resemble ... actor chap: Clare Quilty. They do resemble one another. For a summary of Quilty allusions, see Quilty, Clare.

nictating: rare; winking.

"ne montrez pas vos zhambes": French; "don't show your legs" (jambes is misspelled to indicate an American accent). See ne montrez pas vos zhambes.

a mes heures: French; when in the right mood.

lady writer: H.H.'s characterization and caricature are not "sexist." He's referring to the kind of deathless trite prose long produced by women for women (e.g., the Harlequin romances, whose male authors adopt female pseudonyms to be "credible").

the writer's ancient lust: H.H. sees himself in a line descending from the great Roman love poets, and he frequently imitates their locutions. The intonational stresses of "this Lolita, my Lolita" are borrowed from a donnish English translation of a Latin poem (see [PART ONE] c11.1, c15.1, [PART TWO] c01.1, c29.1, c29.2, c35.1). H.H.'s "ancient" models include Propertius (c. 5016 B.C.) on Cynthia, Tibullus (c. 5519 B.C.) on Delia, and Horace (658 B.C.) on any of the sixteen women to whom he wrote poems. See my Lolita.

Our Glass Lake: a "mistake"; see Hourglass Lake ... spelled.

"Little Carmen": a pun: little [train]men, or "Dwarf Conductors" (see also Keys, p. 144n). The allusions to Carmen have nothing to do with Bizet's opera. They refer only to the novella (1845) by Prosper Merimee (18031870). For a pun on his name, see Merrymay, Pa.... my Carmen. Like H.H., Jose Lizzarrabengoa, Carmen's abandoned and ill-fated lover (see Jose Lizzarrabengoa), tells his story from prison (but not until the third chapter, when the narrative frame is withdrawn). The story of love, loss, and revenge is appropriate. The Carmen allusions also serve as a trap for the sophisticated reader who is misled into believing that H.H., like Jose, will murder his treacherous Carmen; see here, where H.H. springs the trap. H.H. quotes Merimee (Est-ce que ... Carmen, Changeons ... separes, Carmen ... moi) and frequently calls Lolita "Carmen," the traditional name of a bewitching woman ([PART ONE] c13.1, c13.2, c13.3, [PART TWO] c22.1, c22.2, c24.1, c29.1, c29.2). Carl R. Proffer discusses the Carmen allusions in Keys, pp. 4351. In Latin, carmen means song, poetry, and charm. "My charmin', my Carmen," says H.H., thus demonstrating that he knows its etymology and original English meaning: the chanting of a verse having magic power; "to bewitch, enchant, subdue by magic power." See not human, but nymphic. H.H. calls himself "an enchanted hunter," takes Lolita to the hotel of that name, speaks of an "enchanted island of time", and so forth. Nabokov told his lecture classes at Cornell that a great writer was at once a storyteller, a teacher, and, most supremely, an enchanter. See The Enchanted Hunters.

I shot ... said: Ah.': a prevision of Quilty's death; see shooting her lover ... making him say "akh!" and a feminine.

Pisky: "Pixie"; see Percy Elphinstone. The town is invented. Also means "moth" in rural England. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

le mot juste: French; the right word; a phrase made famous by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (18211880), who often took a week to find le mot juste. For other allusions to Flaubert, see nous connumes, Miss Emperor, and Never will Emma rally ... timely tear.

Ronsard's "la vermeillette fente": Pierre de Ronsard (15241585), the greatest poet of the French Renaissance. H.H. alludes to a sonnet entitled L.M.F., and its first line, "Je te salue, o vermeillette fante" ("fente" is the modern spelling): "I salute [or hail] you, oh little red slit" ("Blason du sexe feminin," Edition Pleiade, II, 775). A "Blason" is a short poem in praise or criticism of a certain subject. For another allusion to Ronsard, see adolori ... langueur. During his emigre period in Germany in the twenties and early thirties, Nabokov published Russian translations of many of the writers alluded to by H.H., including Ronsard, Verlaine, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Goethe, Pushkin, Carroll, and Romain Rolland.

