More about Shakespeare

Here is a great article written by Ron Rosenbaum about Brian Boyd and Pale Fire ~ a must read for anyone in our class, especially after the lecture by Dr. Minton on 10-22-09. If you missed that fantastic lecture this article may help fill in some gaps and information for you.

http://www.observer.com/node/42295#


Happy Reading!

Amber to Zen

Blogging for this class requires a lot of thought, but not just any kind of thought. Only intelligent thoughts will suffice. Some days that is a real challenge. So far, my spark has not happened with regard to page 83 in Pale Fire, though I hope to break the block before class tomorrow. I will ponder the enigma of this section further and return to this post as soon as that spark of magic happens, otherwise this will be a seriously boring post to read.

Alphabetic literary family. What was Mrs. G reading? Amber to Zen. I have been thinking and looking for books beginning with Amber and Zen that were available to Nabokov and must confess, I am not having much luck. I hope others in the class have found the jewel in this passage.

Will edit or revise if I have an epiphany.

I GOT IT! I GOT IT!I GOT IT!

Amber refers to Forever Amber

Anthony Hope's popular novel of 1893, The Prisoner of Zenda. is where the Zen comes from.

How did I figure this out?

visit Zembla and search Amber to Zen and read the letter exchange between Brian Boyd and Neil Hornick

Shakespeare

I was really impressed by our guess lecture by Dr. Gretchen Minton. Though I am not a Shakespeare fanatic, as a literature major, I have read and discussed my share. Prior to this class, reading Pale Fire, and then this fabulous lecture, I had never heard of or read Timon of Athens. The apparent resemblances between Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Pale Fire are quite clear after last class. I think Nabokov was referencing both Shakespeare plays in the novel. He is much too interested in doubles, doppelgangers, reflections and resemblances for it to just be a coincidence. Nabokov was extremely well read, and seemed to like submerging references to other literature within his works. In order to catch them all, you have to be an avid scholar of literature and to have read an enormous amount of it, obscure and famous, and do not leave out works Nabokov has professed to dislike, because those are also fair game, as we saw with James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

As we were discussing the Shakespeare passages, I realized the glow-worm/firefly relates to a butterflies. The butterfly begins as a caterpillar or worm-like creature and then 'dies' in that form to reemerge as a butterfly. Fireflies are a type of butterfly. Even when 'stealing' from other works, Nabokov still sticks to imagery he is familiar with and loves.

pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told

pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told

So far, I can see atalanta repeated throughout the message.

As for the meaning, I am struggling on this. If I have to guess...I think think it goes something like:
Father (or papa) do not go across the lane to old Goldsworth's after the tale of fire far rant land has been told?
Padre/Father/Papa, don't go over to Goldsworth's with the man who told the rant of a far land after you finish your fire tale?

Kinbote Peaves

Charles Kinbote has many annoying traits, but what annoys me the most is how he thinks everything is about him and his beloved Zembla. He cannot see any faults in John Shade; he blames Sybil for the 'removal' of Zembla and King Charles from the poem. He is a creepy stalker. He can't be bothered to take care of the house and cat as they owners of the house requested. Stealing the poem when Shade is shot and killed. Kinbote is in general obnoxious and annoying.

Pale Fires

When we were looking at this picture in class today, I was talking to Chris about how much I liked it, and he commented that it almost looked like fire on the head and breast of this waxwing image. After I studied the picture and thought about this comment I realized it was actual a pale fire on the bird. What a perfect choice of bird to begin a novel called Pale Fire written by a trickster like Nabokov. We talked about the waxwing being a trickster in class on Tuesday, and our discussion today about the format of Pale Fire sets Nabokov up as a master of deception and trickery. October is an apropos month to be studying a tricky novel by a tricky author.

Cedar Waxwing
(Bombycilla cedrorum)

June, 2003. © AJ Hand

The colors of this waxwing reminded me of a fiery sunset and so I decided to include it also.

Best Paper

I have been reading the posted papers, again, and still struggling to decide which one is the best. There are so many insightful and intriguing ideas in the papers. With that said, I am going to chose Jana's paper, because I had contemplated writing on and researching Camp Q myself.

Waxwing Pictures

Deleted due to apparent copyright issues.

Short Focused Paper

Humbert as Vampire

On page 138-9 of Lolita, Humbert is describing Lolita sitting in a “blood-red armchair” and says, “Nothing could have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted…”. (Nabokov, 138-9) He is watching a manifestation of Clare Quilty watch Lolita and talking about how innocent Lo looks. Ironically, this moment occurs the morning after the first sexual encounter between Humbert and Lolita, at The Enchanted Hunters. I fail to see how the imagery of a vampire feasting can perceived as innocent. Humbert sees Lolita as food for his “secret delectation”. (Nabokov, 125) When he attempts to satisfy his hunger; he kills Lolita’s childhood, just as a vampire kills the mortal they feed upon to appease their hunger. Neither Humbert nor the vampire can quench their endless hunger for more than a moment.

Humbert describes himself as, “Pathetic-because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child”. (Nabokov, 63) His hunger for Lolita overcomes his intention to protect her purity. The vampire’s hunger is also all consuming and overcomes all logic, reason, and rational objectives. The hunger devours both the victim and the one feasting at the same time.

Humbert’s vampire-like nature is also exposed when he tastes the blood on her nose when he is trying to seduce her. (Nabokov, 240) His hunger to possess her clouds his judgment as an adult and her ‘guardian’, especially since it is his intention to protect and keep her forever, like a husband promises to a wife during the marriage ceremony. He almost cannot see how sick Lolita is, eventually his rational mind pushes through his lust and he takes her to the Elphinstone hospital. He tastes her blood, like a vampire tastes the blood of his victim. In that moment, he gains knowledge. He understands that Lo is truly ill. In vampire lore, when a vampire tastes the blood of a human, the vampire is often able to ‘see’ and ‘know’ things about the person. They can taste disease, malevolence, and purity in the blood. Metaphorically, Humbert does the same; the taste of Lolita’s blood gives him knowledge beyond what had penetrated his hunger up until that point.

According to the mythology of vampires, they are considered to be monsters. Humbert is also a monster. One cannot read the novel and not think Humbert is a monster; he feeds on Lolita’s innocence, and kills her childhood. Both Humbert and vampires prey on human beings. It is because their prey is humankind that makes them monsters in the eyes of others. If either one fed on another type of life form, then they might be perceived as strange but probably not monsters. They are the ‘other’ that we do not understand and thus we fear them. Throughout history, the ‘other’ has always been something to fear, whether that ‘other’ is a monster or not. An example of this is the reaction the Europeans had when they encountered the Native Americans.
Humbert is a human vampire. He is so consumed by his desire and hunger for Lolita that he destroys both their lives. His entire existence is centered on that hunger. Vampire’s existence also centers on feeding their hunger for blood, to the exclusion of all else. Nothing in the world matters beyond feeding the desire and satiating the hunger, if only for a moment. Hunbert does not control his appetite for nymphets, bringing him across the line, from man into monster. Once he becomes a monster, we then look for a name to call our newly ‘born’ monster. Looking to monster lore, the vampire fits Humbert more than only other monster figure. Vampires are sexual predators and so is Humbert. They both feed their desires on the innocent, making Humbert a human vampire.

Pale Fire

So, here we are, embarking on the second half of our semester on Nabokov. I am still reading Pale Fire, but I wanted to share some first thoughts.

First, I am amazed at how so few words can tell such a complex story. Great poetry always has the power to awe me.

Second, I have been noticing how often Nabokov uses gems and stones in descriptions. Just in Canto One he uses diamonds, jade, emeralds, and opals.

Third, like in all the texts so far, Nabokov uses vivid colors in his language. It is those details that bring his words to life in my imagination so completely and complexly.

More to come over the coming weeks...

Elphinestone

While studying for our "Quiz" and I think the word quiz definitely does need the claw quote marks, I noticed that on page 31 on of the books available in the library is A Vangabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone and that the hospital Humbert takes Lolita to when she is sick is at Elphinstone.

Nobel Prize in Literature

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/08/arts/AP-EU-Nobel-Literature.html?_r=1&emc=na

Don't forget to check out the other prize winners and editors picks at
http://nobelprize.org/

Great article about smuggling literature out of the USSR in 1970

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/fredrikson/index.html


Happy Reading and Good luck to everyone on the Quiz today.

