le montagnard emigre: "the exiled mountaineer," the legend under a picture of Chateaubriand and the title of one of his romances (a sentimental ballad or song). An emigre is an expatriate; the word originally referred to Royalist fugitives from the French Revolution (such as Chateaubriand). Le Montagnard emigre was first published in 1806 and later included in Chateaubriand's story Les Aventures du dernier Abencerage, where the untitled verses are sung by a young French prisoner of war. Several of its lines are important in Ada, and appear literally at the center of the Ardis section; see pp. 138139 and 141 (also see pp. 106, 192, 241, 342, 428, and 530). For more on Chateaubriand, see Chateaubriandesque trees.

Felis tigris goldsmithi: taxonomic Latin: "Goldsmith's tiger" (Felis: genus; tigris: species; goldsmithi: subspecies), and allusion to line 356 of "The Deserted Village" (1770), by Oliver Goldsmith (c. 17301774): "where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey" (the animal is in fact a cougar rather than a tiger). "I found it and I named it, being versed / in taxonomic Latin," writes Nabokov in his poem "A Discovery" (John Ray, Jr.). Surely the same cannot be said of H.H., who is completely unversed in such matters (see Nabokov's remarks, John Ray, Jr.).

catalpas: botanical term; "any of a small genus of American and Asiatic trees of the trumpet-creeper family."

Nebraska ... first whiff of the West: a parody of the state's omnipresent pre-1960 slogan, "Nebraska-Where the West Begins!"

Red Rock: the initial rock is here. Nabokov told me that the image is in no way a reference to the "red rock" that appears in The Waste Land (l. 25)-mentioned now because several correspondents have inquired about this.

caravansary: see caravansaries.

detective tale: one of the works of Maurice Leblanc (18641941), who was a kind of French Conan Doyle. See Arsene Lupin.

persons unknown: Quilty. For a summary of allusions to him, see Quilty, Clare.

sign of Pegasus: trademark of Mobil Oil; in Greek mythology, Pegasus is the winged horse sprung from Medusa at her death. Because a blow of his hoof brought forth Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses, he is an emblem of poetic inspiration.

that bug: according to Nabokov, "this 'patient bug' is not necessarily a moth-it could be some clumsy big fly or miserable beetle." For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

the Conche: Shell Oil's trademark; in Greek mythology, the sea demigod Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, played a trumpet made of a conch. See Proteus of the highway.

Chestnut Court: throughout the novel, the smallest verbal units are undergoing a kind of metamorphosis (see A key (342!)). The chestnut trees below the motel are said to be "toylike," and H.H. is indeed toying with "Chestnuts." Here, "Chestnut Court" becomes "Chestnut Castle," five lines later turns into "Chestnut Crest," and here it returns to its "Chestnut Court" form; given a new context here, it becomes a horse. See Chestnut Lodge, by which time it has become "Chestnut Lodge." As happens so often, Nabokov himself has described the process best: "The names Gogol invents are really nicknames which we surprise in the very act of turning into family names-and a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch" (Gogol, p. 43).

an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle: H.H. has just mentioned that they are near Lolita's home town of Pisky ("pixie"; see Pisky); elves are thus indigenous to the region, and Nabokov has blended the fairy-tale theme with the entomological motif.

Chestnut Castle: see Chestnut Court.

"Bertoldo" ... comedy: the famous clown of Italian popular legend, who was the subject of a sixteenth-century collection of witty tales, Vita di Bertoldo, by Giulio Ceasare Croce. Bertoldo is planted here to show that H.H. could easily understand Quilty's later allusion to Italian comedy.

red hood: Quilty; the devil's presence is more than fleeting; see diabolical glow. His appearances are summarized in Quilty, Clare.

cod-piece fashion: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a flap or bag, often ornamental, concealing an opening in the front of men's breeches; cod-piece is archaic for "penis" (often used by such writers as Francois Rabelais [c. 14901553], author of Gargantua).

adolori ... langueur: "affected by love's languor." The phrase "d'amoureuse langueur" appears several times, with slight variations, in Ronsard's Amours. "Adolori," a punning tribute to Lolita (a Dolores), is of course H.H.'s addition. See also Keys, p. 137n. See Ronsard's "la vermeillette fente" for another Ronsard allusion.

diabolical glow: Quilty. She was with him at about the time H.H. was having his hair cut by the grotesque, tragic barber.

the shadow: Quilty is continually identified as such.

CHAPTER 17.

Gros: French; fat.