Remy Belleau's "un petit ... escarlatte": Belleau (15281577), Ronsard's colleague in the Pleiade group, also writes a "blason" in praise of the external female genitalia; "the hillock velveted with delicate moss, / traced in the middle with a little scarlet thread [labia]." For obvious reasons, the poem is rarely anthologized and is difficult to find. It appears in the Leyden reprint (1865) of the rare anthology Recueil de pieces choisies rassemblees par les soins du cosmopolite, duc d'Aiguillon, ed. (1735). The Cornell Library owns a copy, noted Nabokov.

of my darling ... my bride: line 39 of Poe's "Annabel Lee." See Lo-lee-ta for the poem.

Mystery of the Menarche: the menarche is the initial menstrual period. In Ireland it is called "The Curse of the Irish."

kill in my dreams: another prevision of Quilty's death scene.

toothbrush mustache: Quilty has one too. Poe also had one, but Nabokov said that no allusion was intended here.

ape-ear: H.H. several times characterizes himself this way. See here for a most resonant ape image.

coltish subteens ... (all New England for a lady-writer's pen!): this diary entry opens with a burst of cheap-fiction cliches-prose as ready-made as "the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding [Lo's] hair in place." H.H.'s dead language and reference to a colt sets-up a parenthetical echo of the battlefield lamentation of Richard III when his horse is slain: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" (Richard III, V, iv, 19). Shakespeare, the king of English, is deposed and truly in parentheses at this turn of Lolita, hemmed-in by the stock epithets of "a lady writer." For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare.

Ces matins gris si doux: French; "Those gray mornings, so soft ..."

rumor; roomer: a homophone. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator speaks of "mad Sebastian, struggling in a naughty world of Juggernauts, and aeronauts, and naughts, and what-nots" (p. 63).

Is it Fate: "McFate" is quietly introduced; see McFate, Aubrey and Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine.

"And behold": Lolita completes her mother's "Lo," and H.H. later twists the epithet (Lo to behold).

her class at ... school: in Pnin, young Victor Wind sees in the glass headlight or chrome plating of a car "a view of the street and himself comparable to the microcosmic version of a room (with a dorsal view of diminutive people) in that very special and very magical small convex mirror that, half a millennium ago, Van Eyck and Petrus Christus and Memling used to paint into their detailed interiors, behind the sour merchant or the domestic madonna" (pp. 9798). Like Who's Who in the Limelight (pp. 3132) and the "cryptogrammic paper chase" (pp. 25051), the "poetic" class list serves as a kind of magical mirror. The list is printed on the back of an unfinished map of the United States, drawn by Lolita, suggesting the scale of the gameboard on which the action is played. The image of the map secreted in the Young People's Encyclopedia prefigures their journeys (on which H.H. will "finish" the map by showing Lolita the country), just as the class list prefigures and mirrors an extraordinary number of other things.

Beale: the Beales' father kills Charlotte Haze, and they are the first of no less than five sets of twins or twinned names in Lolita's class (the Beales, the Cowans, the Talbots, and the incestuous Mirandas), a microscopic vision of the doubling (H.H. and Quilty) and mirroring that occurs in the roomy interior of the entire book (including Ray's Foreword), where even cars have their twins; "the long hairy arm of coincidence" is said to have its unpredictable "twin limb"; Mrs. Haze is echoed by the widow Mrs. Hays; and obscure women of science mirror one another in spite of the almost 300 pages separating them (Blanche Schwarzmann: "White Blackman," and Melanie Weiss: "Black White"; see here).

Double names, initials, and phonetic effects prevail throughout Lolita, whether the twinning is literal (Humbert Humbert, Vanessa van Ness, Quilty's Duk Duk Ranch, and H.H.'s alternate pseudonyms of "Otto Otto," "Mesmer Mesmer," and "Lambert Lambert"); or alliterative (Clare Quilty, Gaston Godin, Harold Haze, Bill Brown, and Clarence [Choate] Clark); or trickily alphabetical (John Ray, Jr.: J.R., Jr.). The double consonants of the almost infinite succession of humorously alliterative place names and points of interest H.H. visits are thus thematically consistent (Pierre Point, Hobby House, Hazy Hills, Kumfy Kabins, Raspberry Room, Chestnut Court, and so forth). Numbers even adhere to the pattern; H.H. imagines Lolita's unborn child "dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D." (here). The name of "Harold D. Doublename" represents a summary phrase, but the annotator's double initials are only a happy coincidence. For more on mirrors, see a mirror.

Carmine, Rose: see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine.