Lolita ~ An Appreciation

http://www.handprint.com/SC/NAB/loapp1.html

L O L I T A
			a n a p p r e c i a t i o n
			Quotations are from Lolita and Lolita: A Screenplay in the Library of America edition of Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962, edited by Brian Boyd (1996).
				[ the morality thing ]
		Lolita starts with the premise that because we are human, we have desires. Then adds that because we our human, our desires cannot be acted on impulsively; our desires have moral consequences. Morality means others judge our needs, impose through opinion and law the oppressive duty to live as they think we should. But some of our desires are too strong for these weak restraints. They lead us to the wrong choices, even to habitual deception. If discovered we suffer shame, scorn or prosecution. We stumble and fail in the tangle of what we want and what others think is right. Despite our suffering we never really pierce the mystery of ourselves and why our most basic desires collide with a world of right and wrong. For all its sadness, Lolita portrays how miserably funny this is. We can salvage dignity through our capacity to laugh at our own torment and our capacity to pity and care for others. Humbert Humbert, pervert murderer, has lusted and seduced in ways our society utterly rejects. As a child molester writing the summary of his life, he cannot laugh at himself, and he cannot pity others. He can ape, and clown, spin excuses and dramatic confessions, exult with triumph or rage with frustration. But he cannot pity his victim enough to spare her the torment of his desires. It is for the reader to laugh and to pity him.
				[ ]
			Morality is something that the reader brings to the book because the book does not offer a moral point of view: it is written by a criminal. Humbert writes Lolita in a prison cell as evidence in his defense. He is on trial for the murder of Clare Quilty, famous dramatist. Humbert occasionally addresses the reader as "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or some mordant equivalent, and this reminds us of the basic situation. But his confession very quickly reveals a completely different and unexpected crime: that for many years he had manipulated and sexually abused a young girl, Dolores Haze, whom he calls "Lolita" with a lascivious tripping of the tongue. He says he murdered Clare Quilty in retribution for seducing his child lover away from him. As he finishes the manuscript, he decides to withhold it until both he and Lolita are dead, claiming to know that he may be convicted by this lack of evidence. But he dies of heart failure (one does not speak in Lolita of a broken heart) before the trial begins. Now, Humbert sometimes refers to himself as a beast, he sometimes expresses sadness or humiliation at his own acts, he sometimes scorns his own stupidity, and he seems unflinchingly honest as he confesses his seductions, lies, schemes, plots and act of murder. But he doesn't much talk about the murder. He is consumed by his sexual attraction Lolita. Even more: he speaks of her as the great love of his life and the burning meaning of his whole existence. We do not judge a murder, but a love story. So we are invited to read a document revealing the guilt of a sex pervert, offered as evidence to excuse a murderer, in a trial that will never happen because everyone — Humbert, Quilty, and even Lolita — is dead. The reader's curiosity is invited in by the officious comments of John Ray Jr., Ph.D., editor of the manuscript, who helpfully suggests that "in this poignant study there lurks a general lesson." This seems to give the reader both a moral and esthetic justification for perusing the pervert's text. But it also certifies that it is "us" who look at him. By mooting the murder trial through the death of the accused, Nabokov gives the reader complete moral freedom. Our judgment is a personal reaction, not a social duty. But what really is our judgment? Is it that Humbert is immoral? Humbert agrees. Is it that Humbert is degenerate, disgusting? He agrees. That he must renounce his passion for Lolita? Here he is silent. He asks Lolita to forgive him for loving her. But he cannot give up his longing for her. Lolita tests our moral sense through a pariah. Humbert is a man who cannot relinquish his desires in order to join our moral world. Yet those desires seem fit to earn him our harshest condemnation.
			[ ]
		Ironically, we can judge Humbert only if we believe what he tells us is true. But the truth of his testimony is hard to establish. There seems good reason to reject his testimony out of hand. He is awaiting trial — why shouldn't he lie? He describes in detail his ability to deceive others and disguise his crimes. He knows the jurors can convict him, why shouldn't he play on their pity? He brags about his ability to manipulate the feelings of his former physicians, psychiatrists, wives. Humbert's seduction expands. Not only does he by his own admission seduce various women and young girls (using these admissions to comment on his physical attractiveness), he is perhaps trying to seduce us as well — to credulity, to compassion, to consent to the longing that consumes him. He pits his words against the reader's conscience. And what amazing, powerful, hypnotizing words they are. The detail and precision of his descriptions challenge our skepticism through the intense reality they invoke. The humor and irony and horror and misery of the novel erode our detachment until we feel an empathy for Humbert's suffering. He wants to turn the empathy in this single direction: that we let him have his longing, his love. And in a sense, this means letting him have Lolita. But false notes crop up in the many justifications that Humbert scatters throughout his seductive story. Among them, his claim that Lolita was instigator of their overt sexual relations ("it was she who seduced me"), that anyway Lolita had already been seduced by a playmate ("I was not even her first lover"); that besides Humbert intended many precautions to preserve her innocence (soporifics, fondling without intercourse); that many cultures accept love between adults and children; that nymphets are not really children but demonic spirits, as any knowing observer will tell you; and Humbert did "try hard to be good. Really and truly he did..." But is there really any merit to these claims? Of course not. Sexual intercourse with preadolescent girls is a perversion. A flirtatious child should be admonished, not fondled. Sex between a child and her playmate doesn't excuse sex between the child and her parent. What other cultures accept has little relevance to what our morality requires. The idea that children might be demonic is no pretext to exploit them. "Trying hard to be good" must include cooperating honestly with one's therapists and wife; and so on. We can add that lying and deceiving others are wrong; and murder for revenge is wrong. In our culture, in this time, you either understand these things or you don't. Humbert's excuses show that he doesn't understand them. The reader does. Nabokov even has wooden Dr. Ray shuffle out to make the moral matters perfectly clear. So his justifications seem flimsy enough to be insincere. "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," he comments. But if he only wants to seduce us, why would he point out to us the style he is using to do it?
			[ ]
				The new possibility is that there is another victim in Humbert's seductive story: himself. This spins things in a new direction, from whether Humbert wants us to believe him, to whether he believes himself. The roots of this theme appear in the first pages of his story, where Humbert loves and then loses to typhus his lovely twelve year old Annabel Leigh by the sea. Humbert claims that this experience scarred him and that the scar shaped his destiny. With an astounding consistency, he traces how all his acts, all his thoughts, flow as consequences of that wound and his struggle against its pain. But is this remarkable clarity insight, or fiction? To that objection, Humbert offers as it were a torture test of his sincerity. Whatever a man believes will relieve his unbearable pain becomes through that pain a pure conviction. If Humbert's excuses were only directed at us they would be worthless, mere pandering to our sentimentality. But if they were the excuses and rationalizations Humbert rehearsed to himself, as attempts to cure his pain, they would be truthful. The irony of this argument is that the crazier his reasoning sounds, the more desperate would be the torment that formed it. This torture test is the implicit reason why Humbert goes into such detail about the events or crimes in his life (the almost-drowning of Charlotte Haze, for example) that we would never know about otherwise. He is painting the full depths of his suffering. In the context of that suffering, he can introduce his illogical justifications without appearing to insult our intelligence. Finally there is Humbert's obvious vanity, which emerges in his shallow demonstrations of intellectual superiority, his tailored clothing, the icy rage at his suspected rivals for Lolita's affections, his delight in manipulating other people, and his arty language. We might think that Humbert is writing at such length because it gratifies his vanity. But his writing only shows us that he has ruined his life for the embraces of an indifferent little brat. When he describes his past, we see that the lies to others and the lies to himself get mixed up — for example, in his futilely optimistic marriage to Valeria, or his refusal to see Lolita's unfaithfulness. So the crux of the reader's problem is that we do not know when Humbert is lying and when he is telling us the truth. This is the dark fascination of the book. Humbert feels pain, and so do we. Humbert didn't consciously choose his nature, and neither did we. Humbert wrestles with his pain, again just like us. As he struggles, he devises justifications for the things that bring him relief, just as we often do. Some of these justifications shield him from the judgment of others, and some shield him from his own despair and self loathing. Seen in this way, Humbert is no different from us. But for this one detail: Humbert cannot escape his longing, no matter how much pain it causes him. His longing is not mere torment, but the very core of his existence. Without his longing his life would have no meaning. And without it, alone in jail, he dies. All that is not along the lines suggested by Dr. Ray's excuses, but it is also a more complicated moral predicament than the sturdy psychologist seems capable of offering ... pervert there, "us" normal folks here.
		[ ]
			Some critics have followed helpful Dr. Ray's esthetic appreciations and characterized the novel in purely artistic terms, as the allegory (the "tendresse") of old-world Nabokov's romance with the feisty youthful American language. This is a weirdly tepid explanation for a terribly sad and disturbing book. If we want to search for a single thematic image — in itself not a very clever goal — then a good place to look is Speak, Memory (1951), the autobiography that occupied Nabokov for three years before work on Lolita began. And when we read the autobiography for hints of the fiction, we discover an episode that suggests Humbert's passion for nymphets took its moral reality from Nabokov's passion for ... butterflies. Judge for yourself: Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, intefered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Already when I was ten, tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away. In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent fun. He arrived one summer night — in 1913, I think — from a town some twenty-five miles away. His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stout-hearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me. On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden — patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself. The scene is powerful in its moral clarity. How selfish did Nabokov have to be to sneak away from a bikesore, impoverished, lonely and grieving friend to stalk and capture a few insects? Clearly, selfish enough to sink beneath his own moral limits — not just to a pang of guilt but to burning tears of humiliation. Yet he followed his desire. In Lolita Nabokov wrote concretely about the struggle of our desires against our better selves, and the corroding effects of that struggle on our sense of reality and truth, and the inextricable pain that our deepest loves create for us. There is no allegory. Nabokov created a pervert, but invested him with a moral selfishness that Nabokov recognized in himself. The difference between Nabokov the child slighting a friend, and Humbert the adult abusing a child is, of course, the difference between reality and art. Where readers of this book share the predicament of Nabokov and Humbert is that we can be miserable about the moral consequences of our desires — but we follow them anyway, because without them, life would have no meaning.