"luizetta": H.H.'s invention; from louis d'or, the French gold coin.

the ... life we all had rigged: that "we all" (= H.H., Quilty, McFate, and Nabokov) involutes the narrative once more. See I have only words to play with.

burley ... Krestovski: see Krestovski. The punning adjective summarizes his essence: burly (sturdy, stout) plus burley (an American tobacco, used in cigarettes and plugs).

CHAPTER 18.

Chestnuts and Colts: freed from all modifiers (see Chestnut Court), the trees, motels, and unstated brand names of the above pistols are here able to frolic together briefly as horses. "We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures," as Nabokov says of Dead Souls (Gogol, p. 78).

Aztec Red: Quilty's "red shadow" and "red beast" (here), characterized below as a "Red Yak."

Jovian: in Roman mythology, Jove (or Jupiter) is god of the sky.

donc: French; therefore.

crepitating: crackling.

Jutting Chin ... funnies: the comic strip Dick Tracy, created by Chester Gould (19001985) in 1931.

of my age ... rosebud ... mouth: Quilty; the fact and the motif are familiar. H.H. had thought of growing such a mustache (toothbrush mustache), and they also own similar bathrobes (here).

O lente ... equi: "O slowly run, horses of the night"; H.H.'s adjacent "translation" puns on the literal Latin (night mares). Less one lente, this line is from The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (V, ii, 140), by Christopher Marlowe (15641593). With only one hour left before eternal damnation, Faustus hopes for more time. H.H. does not try to "outspeed" Quilty, that latter-day Mephistopheles. See also Keys, pp. 3132. For a similar pun-nightmares and stallions-see Ada, p. 214.

viatic: see viatic.

lady ... lightning: see The Lady Who Loved Lightning. The allusions to The Lady Who Loved Lightning and "Fatface" anticipate the next passage, in which H.H. and Lolita attend Quilty's play. He and his collaborator are mentioned by name here and even appear on stage.

Soda, pop. 1001: there is in California a Lake Soda, pop. unknown. The magical "1001" is well chosen. It is simultaneously a numerical mirroring (see Beale) and an allusion to the fairy-tale theme (see Percy Elphinstone) via another vertiginously involuted work, The Thousand and One Nights.

flatus: gas generated in the bowels or stomach.

kurortish: Kurort is German for "health resort" (see here); the usage is H.H.'s own.

children-colors ... a passage in James Joyce: the colors of the spectrum; the "living rainbow" mimed by the "seven little graces." It is from Finnegans Wake. The theme of the diversity and unity of all things is central to the constantly metamorphosing dream world of Finnegans Wake. The seven colors of the spectrum represent diversity and are most frequently personified by seven "rainbow girls" who oppose the archetypal mother, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The book opens with a reversed rainbow; the seven clauses in the second paragraph each contain a color, shifting from violet to red. Although not wrong, H.H.'s mention of a single "passage" is misleading because the motif is sustained throughout the Wake. To have the hateful Quilty "lift" from Finnegans Wake rather than Ulysses constitutes a rather private and thus thoroughly Joycean joke, based on Nabokov's low opinion of the book he calls Punnigans Wake, or, in Bend Sinister, keeping its vast liquidity in mind, "Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition" (p. 114). "Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings," said Nabokov, "and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am.... Finnegans Wake's facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement" (Wisconsin Studies interview). Charles Kinbote sustains his maker's negative opinion: "it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnigan's [sic-A.A.] Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's 'incoherent transactions' and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ('Dear Stumparumper,' etc.) ..." (Pale Fire, p. 76).

Joyce himself helped to introduce Nabokov to Finnegans Wake. In Paris in 1937 or 1938, he gave Nabokov Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930), one of the fragments published before the Wake was completed. Future commentators will no doubt find several echoes of Finnegans Wake in Lolita; but it could hardly be otherwise, since Joyce's book is so inclusive, so monstrously allusive (Phineas Quimby appears on p. 536 of the Wake [standard American edition], and here in Lolita-but who doesn't appear in Finnegans Wake?). Moreover, Joyce's punning mutations anticipate and echo sentences which are yet to be written. The hero of Finnegans Wake is HCE-Here Comes Everybody, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, usually just Humphrey (with a humped back). Since he is "Everyman," there are some forty humming variations of his name, and, "influences" aside, there is statistically reason enough for some of Nabokov's humorously distorted forms of "Humbert" to coincide with a few of Joyce's punning phonetic variants. Thus Nabokov's sartorially splendid "Homburg" (here) complements Joyce's "Humborg" (p. 72, standard American edition), and Joyce's "Humfries" (p. 97) should surely be served with Nabokov's "Hamburg[s]" (here and here)-but these are all coincidences, said Nabokov, for, "Generally speaking, FW is a very small and blurry smudge on the mirror of my memory." The only persistent "smudge" is a trace of Anna Livia Plurabelle. In Bend Sinister, Ophelia is imagined "wrestling-or, as another rivermaid's father would have said, 'wrustling'-with the willow" (p. 113); and in Ada, the title character alludes to the music of the self-contained A.L.P. section: "Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen?" she wonders (p. 54). The "children-colors," however, constitute the only intentional allusion to Finnegans Wake in Lolita. For a summary of Joyce allusions, see outspoken book: Ulysses.

