game-element manipulates the reader (see here); Quilty reads aloud from H.H.'s poem, "because you took advantage of my disadvantage."

Never Talk to Strangers: this is no idle title. See here ("I would not talk to strangers," H.H. advises Lolita) and Do not talk to strangers, where he repeats and expands upon this excellent fatherly advice: "Be true to your [husband]. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers."

Has disappeared: see next note, and here, where H.H. says, "I have reached the part which ... might be called 'Dolores Disparue' " (a play on Albertine disparue, the title of the penultimate volume of the original French edition of Marcel Proust's a la Recherche du temps perdu). An error in the 1958 edition has been corrected (the transposing of the concluding bracket and period after "follows").

I notice ... in the preceding paragraph: the "slip" refers to "Has disappeared" instead of "Has appeared," another foreshadowing of his loss. Lolita will be cast in a play by Quilty, The Enchanted Hunters. See here. It is central to a full sense of the novel.

Clarence: H.H.'s lawyer, to whom the manuscript of this "unrevised" draft is entrusted. See here.

The Murdered Playwright: the prefiguration of the murder announced above is completed here (Agatha). H.H. now explicitly refers to his killing of Quilty (here), which is prefigured several more times (see I shot ... said: Ah.' and kill in my dreams). By strategically placing Who's Who in the Limelight early in Lolita - like Black Guinea's list of the avatars of the confidence man in Chapter Three of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)-Nabokov gives the reader an opportunity to make at least some of these connections as the novel unfolds.

Quine the Swine ... my Lolita: Quilty, and for "my Lolita," see the writer's ancient lust and my Lolita.

I have only words to play with: even if H.H. has only words, the reader must consider the implications of his extraordinary control of them. The interlacements which lead in and out of this veritable nerve center reveal a capacity for design and order that, given the conditions under which his narrative has allegedly been composed, is only within the reach of the manipulative author above the book. By no accident is Who's Who in the Limelight a theatrical yearbook, for the involutions which spiral out of it demonstrate that playwright Quilty, H.H., and Lolita, as well as the actor and actress who serve as their stand-ins in Who's Who, are all performing in another of Nabokov's puppet shows. "I could not really see him," says H.H., of Quilty, "but what gave him away [in the dark] was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on"-sounds from the workshop (here). "Guess again, Punch," H.H. tells Quilty; and, of their fight, H.H. says, "He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags." The novel's first reference to Quilty thus offers a summary phrase ("Vivian Darkbloom"); for the countless involuted verbal figurations and cross-references in Lolita all represent "Vivian Darkbloom" 's "cue," and suggest that the authorial consciousness is somehow profoundly involved in a tale that in every literal way is surely separate from it.

Having recognized the novel's verisimilar disguise, the reader is afforded a global view of the book qua book, whose dappled surface now reveals patterns that seem almost visual. In the Foreword to the 1966 version of Speak, Memory, Nabokov says that in looking for a title for the first edition, he "toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it"; it would be a fitting, if precious, subtitle for Lolita (as well as for several other Nabokov works). A grand anthemion entwines H.H.'s narrative, like some vast authorial watermark, and its outlines are traced by the elegantly ordered networks of alliteration, "coincidences," narrative "inconsistencies," lepidopterological references, "cryptocolors," and shadows and glimpses of Quilty.

CHAPTER 9.

charming ... chap: the cascade of alliterations in this paragraph, so carefully controlled, underscores the significance of Who's Who, as does a remark on the next page (The reader will regret to learn ... I had another bout with insanity).

Pierre Point in Melville Sound: H.H.'s invention, from Pierre (1852) by Herman Melville (18191891). An allusion to Book IX's opening, where a reckless, truth-seeking "Arctic explorer" "loses the directing compass of his mind.... at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points ..." Pierre dies in prison, as does H.H. Melville's gloomy "Byronic" themes are apposite.

gremlin: a mischievous little gnome reported by World War II airmen as causing mechanical trouble in airplanes. "Drumlins" is the plural for "an elongate or oval hill of glacial drift" (Webster's 2nd).

kremlin: the name of the governing center of Russia completes this sequence of phonological pairings. The best example is found in Pale Fire (note to line 803). Nabokov continually manipulates the basic linguistic devices-auditory, morphological, and alphabetical, the latter most conspicuously. In Pale Fire, Zemblan is "the tongue of the mirror" (p. 242); and the fragmentation or total annihilation of the self reverberates in the verbal distortions in Bend Sinister's police state, "where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else," as well as in the alphabetical and psychic inversions and reversals of Pale Fire-such as Botkin-Kinbote and the Index references to Word Golf and "Sudarg of Bokay, a mirror maker of genius," the latter an anagrammatic reflection and poetic description of omnipresent death, represented in Pale Fire by the Zemblan assassin J[y]akob Gradus, who throws his shadow across the entire novel, its creations, creator, and readers.