Lolita ~ Novel to Film Article

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/parchive/2001/S2001-Mar-8/www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/lolita.html

Lolita – From Nabokov’s Novel (1955) to Kubrick’s Film (1962) to Lyne’s (1997)

by Constantine Santas

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Constantine Santas is a Professor of Literature and Film at Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida, and the author of Responding to Film (Burnham, Inc., 2001)

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‘Lolita’ has become a recognizable word in the English language, having taken up a life of its own, with ever widening connotations and rarely if ever a reference to its literary progenitor. ‘Lolita’, the now word, is a term used to describe a certain type of young woman—usually a teenage girl with precocious sexual drive that proves ruinous to the life of a sinful older man. The word (often lower-cased to ‘lolita’) connotes badness for both sexes, but it is especially demeaning to women. Unfortunately, life itself has furnished plenty of examples to establish this negative vocabulary: not very long ago, Amy Fisher, named the "Long Island Lolita", was convicted for having shot the wife of Joey Buttafuoco, her older male friend, and spent seven years in prison. In more recent times, the scandal between President Clinton and one of his interns has brought about the same worn out eponym to Monica Liewinski. Books have been written on the subject, and videos and films made. The Amy Fisher story spawned several TV and film versions, while many young Hollywood actresses, from Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin, to Brook Shields, Linda Blair, and Drew Barrymore (the list is long), have been relegated to this dubious category of stardom. The word was coined soon after an obscure literature professor, Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian émigré, published a novel, in 1955, descriptive of the obsessions of a middle-aged man for a twelve-year-old girl. Though the book was thought scandalous, it catapulted its author to fame and fortune, and soon attracted the attentions of Stanley Kubrick, who brought it to the screen in 1962. Today, the word ‘Lolita’ has expanded to a myriad of connotations—none flattering to the human race: it is the title of a notorious novel (some think it the greatest novel of the twentieth century); it passes as a pseudo-literary term in academia; it has become the source of an endless list of mostly sordid films; and it is a pop-term exploitative of pornography in video and internet sources … and so forth. Though the controversy surrounding the word has somewhat obscured the original novel’s (and the author’s) literary stature, the two films mentioned in our title add to the mystique of the Lolita saga and are worthy of attention for their own sakes.

As all literary movies must do, both Kubrick’s and Lyne’s versions have eliminated a great deal of material from the original novel, obliged to do so by the laws that dictate a film’s time constraints—laws by which a novelist does not have to abide. Entire scenes are cut, minor characters eliminated, prefatory material excised, and plots simplified. Films that come from novels (not necessarily from plays or short stories) must usually suffer such fate. Nabokov’s book is a lengthy and elaborate excursion into regions of the human male psyche the depth and dimensions of which are impossible in these films. Before any action takes place, Humbert Humbert, the novel’s tortured protagonist, has embarked on a soul-searching exposition of his life and times, documenting in minute detail his background, mental habits, predispositions—all this buried in elaborate treatises on pedophilia, prostitution, virility, ill health, and insanity. These are given side by side with literary observations, condescending views on past and present art, and a pervasive melancholy that foreshadows the story’s tragic end. The reader knows Humbert very well before the latter even meets Lolita. All this background is cut out in Kubrick’s film, which starts at the end, with the murder of Clare Quilty by Humbert, while it scrupulously avoids the erotic content of the book, due to the difficulties with censorship and the Production Code, then in full effect. For similar reasons, Kubrick’s movie was made in England, depriving the viewer of Nabokov’s colorful descriptions of the American landscape, and thus eliminating most of exterior shots that could have enhanced the movie’s visual attractions. Lyne’s movie, on the other hand, maintains most of those advantages; it is free to do as it wishes, finally breaking loose from the restrictions of the various censorship codes imposed on film in previous eras, and even ridding itself from imputations of moral turpitude. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course. Though sex is now displayed blatantly on the screen—and often for no reason at all—the topic of pedophilia, the relation of a man in his forties to a twelve-year-old-girl, is still regarded as a taboo subject, and a downright immoral topic to deal with at all. It was not easy for Lyne’s movie to be shown to mainstream audiences; distributors in the United States shied away from it, following its theatrical release in Europe, but the movie was picked up by SHOWTIME Channel, which showed it on August 2, 1998. Subsequently the film was released to video stores and on DVD, the 1999 edition of which contains an illuminating commentary on its making by Lyne himself.

Nabokov’s Lolita became a controversial topic for a number of reasons, some having nothing to do with its sexual content. A few critics were more offended by the book’s stylistic extravagance (the frequent pauses, parentheses, exclamations, etc.) and by what was perceived as the author’s sardonic rejection of America and its values than by the subject matter itself. The attacks prompted Nabokov to issue a defense of his work in the form of an epilogue to a subsequent edition, in which he stoutly claimed that he was neither a pedophile nor anti-American. But it was mostly the book’s subject matter that gave it its notoriety and propelled it to heights of publicity that it may not have had, had it not been a story about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. Nabokov’s philosophy of "nymphets," young girls with daemonic qualities, added to the controversy regarding this particular work and made it taboo material when it came to turning the novel into film. By the time Stanley Kubrick decided to make Lolita, the novel had earned the condemnation of the Legion of Decency and the Catholic Church, and it was doubtful that Hollywood, where the Hays Production Code still reigned supreme, would touch it. Kubrick sought the collaboration of Nabokov, who readily wrote the script, sharing the chores with Kubrick, and of James B. Harris, a producer with M-G-M backing, who decided that the film would be better made in England. After the movie was finished in 1962, it lay around unreleased to theaters for six months due to the undying controversy. Eventually (around 1962), it was seen in USA theaters, but the film was thought disappointing by many who found it meandering, unequal in merit to the novel, and, more importantly, lacking the novel’s erotic content. In hindsight, critical views have evolved, and Kubrick’s Lolita is now in the canon of classic films, though perhaps not one of Kubrick’s greatest.

Unwilling to dwell on the novel’s sexual content, Kubrick turned the first part of Lolita into a social satire (undoubtedly in the book), devoting the early section of the film to Charlotte Haze's comic marriage to Humbert Humbert. By tipping the balance of the movie to create a different organic whole, he demonstrated that film is capable of exploring the depth of a famous literary work in a variety of ways depending on the circumstances and the time it is made. In the Kubrick version, James Mason, though an excellent choice as daffy Charlotte Haze’s conniving husband, looks grandfatherly to Sue Lyon’s Lolita (Lyon was fourteen, he was fifty three); furthermore, he is overshadowed by Peter Sellers’s portrait of the twisted Clare Quilty, who serves as Humbert’s nemesis. In fact, the entire first part of Kubrick’s movie focuses on the triangle of Humbert/Quilty/Charlotte and hardly pays attention to Lolita, who enters relatively late and has only a few strong scenes that seem to intrude on the flow of the Humbert/Charlotte romance. As soon as Humbert (whose first name is also his surname) enters Radmsdale, the suburb in New England where he is to spend a summer before he goes to teach at Bearsdley College, he encounters Charlotte (Nabokov’s "the Haze woman"), a widow who makes it plain to him that the European professor can have not only the room but the attractions of the environment. Kubrick teases his audience into believing that Charlotte actually encourages Humbert to flirt with Lolita, referring to her daughter as her "cherry pie" (Nabokov’s "my lilies") and lets the viewer see the trio in a drive-in watching a Frankenstein movie, all seated in the front seat, their hands entangled on their knees. Of course Charlotte becomes insanely jealous when she realizes that Humbert is there because of her daughter and sends her away to a camp ("Camp Q" becomes the "Camp Climax" of the film); she still marries Humbert, though, planning to send Lolita away for good, to a school in Europe. This portion of the movie ends with Charlotte’s death, after she reads Humbert’s diary, finds out the truth of his feelings, and rushes out into a storm where she is hit by a car. The rest describes the picaresque adventures of Lolita and Humbert, who embark on what seems an endless car tour, with a brief interruption at Beardsley, where Humbert teaches; the sexual tensions are minimal, the eroticism of the book is eradicated, and the action centers on a dissolving relationship between a middle-aged and rather inept lover Mason and a repulsed Lolita trying to get away from his clutches. The only interest here is provided by a relentless Quilty, who in his various disguises (Dr. Zempf, a lunatic psychiatrist, is his best) pursues Humbert like a fury. With the graphic murder of Quilty already out of the way, and Peter Sellers, who lent his manic energy to this film, gone, the ending of the movie is only the rueful tale of Humbert’s last failed attempt to re-capture Lolita, now a matron with child in an impoverished environment. Kubrick’s movie, more English than American, more comedy than tragedy, is subtle in its imagery yet comes nowhere near capturing the literary involutions, moral outrage, and the passion of Nabokov’s novel.

