deep mirrors: Quilty literally lives in a house of mirrors, just as H.H. is figuratively imprisoned in one; see Beale, a mirror, and below, where the mirror is held up to him and he sees a familiar bathrobe. For an index to Quilty's appearances, see Quilty, Clare.

keys ... locks ... left hand: the keys don't work because magic and terror prevail in the special world of Pavor Manor. See trudging from room to room.

brief waterfall: Quilty has once before flushed the toilet thusly; see someone ... beyond our bathroom.

Je suis ... Brustere: "I am Mr. Brewster," spelled in phonetic French.

Punch: the hook-nosed and hunchbacked principal character in the traditional "Punch and Judy" show (see Introduction and I have only words to play with). Used here in the sense of "clown."

vaterre: "water," with a phonetic French spelling; slang for "water closet" (lavatory).

Patagonia: an actual town in Arizona.

Dolores, Colo.: Nabokov, the enchanted butterfly hunter, made one of his most important captures at Telluride, near Dolores, Colo., which is why he finally chose Dolores rather than Virginia as the proper name of his nymphet. Did you ever hear of a girl named "Telluride"? For Dolores, see Dolores. For a mordant blending of Proust and Dolores, see Dolores Disparue. For the butterfly in question, see from my lofty slope and tinkling sounds ... Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov.

those calls: but H.H. has in mind the fake call Quilty made here.

La ... Chair: The Pride of the Flesh, not a noteworthy translation of Proud Flesh, which in French would be Tissu bourgeonnant or Fongosite.

Wooly- ... -are?: a phonetic burlesque of American pronunciation: "Voulez-vous boire?" (French; "Do you want a drink?").

une femme ... cigarette: "a woman is a woman but a Caporal is a cigarette." Quilty has made nonsense out of "The Betrothed," by Rudyard Kipling (18651936): "A million surplus Maggie are willing to bear the yoke / And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke" (see also Keys, p. 136n). The pun is on corporal (military rank) and Caporal (the brand name of a French cigarette).

a Gentile's house: for a summary of what could be termed "the anti-Semitism theme," see spaniel ... baptized.

"Vous ... vieux": French; "You are in a fine mess, my friend."

"Alors ... -on?": French; "What do we do then?"

Justine: see Sade's ... start: Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue.

Because ... a sinner: a parody of T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" (1930): "Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn...." H.H.'s structural use of "Because" in the remainder of the poem echoes Eliot's. For Eliot, see pastiches.

moulting: animals and insects moult; to cast off hair, feathers, skin, etc., which is replaced by new growth.

flavid: yellowish or tawny-colored.

rencontre: French; meeting (duel).

soyons raisonnables: French; let us be reasonable.

as the Bard said: in Macbeth (V, vii, 19); and for this pun Quilty deserves to die.

Vibrissa: one of the stiff, bristly hairs which many animals have about their mouths (a cat's whiskers); also the similar feathers on a bird.

Schmetterling: German; butterfly. During a conversation with Nabokov, I singled out this moment in the H.H.-Quilty confrontation as a good example of the kind of humorous but telling detail whose significance critics often miss. Nabokov nodded and with complete seriousness said, "Yes. That's the most important phrase in the chapter." At first this may seem to be an extreme statement or leg-pull; but in the context of the involuted patterning it is perfectly just (see I have only words to play with), for by mentioning the German word for butterfly Quilty has superimposed the author's watermark on the scene. Like the mention of Dolores, Colorado (Dolores, Colo.), this reference-the only butterfly in the chapter-points to the lawful obsession with Lepidoptera that makes Nabokov a fellow traveler with enchanted hunters as unsavory as H.H. and Quilty. This tack is summarized in the hospital at Elphinstone ... irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star. For Maeterlinck, the heavy-handed symbolist, see Maeterlinck. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

herculanita: a very potent South American variety of heroin.

Melanie Weiss: "Black White"; from melanin ("black [pigmented]") and the German for "white"-and she does measure reality in black- and-white terms. Her work burlesques the researches of a famous woman anthropologist who also favored far Pacific isles. See Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz for the sisterly mirror reversal "Blanche Schwarzmann" ("White Blackman"), a verbal relationship that once again reveals the author's hand.

Bagration ... Barda Sea: many islands in the Pacific were discovered by Russians, and named by them, but neither of these places exists. The first is after Prince Petr Ivanovich Bagration (17651812), the Russian General who fought with distinction against Napoleon at Borodino, where he was fatally wounded, in 1812. Barda is a vodka-distilling sop given to cattle in Russia. The "geographic" names offer an ironic tribute to Miss Weiss's heroic efforts.

Feu: French; Fire.

