The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

“animate weight” suggests the considerably more combustible lap scene in
Lolita
, perhaps the most erotic interlude in the novel—but it only
suggests
it. Aside from such echoes, little beyond the basic idea of the tale subsists in
Lolita
; and the telling is quite literally a world apart.
    The Enchanter
went unpublished not because of the forbidding subject matter, but rather, says Nabokov, because the girl possessed little “semblance of reality.” 14 In 1949, after moving from Wellesley to Cornell, he became involved in a “new treatment of the theme, this time in English.”Although
Lolita
“developed slowly,” taking five years to complete, Nabokov had everything in mind quite early. As was customary with him, however, he did not write it in exact chronological sequence. Humbert’s confessional diary was composed at the outset of this “new treatment,” followed by Humbert and Lolita’s first journey westward, and the climactic scene in which Quilty is killed (“His death had to be clear in my mind in order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov). Nabokov next filled in the gaps of Humbert’s early life, and then proceeded ahead with the rest of the action, more or less in chronological order. Humbert’s final interview with Lolita was composed at the very end, in 1954, followed only by John Ray’s Foreword.
    Especially new in this treatment was the shift from the third person to the first person, which created—obviously—the always formidable narrative problem of having an obsessed and even mad character meaningfully relate his own experience, a problem compounded in this specific instance by the understandable element of self-justification which his perversion would necessarily occasion, and by the fact that Humbert is a dying man. One wonders whether Thomas Mann would have been able to make
Death in Venice
an allegory about art and the artist if Aschenbach had been its narrator. While many of Nabokov’s other principal characters are victims (Luzhin, Pnin, Albinus), none of them tells his own story; and it is only Humbert who is both victim and victimizer, thus making him unique among Nabokov’s first-person narrators (discounting Hermann, the mad and murderous narrator of
Despair
, who is too patently criminal to qualify properly as victim). By having Humbert tell the tale, Nabokov created for himself the kind of challenge best described in Chapter Fourteen of
Speak, Memory
when, in a passage written concurrently with the early stages of
Lolita
, he compares the composition of a chess problem to “the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings.” 15
    In addition to such obstacles, the novel also developed slowly because of an abundance of materials as unfamiliar as they were unlikely. It had been difficult enough to “invent Russia and Western Europe,” let aloneAmerica, and at the age of fifty Nabokov now had to set about obtaining “such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy. “What was most difficult,” he later told an interviewer, “was putting myself … I am a normal man, you see.” 16 Research was thus called for, and in scholarly fashion Nabokov followed newspaper stories involving pedophilia (incorporating some into the novel), read case studies, and, like Margaret Mead coming home to roost, even did research in the field: “I travelled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita, I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri [his son], one kneecap of