Now, the Lyne version takes a few steps in the right direction. For one, it has no lengthy digression, as Kubrick’s film does, into the Charlotte Haze-Humbert Humbert affair. The mother, in the adequate acting of Melanie Griffith, comes in at the right time—shortly after the beginning—performs a minor function (that of a minor character), and exits, logically and briefly before the first third of the film is over. From the very start, what matters in this movie is the obsession of Humbert, played by a brawny, attractive and "just right" Jeremy Irons, with a young girl of twelve, an instantly recognizable unnatural relationship. Following the book’s linear story more or less literally, Lyne has an actual twelve-year-old (Dominique Swain) play the role of Lolita. In contrast to Sue Lyon of the Kubrick version, who, at fourteen, was elegant, balletic, and somewhat prim, Swain exudes sexuality—and plays her role with abandon. Humbert seems at once a helpless man, paralyzed by his intense passion, and Irons, adapt at playing sexual roles (witness Damage), looks like a man capable of being driven mad by the little intrigues and mannerisms of a nymphet. Borrowing verbatim phrases from Nabokov’s vocabulary, Irons, while confiding to his diary, describes the child as "demonic," possessing a power over others of which she is unaware. Irons’s Humbert is also quite conscious of his provocative blasphemies—and in that sense very much resembling Nabokov’s self-loathing HH. He is only too ashamed of himself when he entices Lolita into the plush hotel, repeating to himself that if he had any sense at all he would immediately "leave this place, this country, this planet." His contrition and his guilt do not help to free him from his bondage, though. He remains enslaved to the end, a victim of his weakness: "I know I am in paradise," he murmurs in self-acknowledgment of his sorry plight, "surrounded by the flames of hell … but still in paradise…."

He and Lolita, after the early death of Charlotte, drive around the country aimlessly, she acceding to his demands and wishes (for the most part), he becoming more insatiable and debased, having to purchase her services to keep her his. What is notable in this movie—in contrast to the other—is the nearly total absence of Quilty as the pursuer. Played by Frank Langhella (and very well), Quilty stays in the shadows, uttering very few words, doing hardly anything, and he does not show up until the end, when an exasperated Humbert finds him, and the truth about him, and shoots him down in a bloodbath unimaginable in Kubrick’s early days. This turns out to be something of a drawback, as an ending, for not a sufficient rationale has been established for this outrageous and bizarre murder, coming as a shock after the soft-core pornographic content of the preceding two-hour action of this movie. There is also another incongruity. Humbert asks Lolita’s pardon, after he gives her a substantial amount of money, and she calls him "dad," implying she has forgiven him. This ending does not exist in Nobokov, whose protagonist is incapable of moral remission—or contrition—only confining himself to admission of guilt. The film also, and quite adeptly, introduces another idea, something actually taken from the Nabokov book: that Humbert Humbert, when fourteen, had an affair (or a love connection) with a young girl of his age, Anabel, who had died of typhus. His yearning for a twelve-year-old nymphet is a remnant of this suppressed desire. This does not work as cause-and-effect, at least not enough to justify Humbert’s self-acknowledged and detestable pedophilia; a yearning for one lost at fourteen does not justify an adult pursuit and exploitation of a minor. Humbert knows this too, and this self-knowledge is what makes him interesting – a tragic, though not an acceptable character. If anything, this film, equaling the novel’s moral fiber, demonstrates the possession of a man by a demon—the demon inside him. Lyne’s story shows the tragic consequences of a liaison that is not only unnatural and repugnant, but the weakness that lies in the enticement itself, the horrifying precipice on which the adult Humbert lives, constantly for years and years, unable to break his bonds and free himself. He chooses freely, though, and, in doing so, he is free to fall.

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© Constantine Santas, September 2000

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General References:

Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York: A Frederick Ungar Book, 1993

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, edited with Preface, Introduction, and Notes by Alfred Appel, Jr., New York: Vintage Books, 1995

Sinclair, Marianne, Hollywood Lolita: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies, London: Plexus Publishing, Limited, 1988

Lyne, Adrian, "Commentary", in DVD, Trimark Home Video, 1999

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Article from Zembla

Intimations of Lo:
Sirens, Joyce and Nabokov's Lolita


by Neil Cornwell


What is now frequently termed 'the Lolita phenomenon' involves - in addition to the text of the novel, its controversial reception, and a difficult publishing history - a screenplay by Nabokov, two film adaptations, and an ever-raging debate over the perpetually sensitive issues of paedophilia and child abuse. However, increased attention has been given to a consideration of a widening assortment of 'pre-texts' (or ur-texts). These range from shades, or anticipatory glimmerings, of the Lolita theme in Nabokov's own oeuvre to the nomination of a gamut of precursors and possible influences. 'Did she have a precursor?' (AL 9) has become a much-quoted question (from the opening section of Humbert's narrative). The answers have been affirmative and their quantity is growing.1 We shall recall a range of these, before turning to the impact of Ulysses.

I

When publishing his third collection of short stories in English, in 1975, Nabokov claimed that he was 'eerily startled to meet a somewhat decrepit but unmistakable Humbert escorting his nymphet in the story I wrote almost half a century ago' (TD 43). In the story in question, 'A Nursery Tale' (Skazka) of 1926, we indeed encounter:

... a tall elderly man in evening clothes with a little girl walking beside - a child of fourteen or so in a low-cut black party dress. ... [the protagonist's] glance lit on the face of the child mincing at the old poet's side; there was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl - the old man's granddaughter, no doubt - one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved close together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice ... (TD 57 / SSRP 2 477-8)

Even earlier, in 1924, it is worth remembering, Nabokov had translated Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into Russian. In The Gift, a decade or so later, Boris Ivanovich Shchyogolev has his own familial situation (with step-daughter Zina Mertz) in mind when he proposes the following plot for a novel:

From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog - but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness - gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl - you know what I mean - when nothing is formed yet, but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind - A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes - and of course she doesn't even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely - the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot - a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out - and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D'you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? (G 172-3 / SSRP 4 366-7)

Here we have, virtually in mise en abyme, two future works: The Enchanter and Lolita. The reference to Dostoevsky evokes Svidrigailov's dream in Crime and Punishment (involving temptation from the blandishments of a five-year-old girl), 'Stavrogin's Confession' in The Devils (in which an abused girl of twelve commits suicide), and precocious sexuality in the lesser known and uncompleted Netochka Nezvanova. A novel from the Russian 'Silver Age' treating somewhat similar themes is Fyodor Sologub's The Little Demon (Melkii bes, 1907).

What the above quotation from The Gift does, then, all but encompass - though without the disastrous ending tacked on - is Nabokov's novella The Enchanter, written in Russian in 1939 (as Volshebnik), and forgotten or lost for many years before its publication in Dmitri Nabokov's English translation in 1986. It is clear from a letter of 1959 that Nabokov did himself contemplate reviving this work for print (see SL 282-3; E 15-16); it was scarcely, however, quite 'the first little throb of Lolita', as seemingly recollected in 1956 - no more than it had been totally lost or destroyed, as then thought (E 11-12). The unnamed enchanter's ambition toward his twelve-year-old and cynically acquired stepdaughter is 'to take disinterested care of her, to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of sexual love' (E 49 / SSRP 5 57). His voluntary death on the road, as Alfred Appel points out, is 'in a manner which Nabokov will transfer [in Lolita] to Charlotte Haze' (AL xxxviii). It also appears to be evoked in the later novel when, in a state of insomnia at the Enchanted Hunters hotel, Humbert is aware of 'the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night' (AL 130).

'Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again', Nabokov recalled (E 13). Other, perhaps minor, impulses had already restarted this throbbing a little earlier. Adam Krug, the protagonist of Bend Sinister, Nabokov's first novel written in America (in 1945-46), experiences the following dream about his teenage housemaid (soon revealed as a spy):

On the night of the twelfth, he dreamt that he was surreptitiously enjoying Mariette while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter. (BS 148).

Later, in an introduction (dated 1963) to the English version, Nabokov confirms that this amoral and treacherous young temptress had been consigned to the fate of gang-rape: 'the dummies are at last in quite dreadful pain, and pretty Mariette gently bleeds, staked and torn by the lust of 40 soldiers' (BS 8). Mallarm�'s L'Apr�s-midi d'un Faune is said to have haunted Krug, while Lolita-like vocabulary and motifs are clearly and admittedly visible (at least with hindsight), in sadistic association with lust and fatality (or, indeed, execution):

Death, too, is a ruthless interruption; the widower's heavy sensuality seeks a pathetic outlet in Mariette, but as he avidly clasps the haunches of the chance nymph he is about to enjoy, a deafening din at the door breaks the throbbing rhythm forever. (BS 10)

Mariette, who is mortally punished, may be reminiscent of Margot (of Laughter in the Dark, first published as Camera obscura, 1932-33), who is not. No doubt further pre-shades, or presentiments, of the Lolita theme from within Nabokov's pre-Lolita writings may be - or indeed have already been - advanced.

II

Notwithstanding his verdict, in a letter to Edmund Wilson of 1947, on What Maisie Knew as 'terrible' (N-W 182), and his declared antipathy to Henry James, it is difficult to believe that the closing stages, at least, of that novel, in which the barely teenage eponymous heroine proposes co-habitation to her stepfather Sir Claude, did not strike a chord with Nabokov, as author of The Enchanter and future creator of Lolita (and the word 'terrible' may even be ambiguous). Barbara Eckstein has written: 'Lolita is surely a burlesque of What Maisie Knew and also an exercise in slippery self-parody'.2 In any event, Nabokov certainly parodied the Jamesian style on occasions and one may suspect that, in the case of James, as with Dostoevsky and no doubt certain others, Nabokov's megaphoned distaste is at least partly attributable to a Bloomian anxiety of influence - the author in question having prematurely anticipated Nabokovian elements but without, of course, executing them quite (or even anywhere near) to Nabokov's satisfaction.