Impredictable: a portmanteau word; unpredictable plus impredicable (from predicated): "incapable of being categorized."

a feminine "ah!": see I shot ... said: Ah.' and shooting her lover ... making him say "akh!".

trudging from room to room: the keys jangling in H.H.'s pocket have not locked the rooms (see keys ... locks ... left hand); a fairy tale and nightmare blended. Quilty's refusal to die mocks the Double story, and the idea that evil can be exorcized so easily.

pink bubble: see bubble of hot poison for the original, figurative bubble.

purple heap: the color of his bathrobe and his prose.

staged for me by Quilty: see The Strange Mushroom.

CHAPTER 36.

Thomas had something: Thomas the Apostle, the "doubting" disciple of John 20:24, who refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ until he himself had touched the nail wounds. Asked if an allusion to Thomas Mann might also be intended here, Nabokov replied, "The other Tom had nothing."

Hegelian synthesis: the death of Charlotte is remembered here (the killer's car going up the slope; here), blending with the whole story of Lolita, from the cows on the slope (here) to her assumed death (if the reader reads the book, Lolita must be dead; see here, here, and here). This "Hegelian synthesis" realizes Quilty's "Elizabethan" play-within-the-novel, The Enchanted Hunters, which featured Lolita as a bewitching "farmer's daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana,", and seven hunters, six of them "red-capped, uniformly attired." A "last-minute kiss was to enforce the play's profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love." When Humbert asks a pregnant and veiny-armed Lolita to go away with him, he demonstrates that the mirage of the past (the nymphic Lolita as his lost "Annabel") and the reality of the present (the Charlotte-like woman Lolita is becoming) have merged in love, a "synthesis linking up two dead women."

heavenlogged system.... crisscrossing the crazy quilt: Part Two's final reference to Quilty by name mirrors the section's first entry, "crazy quilt." We've seen that such "coincidences" limn H.H.'s entrapment, his particular obsessional McFate-"I cannot get out, said the starling"-and, of course, the author's presence. The book-length system of planned coincidences and harmonious authorial patterning can also stand as a metaphor for evidence of the cosmic Author's work, divine Revelation of some "heavenlogged system" (logged here means "to enter in a logbook," "any record of progress"). As for Nabokov's specific "system," pantheism is a just word-lofty, but hardly reductive.

from my lofty slope: Here, H.H. realizes that the sounds emanating from the mining town below were of one nature-children at play. "One could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clutter of a toy wagon.... And then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord," and with these words, it is clear that H.H. has transcended his solipsism. "The rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump" pinpoints happy metamorphoses, especially H.H.'s progression as an ethical being. The pretty but two-dimensional "pregnant" landscape (reread the passage) has given birth to the concord of children, a three-dimensional conception because it includes people. Aesthetic, moral, and communal perspectives have cohered, as ideally they should. The image of the "heavenlogged system" posits a fourthdimension, ail of which is at a considerable remove from the onedimensional landscape represented in the conventional "ancient American estampe." Humbert's is indeed a lofty perch.

The personal dimension of this signal passage is documented by a letter that Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in September 1951, from Ithaca, N.Y., describing a successful quest for butterflies in Telluride, where, in July, he had caught the first identified female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov, though his letter isn't taxonomically specific about his finds. He does mention "a steep slope high above Telluride-quite an enchanted slope," and the mining town, "full of most helpful, charming people-and when you hike from there, which is 9000', to 10000', with the town and its tin roofs and selfconscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets-delightful!" (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 19401977 [1979], p. 265). The passage of Lolita here, which clearly echoes many of these words, may well have been composed shortly after this letter; the end of the novel was written at the outset. In any event, two kinds of wonder are conflated in Lolita's version of the letter's lofty vision.

Otto Otto: queried about this name, Nabokov answered, "a doubled neutrality with something owlish about it."

Mesmer: after Franz or Friedrich Mesmer (17341815), the Austrian physician who established hypnotism. See Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH.

Lambert: a step away from Humbert. No literary allusions intended.

fifty-six days ago: in the concluding paragraphs of Lolita, H.H. reasserts the verisimilar basis that has been belied everywhere in the preceding pages, linking the last three paragraphs of his manuscript with the first three paragraphs of "editor" John Ray's Foreword, creating an elegant pairing and extraordinary equipoise for which neither H.H. nor Ray is responsible (see "real people").