Falter: German; butterfly-and a companion of "Miss Phalen" (phalene: moth [Miss Phalen]) and the playwright "Schmetterling" (butterfly [Schmetterling]). For a summary of the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

Fantasia: a corrected misprint (s instead of z in the 1958 edition). She is married here (the "Murphy-Fantasia" wedding party).

McFate, Aubrey: a vagrant auditor, rather than a member of the class (see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine), though the reader may not realize it for four more pages. McFate's appearance in the middle of the class list undercuts the inviolable "reality" of much more than just the list. By placing the McFate allusions back-to-back here and here, Nabokov gives the reader a fighting chance to make the association, and to realize its implications. It would be "easier" on the reader, of course, if the class list came after the second instance (notes living vacationists and Bill Brown ... Dolores limn similar effects). McFate's first name suggests Aubrey Beardsley (see Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island), the "decadent" Art Nouveau artist (18721898) quite out of fashion when Lolita was written, and reveals another mother lode of verbal figurations: the invented town of "Beardsley," its school and college, and Gaston Godin (see Gaston Godin). The self-reflexive authorial identification with Beardsley is, among other things, a serious literary joke aimed at the unfriendly critics, then and now, who consign Nabokov the gilt-edged prose stylist to Aubrey's party-the artistic dandies, the guilt-free Decadent School.

The Beardsley schools themselves may reflect and refract three actual institutions of learning in Wellesley, Mass. Professor Patrick F. Quinn, who taught English at Wellesley College (19491985), points to several links between Beardsley and the three women's schools in town (letter to the annotator, June 30, 1975). Dana Hall, a private secondary school, was for many years exclusively female, as was Pine Manor Junior College (it moved, c. 1970), and could be the prototypes for the Beardsley School. Wellesley College, where Nabokov taught in the forties, has a Founders Hall, which is "Maker Hall" in Lolita. For about eighty years, Wellesley offered a required, yearlong Bible course, an unusual feature for an elite college; in Lolita, the course offering has been transposed to the Beardsley School. Professor Quinn, by the way, is a distinguished Poe scholar. For Poe, see Lo-lee-ta.

Windmuller: Louise and her father appear here; he here.

bodyguard of roses: classmates "Rose" and "Rosaline" serve as Lolita's rosy page-girls. The rose is of course the flower traditionally associated with gems, decorations, wine, perfume, and women of great charm and / or virtue. Lolita is continually linked with the flower. See Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine. See also Keys, p. 118.

Is "mask" the keyword?: yes, because the masked author has just been mirrored, as it were, in the class list; see the Introduction and Chapter Twenty-six (Heart, head-everything).

charshaf: a veil worn by Turkish women.

Irving: the reader may wonder why H.H. is sorry for "Flashman, Irving." "Poor Irving," said Nabokov, "he is the only Jew among all those Gentiles. Humbert identifies with the persecuted." See spaniel ... baptized.

ullulations: or ululation; a loud, mournful, rhythmical howl.

ribald sea monsters: the intrusive bearded bathers. "Annabel" and H.H.'s seasickness refer to Poe's poem. See Lo-lee-ta.

"Mais allez-y, allez-y!": French; "But go ahead, go!"

Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann: mentioned by John Ray. See Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz.

libidream: H.H.'s portmanteau of "libido" and "dream."

Dorsal view: belonging to, or situated on or near the back of an animal. The phrase is not a sentence, and it is followed by several other fragments. Style is definitely at issue here, in a chapter that deliberately mocks a jejune or degenerating prose-the cliches of popular "feminine" fiction; the half-baked writing of the diarist; verbal laziness of any kind that figuratively places Shakespeare in parentheses.

manege: French; tactics.

tennis ball ... my ... darling: Nabokov pairs the Poe allusion with a tennis ball because it is in the tennis scene that H.H. best captures her beauty-Shakespeare out of parentheses, if you will and so to speak.

CHAPTER 12.

pederosis: H.H.'s description of his condition. Although rare, the term exists; from the Greek paid-, meaning "child," plus ers, "sexual love" (akin to erastbai: "to love, desire ardently"), plus Latin suffix, from Greek, -sis, an "abnormal or diseased condition" (e.g., sclerosis). Pedophilia is the more common word for H.H.'s malaise.

Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine: the devilish "force" responsible for H.H.'s misfortunes is invoked in locations [PART ONE] c11.1, c25.1, c27.1, [PART TWO] c16.1, c16.2, c25.1. When H.H. perceives Quilty-the worst aspect of his McFate-as a "red-beast" or "red fiend," Nabokov is parodying that archetypal Double, the Devil. Red is Quilty's color, just as rose is associated with Annabel (Roches Roses) and Lolita; her classmate's name, "Rose Carmine", defines the two motifs nicely. Its significance, however, has nothing to do with "symbolism"; the red and rose stipplings are the work of the author, rather than McFate, and add some vivid touches of color to the anthemion (see I have only words to play with). Once pointed out, the color motif need not be identified further; but the reader is reminded again that Nabokov is no "symbolist." After reading the first draft of these Notes, Nabokov thought that this point had not been made clear enough, and, moved too by the annotator's loose play with some "red" images, wrote the following for my information, under the heading "A Note about Symbols and Colors re 'Annotated Lolita.' " It is included here because I think it is one of the most significant statements Nabokov made about his own art. He writes: There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression. I am therefore puzzled and distressed by the significance you lend to the general idea of "red" in my book. When the intellect limits itself to the general notion, or primitive notion, of a certain color it deprives the senses of its shades. In different languages different colors were used in a general sense before shades were distinguished. (In French, for example, the "redness" of hair is now expressed by "roux" meaning rufous, or russet, or fulvous with a reddish cast.) For me the shades, or rather colors, of, say, a fox, a ruby, a carrot, a pink rose, a dark cherry, a flushed cheek, are as different as blue is from green or the royal purple of blood (Fr. "pourpre") from the English sense of violet blue. I think your students, your readers, should be taught to see things, to discriminate between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them under such arbitrary labels as "red" (using it, moreover, as a sexual symbol, though actually the dominant shades in males are mauve-to bright blue, in certain monkeys).... Roses may be white, and even black-red. Only cartoonists, having three colors at their disposal, use red for hair, cheek and blood.

See Orange ... and Emerald for further remarks on color.

Miss Phalen: from the French phalene: moth. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

CHAPTER 13.

friable: easily crumbled or pulverized.

parkled: H.H.'s coinage.

safely solipsized: see solipsism. An important phrase (see second half of not human, but nymphic). The verbal form of solipsist is of course H.H.'s coinage-a most significant portmanteau suggesting that Lolita has been reduced in more than size, as H.H. comes to realize. Although H.H.'s "moral apotheosis" is expressed at the end of Lolita, hints of it are fleetingly glimpsed early on, shortly, when H.H. addresses the nymphet's solipsized condition: "What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita-perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness-indeed, no life of her own."

corpuscles of Krause: after the German anatomist: minute sensory particles occurring in the mucous membranes of the genitalia. An author's error has been corrected (s in Krause instead of z in the 1958 edition).

seraglio: the portion of a Moslem house reserved for the wives and harem.

Drew his .32: the revenge murder of Lolita which doesn't take place; see here.

CHAPTER 14.

loan God: from a cultural sequence (e.g., Greek-Roman, Hebrew-Christian); "lone" in the first mass paperback edition, and thus an "existential image" to one critic.

Dr. Quilty: the "playwright" is his nephew (or cousin), Clare Quilty. For a summary of Quilty allusions, see Quilty, Clare.

Shirley Holmes: after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's (18501930) famous detective hero, Sherlock Holmes (see Arsene Lupin). Between the ages of ten and fifteen, Nabokov was a Holmes devotee. That enthusiasm faded, though traces remain. "I spent a poor night in a charming, airy, prettily furnished room where neither window nor door closed properly, and where an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes which had pursued me for years supported a bedside lamp," writes the narrator of Pnin, at the end of the novel (p. 190). The narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight "use[s] an old Sherlock Holmes stratagem" (p. 151); and, in Despair, Hermann addresses Conan Doyle directly: "What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the rest; the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr. Watson himself-Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A staggering surprise for the reader" (pp. 121122)-and a figurative description of several of Nabokov's own narrative strategies. "Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?" wonders John Shade in Canto One of Pale Fire (lines 2728). After identifying Holmes in the Commentary, Kinbote says he "suspect[s] that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints" (p. 78), alluding to The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). He is wrong, but his suspicion summarizes the way that Nabokov frequently parodies and transmutes the methods and themes of that genre, just as "Shirley Holmes" is a jocular reminder that Lolita is, among other things, a kind of mystery story demanding a considerable amount of armchair detection. See the remarks on Poe and the detective story, Lo-lee-ta. For the penultimate moment in this "tale of ratiocination," see Waterproof; and for a telling allusion to Holmes, drawn from The Defense, see everything fell into order ... the pattern of branches ... the satisfaction of logical recognition.