The reader will regret to learn ... I had another bout with insanity: H.H. is right, readers do regret to hear this from a narrator; and H.H. virtually encloses his narrative within reminders of this "unreliability," for, toward the end (here), he casually says he retired to another sanatorium ("I felt I was merely losing contact with reality" [merely!-A.A.]). Several of Nabokov's narrators are mad. Among other things, their madness functions as a parody of critical dogma about fiction, and a telling parody of the reader's own delusory "contact with reality." Of course H.H.'s is not a credible point of view in the terms laid down by Henry James, refined by Percy Lubbock, put into practice by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, institutionalized by two generations of critics, and enforced by thousands of creative writing instructors-and the involuted, patterned surface of Lolita makes this even clearer. H.H.'s copy of Who's Who and Quilty's "cryptogrammic paper chase" (here), the two most important concentrations of authorial inlays, typical in method and effect, are thus symmetrically located at the beginning and near the end of the novel, almost next to those declarations of insanity which seem to frame it, though these symmetries cannot hope to be as exact as the one formed by the first and final words of the novel ("Lolita"). See Notes her class at ... school through McFate, Aubrey for another concentration of self-reflexive involutions.

CHAPTER 10.

patients ... had witnessed their own conception: Nabokov's attacks on Freud are consistent. Kinbote includes in his Commentary lines deleted in the draft of the poem Pale Fire: ... Your modern architect Is in collusion with psychanalysts: When planning parents' bedrooms, he insists On lockless doors so that, when looking hack, The future patient of the future quack May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene. [p. 94]

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov similarly "reject[s] completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents" (p. 20); while in Ada he notes the "pale pencil which poor [public] speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer's having read in infancy his adulterous parents' love letters)" (p. 549). For Freud, see a case history.

Humbertish: H.H.'s coinage; after any language ending in the -ish suffix (Finnish, English, Lettish).

house ... burned down: Nabokov omitted from the last draft of Lolita a hilarious scene describing H.H.'s arrival by taxi at the charred-out, bepuddled, roped-off ruins of the McCoo residence. A large crowd applauds H.H. as he grandly alights from the cab; only an encyclopedia has survived the holocaust. He recognizes that the lost opportunity to coach "the enigmatic [McCoo] nymphet" is no loss at all (see p. 41). Nabokov reinstated the scene in his published screenplay of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick had dropped it from the film). "Although there are just enough borrowings from [my Lolita script in Kubrick's] version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick's film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlust [see Introduction, here] is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its original form" (Paris Review interview, 1967). Speaking more positively three years earlier, Nabokov said, "The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car-these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty [Peter Sellers] is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze [Shelley Winters; James Mason was H.H.]. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed-for example, the different motels at which they stopped" (Playboy interview). The highways and motels were so little in evidence because the film, released in 1962, was shot in England.

342: for "coincidences," see A key (342!) and 342.

A lady who lived opposite: and she is subsequently referred to as "Miss Opposite" on pp. 52 ff.

suburban dog: a foreshadowing of Charlotte Haze's death, for Mr. Beale will run over her when he swerves to avoid hitting what may well be this dog (see here). See also Keys, p. 6.

van Gogh: the "Arlesienne" (1888) is a famous portrait of a woman from the town of Aries in Provence, by Vincent van Gogh (18531890). Mass-produced reproductions of it are quite popular in America. H.H.'s low opinion of van Gogh is shared by other Nabokov characters. In Pnin, the art teacher Lake thinks "That van Gogh is second-rate and Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles" (p. 96); and Victor Wind acknowledges "with a nod of ironic recognition" a framed reproduction of van Gogh's "La Berceuse" (p. 108).

Marlene Dietrich: see Lola. Also here and here.