Do not talk to strangers: in Who's Who in the Limelight, "Quine, Dolores" is said to have made her debut in Never Talk to Strangers, and here H.H. advises Lolita similarly (see Never Talk to Strangers). "Coincidence" and design govern in things this small, to paraphrase Robert Frost's poem "Design" (1936), a bleak reversal of Nabokov's hopeful pantheistic vision.

do not pity C.Q..... aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments ... my Lolita: "durable pigments" preserve the angels in Old Master paintings. The "auroch" refers to the European bison, now virtually extinct, as is this definition, since it is omitted from Webster's 3rd. H.H.'s aurochs allude to those delicate and stylized images of bison that still are visible on the cave walls of Spain and France where they were painted ten to twenty thousand years ago. Their "durable pigments" are an inspiring idea and sight, even when the images are poorly reproduced in text books. But I would never have identified the auroch as such if Nabokov himself hadn't mentioned it to me during a 1974 conversation about the cave paintings of Lascaux. (The beleagured drawing instructor in Nabokov's 1938 story, "Tyrants Destroyed," who endures a totalitarian regime, finds some solace in his doctoral dissertation on the cave origins of painting.) But Lolita's cave painting is too "Joycean," too obscure; "C.Q.," the final Quilty reference, is much fairer. With it, H.H.'s tone turns an unfamiliar shade. Although the narrative surface is still intact, the masked narrator does speak in a newly impersonal way. When asked if one is now supposed to "hear" a different voice, as at "the end" of so many of his novels (see Introduction), Nabokov said, "No, I did not mean to introduce a different voice. I did want, however, to convey a constriction of the narrator's sick heart, a warning spasm causing him to abridge names and hasten to conclude his tale before it was too late. I am glad I managed to achieve this remoteness of tone at the end" (Wisconsin Studies interview). This "remoteness" is appropriate, for Humbert's love and Nabokov's labors have become one. The final phrase sounds the "Latin" locution that has echoed through the narrative (see the writer's ancient lust and my Lolita), and the last word of the novel, that fatal constriction, repeats the first: "Lolita." It is a fitting and final symmetry for this Byzantine edifice, this verbal equivalent of an ordered (divinely ordered?) universe. Fyodor, the young poet of The Gift, wonders, on a summer stroll, "what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days-from Person Unknown" (p. 340).

ON A BOOK ENTITLED LOLITA.

ON ... ENTITLED LOLITA: this Afterword was written to accompany the generous excerpts from Lolita which appeared in the 1957 edition of The Anchor Review, the novel's American debut, made possible mainly by Jason Epstein and the review's editor, Melvin J. Lasky. It was appended to the Putnam's edition in 1958, and has since been included in most of the 25 or so translations.

the poor creature's cage: see I cannot ... starling. In Pale Fire, Kinbote tells John Shade, "with no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws, and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars" (pp. 226227). Writing about Sirin-himself-in Conclusive Evidence (1951), in a sentence omitted from the second edition (Speak, Memory), Nabokov says, "His best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls" (p. 217). Nabokov employed the prison trope in many ways. See my Introduction, here.

best ... are not translated: this of course is no longer true.

destroyed it ... after ... 1940: nor is this true. The story, titled "The Enchanter," unexpectedly turned up among his papers in 1964, a fifty-four-page typescript rather than the thirty pages of memory. Two passages were made available to Andrew Field for use in his study Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967). Newly translated versions are quoted in the Introduction, here.

The book developed slowly: its design and order of events, however, were clearly in mind early in its composition, said Nabokov, although various sections were written well out of sequence, as was customary with him. See Introduction, here.

"reality" (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes): in Ada, Nabokov writes, "It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada [Van] discovered the pang, the ogon,' the agony of supreme 'reality.' Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws ..." (pp. 210220).

America: a corrected misprint ("American" in the 1958 edition).

Palearctic ... Nearctic: one of the four world faunal regions, the Holarctic (arctic and temperate zones), is subdivided into Palearctic (Europe and Asia) and Nearctic (North America). The "suburban lawn" and "mountain meadow" above are open country for a lepidopterist, notes Diana Butler in "Lolita Lepidoptera," New World Writing 16, p. 61. See John Ray, Jr. for a summary of all the entomological allusions.

spring of 1955: a corrected author's error (instead of "winter of 1954" in the 1958 edition).

Mr. Taxovich: Maximovich, the ex-White Russian colonel reduced to driving a taxi, is totally infatuated with H.H.'s first wife, Valeria. H.H. graciously lets her go.

class list of Ramsdale School: it is most notable for the way it mirrors the artist who created it (see her class at ... school ff.), and for "Flashman, Irving," who suffers quietly, the only Jew in a class of Gentiles (see Irving).