CHAPTER 15.

Camp Q: "Cue" is Quilty's nickname. "The 'Q,' " noted Nabokov, "had to be changed to 'Kilt' in the French translation because of the awful pun, Q = cul!" (which means "ass").

Botticellian pink: Sandro Botticelli (1444 or 14451510), master of the early Italian Renaissance, known for his tender renderings of sensual but melancholy femininity. That pink is most manifest in the vision of the three graces in his painting "Primavera," while the "wet, matted eyelashes" suggest his famous "The Birth of Venus," which H.H. invokes here and here. In Laughter in the Dark, blind Albinus tries to transform incoherent sounds into colors: "It was the opposite of trying to imagine the kind of voices which Botticelli's angels had" (p. 242).

her coccyx: the end of the vertebral column.

iliac: anatomical word; pertaining to the ilium, "the dorsal and upper one of the three bones composing either lateral half of the pelvis."

Catullus ... forever: Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 8454 B.C.), Roman lyric, erotic, and epigrammatic poet. H.H.'s "that Lolita, my Lolita" echoes Catullus's evocation of his enchanting Lesbia, as well as imitations such as "My sweetest Lesbia" (1601), by Thomas Campion (15671620), English poet. See the writer's ancient lust and my Lolita ... her Catullus.

D.P.: during and shortly after World War II, refugees were officially described as "Displaced Persons"; hence "D.P."s.

Berthe au Grand Pied: Bertha (or Bertrade) with the Big Feet (or Bigfoot Bertha); the epithet is not pejorative. A French historical figure (d. 783), she was Pepin le Bref's wife and Charlemagne's mother, and is alluded to by Francois Villon in his ballad with the refrain "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

mais rien: French; but nothing.

CHAPTER 16.

mon cher, cher monsieur: French; my dear, dear sir.

Departez: the wrong French for "leave!" Correct: Partez!

cheri: French; darling.

mon tres, tres cher: French; my very, very dear.

crooner's mug: many younger readers of the rock-and-roll persuasion do not know that to croon is to "sing in half voice especially into a closely held microphone" (Webster's 3rd), a poor definition of the romantic style of ballad singing best represented by the oeuvre of Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby (19041977), known affectionately as "The Groaner"; Frank Sinatra (1915); and Mel Torme (1925). They are not mentioned by H.H. when he complains about pop singers (the nasal voices). Nabokov's high standards prevailed quite instinctively, even on such foreign ground.

Morell ... "conquering hero": Thomas Morell (17031784), an English classical scholar, wrote the song "See the Conquering Hero Comes." George Frederick Handel (16851759) used it in his oratorios Joshua and Judas Maccabeus. Sung by a Chorus of Youths in Joshua, it begins, "See the conquering hero comes! Sound the trumpet, beat the drums" (Act III, scene 2). It was also used in later versions of Nathaniel Lee's (16531692) tragedy, The Rival Queens (1677), and is quoted in Joyce's Ulysses in reference to Molly's seducer, Blazes Boylan (1961 Random House edition, p. 264). It is apt that the "conquering hero" should be above Quilty's picture, since that motto predicts his victory. As for the c. 1949 magazine ad which is said to resemble H.H., his description of it is quite accurate. The ad is for Viyella robes, and is of some interest. It's reproduced in color in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), p. 86. See the following page. For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses.

A distinguished playwright ... Drome: Quilty. A dromedary is a one-humped camel, and H.H. is both playing with the familiar brand name and correcting the manufacturer's error: the beast on the cigarette wrapper is not a camel, strictly speaking. H.H.'s aside, "The resemblance was slight," refers to resemble ... actor chap, where he is said to resemble Quilty. Note, too, that "Lo's chaste bed" is under Quilty. See Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions.

CHAPTER 17.