Almost at the very beginning of the composition of Lolita, in 1948, Edmund Wilson supplied Nabokov with volume six of Havelock Ellis's Etudes de Psychologie Sexuelle (Paris, 1926), which contains a 100-page confessional document written in French by an anonymous southern Russian: 'Havelock Ellis's Russian sex masterpiece', as Wilson terms it (N-W 201), to which Nabokov rejoined:

I enjoyed the Russian's love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across girls with unusually rapid and rich reactions. The end is rather bathetic. (N-W 202)

This apparently authentic disclosure, written down for Havelock Ellis, purports to record the detailed sexual history of the scion of an upper-crust Russian family (resident in Kiev), who develops from precociously over-sexed adolescent debauchery, involving young females of all classes, through a lengthy period of abstinence in Italy, which finally degenerates into paedophilia, voyeurism and masturbatory obsession amid Neapolitan child prostitution. The raconteur, now known as 'Victor X', is remarkable (in Nabokovian terms) for his insistence on imagination as 'the most important factor in sexual pleasure', leading to his claim that 'I can get no enjoyment unless I can imagine the woman's enjoyment'.3 Victor is unusually passive in his activities for much of his 'career' and restrains himself from immoral compulsion when he encounters (thanks, as in the case of Humbert, to the helping hand of a rich uncle) the stricter mores of Italian society - until, that is, he allows himself to be entrapped in 'the Babylon' of Naples.

While comparisons between Nabokov's protagonists and Victor should not be exaggerated, there are undeniable common factors; as Donald Rayfield (Victor's subsequent translator into English) has written, there is 'the disastrous inability to find sexual arousal and satisfaction in anything but young girls' and, moreover:

The basic structure of Lolita and the confessions is similar: the contrast between the homeland (Russia or France) and the attempt to recreate lost experience in exile (Italy or America). both Victor and Humbert Humbert are prisoners of their first childhood sexual experiences. (Rayfield 141)

'"Sexual confessions" (in Havelock Ellis and elsewhere), which involve tiny tots mating like mad' are mentioned in Speak, Memory (SM 158), and were elaborated slightly further in the Russian version (Drugie berega), which refers to 'a particularly Babylonian contribution from a landowner [from the Ukraine]' (SSRP 5 275).4

III

A number of obvious or plausible proposals of other works or authors that may seem to have contributed to the shaping of Lolita have, of course, long been made. The 'Annabel Lee' theme from Edgar Allan Poe is the most overt instance coming from within the novel's text.5 M�rim�e and Proust have also been considered particularly relevant authors in this respect, with a mass of others (including Shakespeare, Goethe, de Sade, Joyce and T.S. Eliot) close behind. The more recent rush of suggestions, though, has shown a perhaps unexpected widening in scope: in terms of artistic approach, chronology, and stature.

In addition to the Dostoevskian novelistic episodes indicated above, Julian Connolly (NS 4, 1997) has drawn rich comparisons with the story A Gentle Creature (Krotkaia, 1876).6 Alexander Dolinin, in an article on Nabokov and 'third-rate literature' (of 1993) adds a story by a minor �migr� writer named Valentin Samsonov as another possible source.7 Ellen Pifer, who seems set to emerge as the doyenne of Lolita studies (especially after her Oxford 'Casebook' of 2003), has observed a series of parallels between the two most famous novels of Nabokov and Mary Shelley, in 'Lolita's narrative and thematic structure, and the homage it pays to Frankenstein's'; she draws particular attention to the use made in both works of the terms 'daemonic' and 'fiend' (Pifer, 1999 163; 166; 169).8 Pifer furthermore compares Lolita with Edith Wharton's The Children (1928), in which novel the fifteen-year-old Judith Wheater is desired by the 46-year-old Martin Boyne (who perhaps more nearly deserves the label 'middle-aged' than does the 37-year-old Humbert Humbert - almost unanimously so termed by commentators). While it is admitted that 'Humbert's scurrilous conduct lies outside the purview of the more scrupulous Boyne' (Pifer, 2002 175), and that Judith's home background, as the guardian of younger siblings, is rather different from that of Dolly Haze, respective images of the 'child-woman' and the 'nymphet' invite comparison (ibid. 181).

As part of an on-going survey of the impact of other artistic forms on Nabokov's fiction, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney focuses on his experience of the Ballets Russes, and in particular Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty (which he certainly saw in Russia and had the opportunity to see again in London), in relation to Lolita and The Enchanter (see Sweeney, 2003a, first published 1999; and Sweeney, 2003b). In particular, she finds (2003a 133):

Nabokov apparently borrowed the notion of an enchanted hunter from The Sleeping Beauty, and he acknowledged that borrowing - along with all of his other debts to Petipa's ballet - with his embedded parody of just this kind of theatrical and literary appropriation of fairy tales, in the form of Quilty's play The Enchanted Hunters.9

'Enchantment' is also of the essence in a much earlier novel with which Nabokov was concerning himself at a certain stage during the composition of Lolita. In a brief, though fascinating, article published in 2004, Miriam Gottfried goes back to Cervantes's Don Quixote, with a reminder that Nabokov was preparing his Harvard lectures on that work in 1952. Nabokov regarded Don Quixote as 'a cruel and crude old book' (LDQ xiii); however, according to Guy Davenport's 'Foreword' to the Lectures, after Lilith, Lulu, Molly, Circe, Odette and other feisty mistresses of Decadence, Nabokov chose the 'Swinburnian' name Dolores - related to a much younger Alice, Ruskin's Rose and of course Annabel Lee - and yet 'her Grandmama was Dulcinea del Toboso' (ibid. xvii-xviii). Humbert, in Gottfried's reading, 'internalizes and embodies' both the 'crude and cruel' characteristics 'in applying the chivalry theme to his own life' (Gottfried 36-7). Lolita's full name, 'Dolores' means 'pains' (or 'sorrows') in Spanish, while 'Dulcinea', on the other hand, comes from dulce, or 'sweet'; both females are 'solipsized' into contrasting visions or ideals devoid of any 'reality' (ibid. 41-2). 'Enchanters' are vital to both novels, while Quilty (amid the 'deep mirrors' of Pavor Manor: AL 294) even becomes 'a Knight of Mirrors' (Gottfried 45).

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Notes

1. The first two sections which now follow appeared, in slightly different form, in the chapter 'The Lolita Phenomenon': Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov (Plymouth: Northcote House, 'Writers and Their Work', 1999).

2. Barbara Eckstein, 'Unsquaring the Square of What Maisie Knew', in The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew, ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 'New Casebooks', 1998, 179-93), (190). On Nabokov and James, see: Robert Gregory, 'Porpoise-iveness Without Porpoise: Why Nabokov Called Henry James a Fish', The Henry James Review, 6/1 (1984), 52-9; and Neil Cornwell, 'Paintings, Governesses and "Publishing Scoundrels": Nabokov and Henry James', in Nabokov's World. Vol. 2: Reading Nabokov, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin and Priscilla Meyer (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave in association with School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2002), 96-116.

3. Rayfield, ed., The Confessions of Victor X, 74.

4. See also Rayfield, 140.

5. On this topic, see Appel, AL 328-32, 9/2; and, for instance, Dale E. Peterson, 'Nabokov and Poe', GCVN, 463-72. See also Fraysse.

6. See also Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, 'Rereading Lolita: Reconsidering Nabokov's Relationship with Dostoevskij', Slavic and East European Journal, 33/1 (1989), 64-77.

7. See also Ernest Machen's letter in TLS (27 November, 1998), 17.

8. See also Pifer's 'Nabokov's Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin', in Pifer, A Casebook, 83-109 (an essay first published in 2000).

9.One cannot help wondering, in view of the Joycean allusions to be noted below, whether Nabokov was aware that the original Dublin prototype for Leopold Bloom was a man named Hunter (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 161-2; 230; 375), and that there is therefore a sense in which Bloom was to become 'the enchanted Hunter'. Dolly Schiller, of course, lived on Hunter Road (AL 268).