Orange ... and Emerald: when I asked Nabokov if he chose these particular colors because they are also the common names of a butterfly and a moth, respectively, Nabokov responded: "The Dubliner's rainbow of children on p. 221 would have been a meaningless muddying of metaphors had I tried to smuggle in a Pierid of the Southern States and a European moth. My only purpose here was to render a prismatic effect. May I point out (at the risk of being pretentious) that I do not see the colors of lepidoptera as I do those of less familiar things-girls, gardens, garbage (similarly, a chessplayer does not see white and black as white and black), and that, for instance, if I use 'morpho blue' I am thinking not of one of the many species of variously blue Morpho butterflies of South America, but of the ornaments made of bits of the showy wings of the commoner species. When a lepidopterist uses 'Blues,' a slangy but handy term, for a certain group of Lycaenids, he does not see that word in any color connection because he knows that the diagnostic undersides of their wings are not blue but dun, tan, grayish, etc., and that many Blues, especially in the female, are brown, not blue. In my case, the differentiation in artistic and scientific vision is particularly strong because I was really born a landscape painter, not a landless escape novelist as some think." For more on "blue," see Why blue; for a more generalized discussion of color, see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine.

CHAPTER 19.

P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone: = P.O.W. and Poe, and the imprisonment theme.

Ne manque ... Qu'il t'y: an allusion to Quilty and a parody of the classical alexandrine verse of seventeenth-century France, specifically of Le Cid (1636), by Pierre Corneille (16061684): "Do not fail to tell your suitor, Chimene, how beautiful the lake is, because he should take you there." Chimene is from Le Cid, but the line itself is invented. See also Keys, p. 71. For an index to Quilty references, see Quilty, Clare.

the mysterious nastiness: Mona knew all about Quilty and injected his name. H.H. is not supposed to understand, at the time, the planted "qu 'il t'y," though he suspects some nasty trick.

a titre documentaire: French; just for the record.

Lo to behold: H.H. toys with the worn interjection, "Lo and behold," as Lolita did much earlier (And behold).

detective: Trapp (Quilty).

un ricanement: French, a sneer.

Alice Adams: the title of a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington (18691946) about a small-town girl who pines for better things.

Browns: "Browns" reappear here, here, and here.

Cokes: the 1958 edition did not capitalize the trademark; the error has been corrected.

intacta: H.H. uses the Latin form of the common word "intact," but invokes its less common meaning, "untouched virgin."

boy friend: Quilty.

bearded scholar: "Another little bit of prophecy" (see The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single), said Nabokov. "Lots of bearded young scholars around these days."

la pomme de sa canne: French; the round knob of a cane.

Mirana: H.H.'s father had owned a Mirana hotel; see Mirana.

Proteus of the highway: Quilty; from Greek mythology; a prophetic sea-god in Poseidon's service, who would assume different shapes when seized.

remises: carriage houses.

Melmoth: a triple allusion. There is no such car; it is named after the four-volume Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin (17821824), Irish clergyman and writer (also identified in Keys, p. 31). In his Eugene Onegin Commentary, Nabokov calls Maturin's Melmoth a "gloomy vagabond" (Vol. II, p. 352). "The book, although superior to [Monk] Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe, is essentially second-rate, and Pushkin's high regard for it (in the French version) is the echo of a French fashion," writes Nabokov (ibid., p. 353). Nabokov's paraphrase of the "action" of Melmoth the Wanderer (ibid.) underscores the humor of naming H.H.'s car after it: [John Melmoth] and his uncle are descendants of the diabolical Melmoth the Traveler ("Where he treads, the earth is parched! Where he breathes, the air is fire! Where he feeds, the food is poison! Where he turns his glance, is lightning.... His presence converts bread and wine into matter as viperous as the suicide foam of the dying Judas ..."). John discovers a moldering manuscript. What follows is a long tale full of tales within tales-shipwrecks, madhouses, Spanish cloisters-and here I begin to nod.

Melmoth's nature is marked by pride, intellectual glorying, "a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge," and a sarcastic levity that makes of him "a Harlequin of the infernal regions." Maturin used up all the platitudes of Satanism, while remaining on the side of the conventional angels. His hero enters into an agreement with a Certain Person who grants him power over time, space, and matter (that Lesser Trinity) under the condition that he tempt wretches in their hour of extremity with deliverance if they exchange situations with him.