Rene Prinet: "The Kreutzer Sonata" was dedicated by Beethoven to Rodolphe Kreutzer in 1805 (Nabokov intended no allusion to Tolstoy's story of that name). Prinet's painting (1898) has long illustrated the Tabu perfume advertisement found in The New Yorker and chic ladies' magazines. It shows, in Nabokov's words, an "ill-groomed girl pianist rising like a wave from her stool after completing the duo, and being kissed by a hirsute violinist. Very unappetizing and clammy, but has 'camp' charm." For a scented version, see and smell Glamour, December 1990, p. 49.

Riviera love ... over dark glasses: the confluence of sunglasses and H.H.'s Riviera love suggest that H.H. has stumbled upon a veritable Lost-and-Found Department (see lost pair of sunglasses).

fairy-tale: see not human, but nymphic and Percy Elphinstone.

"Roches Roses": the "red rocks." See Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine. Both H.H.'s and Poe's "Annabel Lee" are alluded to on this and the next page.

nouvelle: French; new one. For the literary importance of "this Lolita, my Lolita, see the writer's ancient lust.

mummery: the performance of an actor in a dumb show; mummer is obsolete slang for a play-actor.

fruit vert: "green fruit"; French (dated) slang for " 'unripe' females attractive to ripe gentlemen," noted Nabokov.

Au fond, ca m'est bien egal: French; "Really, I don't care at all."

CHAPTER 11.

en escalier: set-up in an oblique typography; French for "staircase style."

Blank ... Blankton, Mass.: there is no such town. The "blanks" make fun of the "authenticity" of the pages of both the diary and the entire novel, H.H.'s "photographic memory" notwithstanding. Thus Lolita's parodic design also includes the literary journal or diary. Nabokov regarded with profound skepticism the possibilities of complete autobiographical revelation. "Manifold self-awareness" (as he calls it in Speak, Memory) is not to be achieved through solemn introspection, certainly not through the diarist's compulsive egotism, candid but totally self-conscious self-analysis, carefully created "honesty," willful irony, and studied self-deprecation. Nabokov burlesqued the literary diary as far back as 1934. Near the end of Despair, Hermann's first-person narrative "degenerates into a diary"-"the lowest form of literature" (p. 208)-and this early parody is fully realized in Lolita, especially in the present chapter. For more on the confessional mode, see Dostoevskian grin.

phoenix: a legendary bird represented by the ancient Egyptians as living for five or six centuries, being consumed in fire by its own act, and then rising from its ashes; an emblem of resurrection and immortality.

sebum: the material secreted by the sebaceous glands.

Humbert le Bel: Humbert the Fair; a kingly epithet (e.g., Charles le Bel of France).

entree: appearance on a stage; grand entrance.

favonian: of or pertaining to the west wind; thus, gentle.

phocine: pertaining to the zoological sub-family which includes the common seal, the image against which H.H. measures "the seaside of [Lolita's] schoolgirl thighs"-an allusion to the lost "kingdom" of Annabel (see Lo-lee-ta).

Priap: son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Priapus was the Greco-Roman god of procreation and fertility, usually portrayed in a manly state. Also mentioned here, here, and less mythically, here. See Dolores.

predator ... prey: H.H. often characterizes himself as a predator, most often as an ape or spider (prominent among the butterfly's natural enemies). For further discussion, see my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., pp. 222 and 228.

stippled: engraved, by means of dots rather than lines; in painting, refers to the use of small touches which coalesce to produce gradations of light and shade. See stippled Hopkins.

Delectatio morosa ... dolors: Latin; morose pleasure, a monastic term. In the next sentence, as on p. 53, H.H. toys with the Latin etymology of "Dolores" (see Dolores).

Our Glass Lake: see Hourglass Lake ... spelled.

nacreous: having a pearly iridescence.

Virginia ... Edgar: Poe was born January 19, 1809. He was therefore twenty-seven when in 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died of a lingering disease in 1847. She was the inspiration for many of his poems. For his first conjugal night with Lolita, H.H. appropriately registers as "Edgar" (see Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter). He also employs the name here and here (see also Keys, p. 37). Nabokov told me that he originally intended to call Lolita "Virginia" and title the book Ginny. For a summary of the Poe allusions, see Lo-lee-ta.

Je m'imagine cela: French; I can imagine that.

"Monsieur Poe-poe": H.H. puns on "poet," but the schoolboy had in mind "popo" (or "popotin"), French slang for the posterior.