IV

According to Carl Proffer, 'it amuses Nabokov's genius to rely on reverberations from third-rate works like [Swinburne's] "Dolores"'.10 Perversely, perhaps, he may well have had more patience with undisputed 'third raters' than he had with his despised '"great" second-raters' (who could include such figures as 'Camus, Lorca, Kazantzakis, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe' and 'literally hundreds' of others: SO 54). The most recently suggested possible 'source' for Lolita is a short story of that very name (the only so-titled work preceding Nabokov's novel?), published in 1916, by the little known (and, indeed in most estimations, 'third-rate' at best) German writer Heinz von Lichberg. The story had appeared in a volume entitled Die verfluchte Gioconda ('The Accursed Gioconda'), published under the pen-name of one Heinz von Eschwege (1890-1951), an aristocrat who was subsequently to become a Nazi commander. It was rediscovered nearly ninety years later, and passed to the German literary journalist Michael Maar, who 'outed' it in 2004, whereupon Nabokov's novel was to be 'now embroiled in a new furore'.11 It was then swiftly translated - first into French, and soon appearing in English.12

Von Lichberg's tale (of some four thousand words in its English translation; eighteen pages in the original) is a slight work, overtly (from its opening sentence, in the framing material) of the imitation Hoffmann variety - reminiscent, for instance, of Rat Krespel. It also includes references to Quixote and Iphigenia. The story features a mature protagonist (a professor, but - even twenty-five years on from the events in question - still 'a sensitive man of youthful appearance'), who relates his attraction to a young female (the eponymous Lolita), doomed by a 'curse' handed down over a century or more; it also relies heavily on visions, dreams, musical effects and severe tricks of both chronology and geography (in its German and Spanish settings). Generations of 'Lolitas', or 'Lolas', are apparently successively (or repeatedly) murdered by a pair of jealous lovers, between whom their inamorata refuses to choose. The 'present' Lolita's father explains:

'The women all give birth to just one child, a daughter, and within weeks of giving birth, they go mad and die. But they are all beautiful - as beautiful as Lolita!... My wife died that way,' he whispered, serious now, 'and my daughter will die the same way.'

The flaw in the father's prediction would appear to be that his young Lolita has not herself had a daughter before her even more premature demise (though Nabokov's Lolita has13 - a point which Maar does not quite make); and, for that matter, there is no indication of a rival to the protagonist for her love (neither does the father appear to object to his boarder's attentions to his daughter). If the protagonist is deemed to have put an end to the curse, he has done so by declaring his intention to abandon 'the child' ('Lolita's immense and dangerous love had begun to frighten me', he says) - but this still produces a d�nouement no less disastrous.

The title of von Lichberg's story is certainly its most startling effect, as far as modern readers are concerned. There is clearly doubt as to how much further any comparison with Nabokov's novel should be taken - just as the vexed question arises as to whether Nabokov would, or even could, in his Berlin days have read this particular 'forerunner'.14 How young is von Lichberg's Lolita? 'By our northern standards she was terribly young', is all that we are told. Dieter Zimmer guesses this to mean 'between fifteen and eighteen'; Maar, however, insists she is much younger, citing the use of diminutives (TLS April 23 2004; May 7 2004) - even 'a pre-teenager' (TLS April 2 2004, 13).15 The adjective 'Hoffmannian' does not have very much critical currency, even with regard to Nabokov's early fiction, although, as Maar notes, one work to which the term has been applied is 'A Nursery Tale' (in which overt devilry takes place).16 Nabokov's Lolita, for Maar (though he does not mention a Frankenstein connection), 'is not about paedophilia, but demonism' (TLS April 2 2004, 15). In addition to 'A Nursery Tale', Maar sees comparisons with the play The Waltz Invention (Izobretenie Val'sa, 1938) - the elderly Germanic brothers who supposedly, as young men, murdered the original Lola ('or was it really Lolita?') a century before in Spain are named 'Walzer' - and La Veneziana (written 1924).

There are, however, two points made by Maar with which it is hard to disagree (TLS May 7 2004). The first is that, while in any case it may be hard to prove a negative, conversely: 'As long as no actual diary entry noting a particular reading - or some other proof that perhaps lies under our nose - turns up, plausibility is the most that can ever be attained'. Secondly, with regard to 'everything that shimmers through Lolita', 'Nabokov's play with implications and allusions was ... inexhaustible'. For that matter, Maar - perhaps pertinently - wants to know what Dolly Haze's 'little Spanish friend' ('a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman': AL 161; 163) is doing in Nabokov's novel.

V

It does not need saying - and indeed we have seen already - that Nabokov would by no means have to have known von Lichberg's story to have arrived at the name 'Dolores', of which 'Lolita' (along with 'Lola', or 'Lo') is, in any case, a common enough diminutive in Hispanic circles.17 In his reference to 'the heroine's ... first name [which] is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it' (AL 3-4), we may safely assume that John Ray, Jr. is thinking both of the full 'Dolores' and the range of diminutive forms (stemming from 'Dolores on the dotted line': AL 9).18 We have only to turn back to another work which Nabokov knew intimately, lectured on, and (this time) greatly admired: Joyce's Ulysses (see LL 285-370). Humbert's comment, 'J'ai toujours admir� l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois' (AL 207), has been duly recognised, by Proffer (20) and Appel (AL 407 207/3), as a tribute to Joyce (as well as an 'hors [de ce] monde' pun); moreover, the (non-existent) French adjective 'ormonde' is noted as pointing to Dublin's Ormond Hotel - scene of the so-called 'Sirens' chapter (episode 11) in Ulysses.

'There are', writes Proffer (134, n. 24), 'several other references to things Ormond'.19 A number of such possible allusions (not, however, pointed out by these commentators) may arise from the 'trilling' of a song by Lydia Douce (another 'sweet' figure), one of the Ormond barmaids (or 'sirens'). Only nine lines in, we encounter: 'Trilling, trilling: Idolores', prefiguring the trilled line ' - O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas! ' (U 11.9; 11.226).20 'Fair one of Egypt' is the next transposition for this Idolores (U 11.383), and Lydia Douce herself takes on the mantle of 'Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent' (U 11.518). 'Quine, Dolores' is found by Humbert in Who's Who in the Limelight (AL 31).21 Miss Douce is also associated (like Lolita and the rose: see AL 362, 52/5) with the 'rose of Castile' (U 11.329; 11.1271) and with the colour bronze.22 'Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head' emblematises the two sirens (Lydia and Mina: U 11.64).23

As Bloom listens to the musical trillings and performances, the lyrics turn his thoughts back to his wife Molly (who is even now about to betray him with Blazes Boylan: 'the conquering hero'24 ) and her Spanish (Gibraltarian, Mediterranean) background: 'Spanishy eyes', 'in old Madrid', 'Dolores shedolores' (U 11.732-4).25 Molly Bloom (n�e Marion Tweedy), having assumed these dolorous and floral qualities, reveals herself (in 'Penelope': episode 18) to have been a precocious teenager ('Fifteen she told me', muses Bloom: U 13.890, and this is duly noted by Nabokov: LL 348), the daughter of a mysterious mother, 'whoever she was', named Lunita (U 18.846-8). We might also note the presence within 'Sirens' of the phrase 'a pin cuts lo' (U 11.297),26 and the exhortation by poster to: 'Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all' (U 11.300-01; cf. the 'colored ad' for Dromes in Lo's room: AL 69).27 References to 'nymphs' and 'seaside girls' appear widely in Ulysses, while Nabokov considered Bloom to be an 'undinist' (AL 425, 250/3) - although he appears to remain, like the earlier Humbert, but unlike the mature Humbert, 'a law-abiding poltroon' (AL 18); Quilty is called by Humbert 'a repressed undinist' (AL 250).

Julian Moynahan has commented: 'Just as Humbert Humbert's characterization owes more than a little to Joyce's Leopold Bloom, so does the characterization of Dolores Haze owe something to Joyce's Gerty' (GCVN 443). Bloom's interest in the physical development of his fifteen-year-old daughter Milly may appear a trifle over-zealous ('Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think': U 13.1200). In 'Nausicaa' (episode 13), on Sandymount strand that evening, Bloom takes full advantage ('love at a distance [Bloomism]': LL 348) of Gerty's provocative display of her underclothed nether regions, in a sequence much admired by Nabokov: 'the frilly novelette parodies in the Masturbation scene are highly successful; and the sudden junction of its clich�s with the fireworks and tender sky of real poetry is a feat of genius' (SO 76-7).

Humbert's 'salad of racial genes' included an element of 'Austrian descent' (AL 9); Nabokov had noted 'a blonde Austrian soldier' in Bloom's ancestry (LL 316). Both Bloom and Humbert are suspected, and accused, of 'racial impurity'. And why (other than for pseudo-Joycean allusion) should Humbert describe his looks as 'pseudo-Celtic' (AL 104) and himself as 'the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman' (AL 122) or 'not un-Celtic' (AL 188)? Furthermore, Humbert (somewhat Bloom-like) had worked on 'perfume ads' on his arrival in New York (AL 32) - and stolen Spanish perfume had featured in his (Riviera, Mediterranean) 'unsuccessful first tryst' with Annabel (AL 14-15). Gerty, 'the girlwoman' (U 13.430 - 'though Gerty would never see seventeen again': 13.172-3), as she limps away ('She's lame!'; 'that little limping devil': 13.771; 13.851-2), is conflated with Milly, and Molly, and (through thoughts on menstruation) 'Molly and Milly together' (13.785; 'Devils they are when that's coming on them': 13.822) - 'The Curse of the Irish' is one of Humbert's names for it (AL 47).28 As for Milly, she is '[s]traight on her pins anyway not like the other' (U 13.928). And it's back again to Molly, who 'can knock spots off them. It's the blood of the south. Moorish' (U 13.968-9) - as her perfume ('those spice islands': 13.1018) seems to waft its way to him (Rita also probably had 'some Spanish or Babylonian blood': AL 258).