"waterproof": When Jean Farlow notices that H.H. has gone swimming with his watch on, Charlotte reassures her, and dreamily relishes a miracle of modern technology: " 'Waterproof,' said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.". The word is also the clue H.H. uses to torment the reader who strains to learn the identity of Lolita's abductor (see Waterproof), and one is thus reminded that Lolita is a very special kind of detective story (see Lo-lee-ta).

in slow motion ... Humbert's gifts: Lolita is remembered as an illusory creature in a dream, rather than as the object of H.H.'s lust (see here), and the allusion to his gifts recalls his desperate bribery as well as its results.

the pictures ... of Gaston Godin: furtive love is invoked; like the artists whose portraits dominate his garret, Gaston is clearly homosexual. See large photographs.

the Kasbeam barber: he talks of his son, dead for thirty years, as though he were still alive (see here).

Lolita playing tennis: if ever H.H. succeeds in "fix[ing] once for all the perilous magic of nymphets," it is in this scene.

the hospital at Elphinstone ... irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star: Nabokov is referring to Lolita by her married name. Twin deaths are recorded: Lolita "dies" for H.H. when Quilty steals her from the hospital (here) and "dies" for Nabokov when the book is completed, and her image is irretrievable. But Lolita does not die in the book; as H.H. says, "I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive." Her creator points beyond the novel's fictive time into the future, for he would agree with H.H.'s closing statement that art "is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." It is important to note that none of these "secret points" is exclusively sexual. Rather, the images and characters all formulate varying states of isolation, loss, obsession, and ecstasy which generalize H.H.'s consuming passion; the concluding "co-ordinate," after all, places in their midst the author, butterfly net firmly in hand.

tinkling sounds ... Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov: the final "co-ordinates" form a most interesting progression. The last "nerve of the novel" is in fact outside the novel and extends from the lepidopterist to the nympholept, who almost seem to pass one another on the same trail. H.H. also experiences a most pleasing unity of sounds coming from a valley town (here); and the butterfly in question was captured by Nabokov near Dolores, Colorado (see Dolores and Dolores, Colo.). Nabokov commented: "This Coloradian member of the subgenus Lycaeides (which I now place in the genus Plebejus, a grouping corresponding exactly in scope to my former concept of Plebejinae) was described by me as a subspecies of Tutt's 'argyrognomon' (now known as idas L.), but is, in my present opinion, a distinct species." See John Ray, Jr..

My private tragedy ... my natural idiom: the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Nabokov's first novel in English) says something very similar about Knight: I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian's Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before his first book-that is, at the time he left Russia,-his English was as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books. [pp. 8283].

Nabokov's "private tragedy" is our concern, for in varying degrees it involves us all. Nabokov's search for the language adequate to Lolita is H.H.'s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all of our attempts to communicate. " 'A penny for your thoughts,' I said, and she stretched out her palm at once." It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality-the desperate extent of all human need and desire. "I have only words to play with," says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita's palm. H.H. has failed once-"She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I use[d] for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own teeth on edge"-but it is a necessary act of love to try, and perhaps Nabokov succeeds with the reader where H.H. failed with Lolita.

frac-tails: Nabokov wittily demonstrates that the "native illusionist" is now an internationalist: frac is French for "dress coat." It is just that Nabokov (and this edition) should conclude with a joke, however small, for, from behind "the bars of the poor creature's cage," desperate Humbert also exults. In Gogol, Nabokov notes how "one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant" (p. 142), a juxtaposition implicit in the early title, Laughter in the Dark. The title goes two ways: it records the laughter of the cosmic joker who has made a pawn of Albinus, blinding and tormenting him, but it also summarizes Nabokov's response to life, his course for survival. Toward the end of Lolita, the sick and despairing Humbert has finally tracked down Lolita, who is now the pregnant Mrs. Richard Schiller. He recalls how he rang the doorbell, ready to kill Dick. The bell seems to vibrate through his whole exhausted system, but suddenly Humbert takes his automatic French response to the sound and playfully twists it into verbal nonsense: "Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense?" he wonders. It sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov's profoundly humane comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert's narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the sadness or terror of everyday life.

ABOUT VLADIMIR NABOKOV.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (19231937) and Paris (19371940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century's master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works-including Lolita-into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

ABOUT ALFRED APPEL, JR.

Alfred Appel, Jr., was born in New York City on January 31, 1934, and raised on Long Island. He served for two years in the U. S. Army, and was educated at Cornell and Columbia, which granted him a Ph.D. degree in 1963. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford, and, since 1968, at Northwestern University, where he is presently Professor of English and American Culture. He has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. The first edition of The Annotated Lolita was in print for twenty years and went through twelve printings. His other books include Nabokov's Dark Cinema, Signs of Life, and The Art of Celebration: The Expression of Joy in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, Photography, and Music, forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

BOOKS BY Vladimir Nabokov NOVELS.

Mary

King, Queen, Knave

The Defense