Maturin's novel most likely supplied Oscar Wilde (18541900) with his post-prison pseudonym of "Sebastian Melmoth." In addition, added Nabokov, "Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain)." For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

grays ... his favorite cryptochromism: a coinage; "secret colors." It is also an authorial favorite, in view of the puns on Haze, shadow, and ombre.

"ordeal of the orb": changing the tire.

gigantic truck ... impossible to pass: a fear confirmed; see slow truck ... road.

CHAPTER 20.

"Love Under the Lindens": planted between famous plays by Henrik Ibsen (18281906) and Anton Chekhov (18601904) is a combination of Desire Under the Elms (1924), by Eugene O'Neill (18881953), and Unter den Linden (a boulevard in Berlin). See also Keys, p. 15on. The portmanteau title, credited to "Eelmann" (O'Neill plus Thomas Mann), is mentioned in Ada (p. 403). Nabokov's low opinion of O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is expressed in Gogol (p. 55).

flashlight: a corrected author's error (instead of "torchlight" in the 1958 edition). The quotation marks which enclosed this extract in the 1958 edition have also been corrected.

Cyrano ... sleeping stranger: after rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov belatedly put words in H.H.'s mouth: "Cyrano's big nose. Cyranose. Sorry myself to have missed that portmantoid pun. 'A sleeping stranger,' " he added, "is enchanting and haunting." Edmond Rostand's famous play (1897) is based on the life of Cyrano de Bergerac (16191655), French writer and soldier. "Cyraniana" in Ada (p. 339) alludes to his most famous work, Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune (1656; modern edition: A Voyage to the Moon).

petit rat: a young ballet student at the Paris Opera (ages nine to fourteen).

Electra: "The name is based on that of a close ally of the Clouded Yellow butterfly," said Nabokov, "and has nothing to do with the Greek Electra." See Edusa Gold. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

Ned Litam: the anagrammatic (it reads backwards) pseudonym under which the great tennis player William T. (Bill) Tilden II wrote fiction. See a famous coach ... with a harem of ball boys, where Lolita takes lessons from him.

endorsing a Dromedary: like Quilty; see Morell ... "conquering hero". Note how H.H. is continually providing oblique clues; see Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions.

fifty-three: the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has been corrected.

susceptible to the magic of games ... I saw the board: H.H. is speaking for his maker, who would hope that the reader shares this limpid view of the gameboard that is Lolita.

stratagems: "beautiful word, stratagem-a treasure in a cave," writes Nabokov in Gogol (p. 59).

tessellated: laid with checkered work or adorned with mosaic.

Champion, Colorado: an actual town, chosen by Nabokov because this is a championship game-H.H.'s attempts to fix in prose the beauty of the nymphet.

Decugis or Borman: Max Decugis was a great European tennis player who often teamed with Gobbert (see Gobbert). They were Wimbledon men's doubles champions in 1911. Paul de Borman was the Belgian champion in the first decade of this century. Nabokov recalled, "He was left-handed, and one of the first Europeans to use a sliced (or twist) service. There is a photograph of him in the Wallis Myers book on tennis (c. 1913)." I could not find the Myers book, but Decugis and Borman are discussed in George W. Beldman and P. A. Vaile's Great Lawn Tennis Players (New York, 1907). Beldman deplores Borman's lack of aggressiveness and poor position (resulting from the way he used his body to achieve his spins and cut shots), and writes of him, inimitably, "I do not know that he has a single perfect stroke, yet in every shot he made there was education for him who was able to take it" (pp. 350351). Nabokov took it, and immortalized Borman in Lolita. At first wince (to quote H.H.), such minutiae may seem no better than Kinbotisms, but they are calmly offered as an example of the precise manner in which Nabokov's memory speaks to him and, as well, to suggest how he does indeed stock his "imaginary garden with real toads" (see Parody of a hotel corridor ... and death). He was in fact a life-long tennis enthusiast and supplemented his meagre income as an emigre by giving tennis lessons to wealthy Berliners. Not by chance does he have H.H. poeticize Lolita's tennis game, on a court invested with the geometric perfection that the painter Piet Mondrian (18721944) brought to rigorous abstractions that sometimes look like overviews of tennis courts.

butterfly: although Nabokov intended no "symbolism," it appears after H.H. has come as close to capturing Lolita's grace as he ever will. Nabokov only commented, "Butterflies are indeed inquisitive, and the dipping motion is characteristic of a number of genera." See John Ray, Jr..

wimbles: any of several instruments for boring holes.