Humbert in Paris, cuckolded like Bloom, looks on while the White Russian colonel-taxi-driver ('Taxovich' or Maximovich: AL 28; 30) helps 'his moll' (Humbert's legal spouse Valeria),29 and 'child-wife' to be, to pack and leave (AL 29; 28). Humbert is initially ready to flee from Ramsdale to 'the Blazes' (AL 36) - until he spies Lolita. Charlotte Haze has a 'bronze-brown bun' and, in the first sound she makes (siren-like perhaps), her 'contralto voice ... inquired melodiously, "Is that Monsieur Humbert?"' (AL 37; plus her 'bronze hair': AL 70). While Dolly Haze's characterization may owe something to Gerty, there would seem also to be at least two further nods in the latter's direction.30 The first features the young Parisian prostitute Monique (claiming to be eighteen, but 'no doubt ... adding one or two years to her age'), who declared 'with great gusto': 'Je vais acheter des bas' when Humbert has given her a 'bonus' (AL 22-3). Gerty was wearing 'unusually expensive' transparent stockings (UA 392; U 13.499-502) - a point certainly not lost on Bloom ('Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings, stretched to breaking point': U 13.929-30). The second is the presence of Ginny McCoo ('Oh, she's a fright. And mean. And lame' - Lolita: AL 41; 'Ginny and her lagging leg' - Humbert: AL 53); she even returns to Humbert's mind at a time of acute distress, on his visit to (the 'now') Dolly Schiller (AL 279).31

The characterization of Dolly Haze, moreover (or therefore), would seem to owe something too to Milly (who had also lost a young brother), together with (the younger) Molly, and even (shared, appropriately enough, with her own mother) Lydia Douce. The appellation la gitanilla derives, of course, from M�rim�e's Carmen, but it could still owe something as well to the young Molly Bloom, daughter of Lunita. The dreamed Lolita can also appear 'in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them' (AL 254). A 'gloomy girl Marion' makes a late appearance, recollected from one of Lolita's 'trash' books, whose dead mother is being extolled (by an unexpectedly 'young, gay, understanding redhead' of a stepmother: AL 286); Dolly Haze and Molly [Marion] Bloom both wonder about their dead mothers. If some semblance of an Irish sub-theme can be detected by now in Lolita (at times duly connected with the Spanish), it applies also to Dolly Haze herself; and we should remember that '"Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname' (AL 3-4).32 In addition to anything noted so far, she remains 'the little colleen' and (unlike her Swiss-English step-father, for all his Celtic protestations) 'happened to be half-Irish' (a quality which apparently appealed to her near namesake Mrs Hays: AL 239). Peter Lubin's seemingly parodic 'interview' with Nabokov ('Kickshaws and Motley', 1971) referred to 'a small field trip to Ireland', making Nabokov 'the most dutiful of Dubliners'. A claim has recently surfaced, however, that the young Nabokov-Sirin may indeed have stayed in Quilty, County Clare.33

VI

These proto-tales, pre-texts, and putative ur-texts notwithstanding (and this survey is by no means exhaustive - more will undoubtedly surface34), Lolita, it goes without saying, took on an overwhelming novelistic momentum of its own: a switch from third-person to first-person narration, a new tone in a new world - that of the post-war America which Nabokov had experienced through the 1940s and was now to re-create in fictional form at the age of fifty (what he called 'inventing America': AL 312). In particular, Lolita achieves its American lift-off, leaving behind these 'shades', to a very large extent at least, following the death of Charlotte and before Humbert's loss of Dolly. 'The book developed slowly': Nabokov later claimed to have written Lolita between 1949 and the spring of 1954 (L 312). As early as April 1947, however, he had told Edmund Wilson that he was writing 'a short novel about a man who liked little girls - and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea' (N-W 188). In the early stages the heroine was to have been called 'Juanita Dark' (AL 312)35 and Nabokov was now using his index-card method of composition, adapted from lepidopteral research. Actual field trips for the latter also provided Nabokov with a detailed topographical knowledge of many American states, while he also undertook investigations into teenage slang and relevant criminal cases. Work progressed slowly, between academic and lepidopteral exertions, but a diary entry of December 6 1953 reads: 'Finished Lolita which was begun exactly five years ago' (BB Am. Years 226).

The present essay was published in a Russian translation (by Nina Sosna) in Vittorio: Mezhdunarodnyi nauchnyi sbornik, posviashchennyi 75-letiiu Vittorio Strady [edited by Sergei Bocharov and Aleksandr Parnis], Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2005, pp. 603-22. A reduced version of the final section was posted on the NABOKV-L website (October, 2005) and a slightly shorter version still of this section appeared in the James Joyce Broadsheet (No. 71, June 2005, p. 1).

Just one relevant article to have come to my notice since this paper was written is Elizabeth Freeman’s ‘Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov’, American Literature, 70: 4 (1998, 863-97), discussing works by Poe, Hawthorne and Mayne Reid in relation to Lolita.

[ page one | page two ] Notes

10. Proffer, Keys to Lolita, 28-30 (30) was probably the first to draw attention to this poem (regarded by Nabokov as 'dreadful': ibid., 139, n. 44) See also Appel's comments on the name 'Dolores': AL 332-3, 9/5. Proffer's suggestion regarding a 'Lolita' in Lernormand's play La Maison des Remparts (Proffer 30) is dismissed by Appel: 'Nabokov never saw or read it' (AL 405, 201/4). Fraysse (94-5) has an ingenious 'tri-syllabic' theory for the name 'Lolita', arising from Melville's Omoo ('Lo-': a girl therein named 'Loo'), Poe's Annabel Lee ('-lee') and Mérimée's Carmen (the '-ta' from 'Carmencita').

11. Nick Paton Walsh, 'Novel twist', The Guardian (April 2, 2004, 19). Michael Maar's article appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 19, 2004) and led to internet exchanges (NABOKOV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU) and international press comment. It then appeared as 'Curse of the first Lolita', TLS (April 2, 2004, 13-15). See also Dieter E. Zimmer's letter (TLS April 23, 2004); and Maar's reply (TLS, May 7, 2004).

12. La Règle du jeu, 25, May 2004; 'Lolita: A tale by Heinz von Lichberg', translated by Carolyn Kunin (TLS, July 23, 2004, 14-15)..

13. 'Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl': AL 4.

14. For a relatively recent discussion of Nabokov's competence in the German language, see Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov) (London: Picador, 1999), 59.

15. Maurice Couturier has tracked down the following passage in Valéry Larbaud's Des prénoms féminins, published in 1927:

"... c'est décidément l'Espagne qui est le mieux outillé des pays d'Occident, en fait de prénoms. Elle a ces prénoms-gigognes, pourvus d'un jeu de diminutifs capables d'exprimer toute espèce de nuances : l'âge, le degré de familiarité dans lequel on est avec les personnes... Lolita est une petite fille ; Lola est en âge de se marier ; Dolores a trente ans ; doña Dolores a soixante ans (…). Un jour, inspiré par l'amour, je murmurerai : Lola. Et le soir des noces, j'aurai Lolita dans mes bras."

[...it is certainly Spain that is the best equipped of the Western countries, as far as forenames are concerned. It has those nested forenames, endowed with a set of diminutives capable of expressing every kind of nuance: age, degree of familiarity with the person... Lolita is a little girl; Lola is of marriageable age; Dolores is thirty years old; doña Dolores is sixty years old (...). One day, inspired by love, I'll murmur: Lola. And on our wedding night, I will have Lolita in my arms.]

The list of Dolores diminutives, and especially the final line ["And on our wedding night, I will have Lolita in my arms"] make pure coincidence seem highly unlikely. (See p. 3. of the text of Couturier's talk in St. Petersburg, Russia, Spring, 2001, available in Zembla.)

16. See Boyd, BB Russ. Years, who calls the story 'deliberately Hoffmannesque' (259). Priscilla Meyer sees this evocation as 'parodic': see her 'The German Theme in Nabokov's Work of the 1920s', A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, ed. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993, 3-14), 11.

17. See also Fraysse, 96-7, for comment on the Mater Dolorosa. And see Larbaud's 'classification' (note 15 above).

18. For a detailed enhancement of John Ray Jr.'s 'role', see George Ferger, 'Who's Who in the Sublimelight: "Suave John Ray" and Lolita's "Secret Points"', NS 8 (2004, 137-98).

19. Proffer (9-10; 132, n. 12; 135-6, n. 30) finds Lolita (and 'Lo') suggestions too in Finnegans Wake, on which (on 'children-colors') see also Appel: AL 413-14, 221/1. Nevertheless, Nabokov purportedly held that work to be 'one of the greatest failures in literature' (LL 349). See also comments in Michael Long's chapter 'The Enchanted Hunter' (Long, Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 135-51). For Appel's list of Joycean allusions, see AL 324, 4/11 (in which '69/1' should read '69/2'). On Nabokov and Joyce, their acquaintance and generally, see Neil Cornwell, James Joyce and the Russians (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), 71-9; and Julian Moynahan, 'Nabokov and Joyce', GCVN, 433-44. Apart from Fraysse, see too the articles in Cycnos, 12: 2, by Brian Boyd ('Words, Works and Worlds in Joyce and Nabokov', on Ulysses and Ada, 3-12); and Christine Raguet-Bouvart ('riverruning acrostically through "The Vane Sisters" and "A.L.P.", or "genealogy on its head"', 21-8). Maurice Couturier's article (in the same issue: 29-42), 'Censorship and the Authorial Figure in Ulysses and Lolita', examines the publishing history of the two novels, but makes no textual comparisons.

20. This is glossed by Don Gifford as the refrain of the aria 'The Shade of the Palm' ('Oh Idolores, queen of the eastern sea, / Fair one of Eden look to the West for me, / My star will be shining, love, / When you're in the moonlight calm, / So be waiting for me by the Eastern sea, / In the shade of the sheltering palm'), from the 'light opera' Floradora (1899) by Leslie Stuart; on a South-Sea island, 'Idolores, the beautiful and flirtatious heroine, is being pursued (and spoiled) by a host of men, including the nasty villain' (UA 291). According to James Hurt, however (James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 73, February 2006, p. 3), referring to Ruth Bauerle’s James Joyce Songbook (1982), ‘Miss Douce has apparently misheard the beginning of the chorus of “The Shade of the Palm”, and the name of the heroine is indeed ‘Dolores’, rather than the more unlikely ‘Idolores’. South Sea allusions come into the latter part of Lolita: 'Polynesian' (AL 246), 'Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays' (256), 'far far away, in the coves of evoked islands' (257); Dolly Schiller makes 'familiar Javanese gestures' (270); Quilty refers to non-existent distant islands (AL 302). Cf. also 'the plash of waves' from the shell held by the Joycean 'sirens' (U 11.936) and the (siren-like, from a 'romantic soul') 'torrent of Italian music' coming from what had been the Haze house, 'where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday' to which Humbert fondly looks back (AL 288). It might also be noted that the Mediterranean ('Riviera') represents an 'eastern' sea from the geographical standpoint of the USA, bordering indeed on the 'Near East'. See also the Melville Polynesian associations suggested by Fraysse.

21. Lolita is associated with a milk bar named 'The Frigid Queen' (being dubbed 'My Frigid Princess') and shortly conflated with the seaside, 'a Kingdom by the Sea, a sublimated Riviera': 'Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta' (AL 166-7); according to Appel, this was 'the actual name of a milk bar' (AL 395, 166/2). The chess game in Ramsdale, at the point when Gaston 'swooped down' upon Humbert's queen, while Lo is clandestinely consorting with Quilty, prefigures the latter's subsequent 'taking' of Dolores Haze (AL 203).

22. The Rose of Castile (1857), a light opera by Michael Balfe (UA 139).

23. Bronze and gold are conflated in the figure of Edusa Gold, who has 'brilliant bronze hair', and has been one of the intermediaries between Lo and Quilty (AL 208); another such bears the name 'Mona'. Cf. Medusa, Edusa, Miss Douce [Dublin pronunciation: 'Muz Deuce']: the Clouded Yellow origin of 'Edusa' (Appel: AL 409, 209/1) does not necessarily preclude other allusions or nuances, while 'Sirens' and Gorgons (the Medusa) have certain qualities in common. For that matter, 'Schiller' (when pronounced 'Skiller': AL 268) suggests 'Scylla': Dolly's killer (rather than the Charybdis of abuse sucking her in from the dual form of Humbert-Quilty) turns out, though, to be the natural rock of childbirth (AL 4).

24. The song-line 'See the conquering hero comes' is associated with Boylan in 'Sirens' (U 11.340) and (by Lolita) with Humbert in a breakfast in bed advert (featuring a figure said to have 'Irish eyes'); yet it belongs more with Quilty, in 'another picture' underneath (the Drome ad): AL 69. The breakfast ad (reminiscent of Bloom bringing Molly's breakfast – 'one of the greatest passages in all literature': LL 306 – and looking also uncannily like the younger James Mason) is reproduced by Appel (AL 369), who notes the Joycean allusion and the prediction of Quilty's 'victory' (AL 367-8, 69/2). Breakfast in bed, it may also be remarked, is reversed and parodied, when Lolita leaves a bacon-less tray outside Humbert's door: 'My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Lola, Lolita!' (AL 50); and it is parodied again with reference to Charlotte (AL 70).

25. Under the impact of the fate of The Croppy Boy (a song of betrayal about the 1798 rebellion), Bloom thinks of 'Dolor! o, he dolores!' (U 11.1132).

26. This refers back to U 8.630: 'Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts lo', said to allude to a superstition that this would 'cut love' (UA 176) and noted as such by Nabokov: 'The ve in love has been cut off to show what happens (LL 322). Cf. 'the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding [Lo's] hair in place' (imitating 'a lady-writer's pen!': AL 49), said by Appel to be part of 'a burst of cheap-fiction clichés' (AL 360, 49/1) that may appear analogous to the opening half of 'Nausicaa'. Cf. also the street rhyme, 'O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers' (U 5.281; recalled in 'Sirens': U 11.870), and 'pin' – Humbert's name for his favourite drink (gin and pineapple juice: AL 374, 97/1). One [evidently 'lost'] 'three-year-old bobby pin of [Lolita's]' turns up 'in the depths of the glove compartment' of Humbert's car as he drives to shoot Quilty (AL 293). Another (rather more obscene) street rhyme, alluded to in both Ulysses and Lolita, involves the Reverend Rigger (or MacTrigger), noted by Appel (AL 401, 187/1): see U 8.748-9; AL 187, 189, 191, 195; he reapppears as 'the Rev, Rigor Mortis' (AL 252).

27. The advertising slogan for Mermaid cigarettes (UA 298). Charlotte Haze is regarded by Humbert as 'a very mediocre mermaid' (AL 86), while he buys, for Dolores, Andersen's The Little Mermaid (on which, see Appel: AL 397, 174/5).

28. According to Appel at least, this is what 'the Mystery of the Menarche', 'the initial menstrual period', is called in Ireland (AL 360, 47/5).

29. 'Moll' is used again, in its usual (mock-) gangster mode (AL 62), but the line 'Plowing his ['child wife'] Molly in every State' occurs in Humbert's 'original' poem (AL 256).

30. 'Move your bottom, you', Lo brazenly orders Humbert, scrambling uninvited into her mother's car (AL, 50); Gerty, on the other hand, 'crimsoned at the idea of [her friend] Cissy saying an unladylike thing like that out loud', on hearing 'On the beeoteetom' (U 13.263-5).

31. In the class list, see 'McCoo, Virginia' (AL 52). Any use in Lolita of the name 'Virginia' is also an allusion to Poe and his child bride.

32. While no convincing 'real surname' has yet been suggested, it would appear, we should not perhaps ignore the homonyms 'Hays' (used AL 239) and (the more Irish) 'Hayes', which features in Nabokov's screenplay (188) as 'Dolores Hayes, H,A,Y,E,S, ... a fat old dame selling homemade Tokay to the Indians' (noted by Brian Boyd: Pifer, A Casebook, 76).

33. Brian Gilmore, TLS, May 28 2004, 17: 'for a week or so in the early 1920s', the young Nabokov (if indeed it were he) 'had come to net butterflies'; because of the rain, however, he spent much time indoors, playing chess.

34. See, for instance, the present author's '"A Dorset Yokel's Knuckles": Thomas Hardy and Lolita', The Nabokovian, 54 (Spring 2005, 54-64).

35. This name may also derive from Melville's Omoo (according to Fraysse, 94).

[ page one | page two ]

REFERENCES

Works by Nabokov

AL The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred J. Appel, Jr. (1971; reprinted 1991; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995)
BS Bend Sinister (1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974)
E The Enchanter, translated by Dmitri Nabokov (1986; London: Picador, 1987; reprinted 1998)
G The Gift (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981; reprinted 2001)
LDQ Lectures on Don Quixote, edited by Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983)
LL Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980)
N-W The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940[-]1971, edited by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1979)
SL Selected Letters 1940[-]1977, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, (London: Vintage, 1991)
SM Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969)
SO Strong Opinions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974)
SSRP Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 5 vols (St Petersburg: Simposium, 1999-2000).
TD Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)

Other Sources

BB Russ. Years Boyd, Brian, Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990)

BB Am. Years Boyd, Brian, Nabokov: The American Years (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992)

GCVN Alexandrov, Vladimir E. (ed.), The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995)

NS Nabokov Studies

U Joyce, James, Ulysses, The Corrected Text (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986)

UA Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman, 'Ulysses' Annotated, second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)

Plus

Boyd, Brian, '"Even Homais Nods": Nabokov's Fallibility; or, How to Revise Lolita', in Pifer (ed.), A Casebook, 57-82 [A version of this article is available in Zembla.]

Connolly, Julian W., 'Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and "The Gentle Creature"', NS 4 (1997, 15-36; published 1998)

Dolinin, Alexander, 'Nabokov and "Third-Rate Literature": On a Source of Lolita', Elementa, 1 (1993, 167-73)

Fraysse, Suzanne, 'Worlds Under Erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism', Cycnos, 12: 2, Nabokov at the Crossroads of Modernism and Postmodernism (1995), 93-100

Gottfried, Miriam, 'Enchanters, Artists, Madmen: The Influence of Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha on Nabokov's Lolita', The Nabokovian, 52 (Spring 2004, 36-46)

Pifer, Ellen, 'Her monster, his nymphet: Nabokov and Mary Shelley', in Connolly, Julian W. (ed.), Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 158-76)

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