Vladimir Nabokov - The Annotated Lolita

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Vladimi Nabokov was born in St Petersburg in 1899, the elder son of an aristocratic, cultured, politically liberal family. When the Bolsheviks seized power the family left Russia and moved first to London, then to Berlin, where Nabokov rejoined them in 1922, after having completed his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and was recognized as one of the outstanding writers of the emigration. In 1940 he and his wife and son moved to America, where he was a lecturer at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948. He was then Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University until he retired from teaching in 1959. His first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941 and his best-known novel, Lolita, brought him world-wide fame. In 1973 he was awarded the American National Medal for Literature. He died in 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland.

His works include, from the Russian novels, The Luzbin Defense and The Gift; the English novels, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and Ada; the autobiographical Speak, Memory, translations of Alice in Wonderland into Russian and Eugene Onegin into English; and lectures on literature. All of the fiction and Speak, Memory are published in Penguin.

Nabokov is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. As Martin Amis has written, The variety, force and richness of Nabokovs perceptions have not even the palest rival in modern fiction. To read him in full flight is to experience stimulation that is at once intellectual, imaginative and aesthetic, the nearest thing to pure sensual pleasure that prose can offer.

Alfred Appel, Jr. was born in New York City in 1934 and raised on Long Island. He served for two years in the US Army and was educated at Cornell and Columbia, which granted him a PhD in 1963. He has received Guggenhaim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships and is presently Professor of English and American Culture at Northwestern University. His other books include Nabokovs Dark Cinema and Signs of Life.

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Lolita first published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1959
Published in Penguin Books 1980
This annotated edition published in different form by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971
Published in its present form in the USA by Random House 1991
Published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1993
Published in Penguin Books 1995

Lolita copyright Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
This annotated edition copyright Alfred Appel, Jr., 1970, 1991

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part.
This edition published by arrangement with The Orion Publishing Group, London, and the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-718-19284-6

to Vra

Vladimir Nabokov

THE ANNOTATED LOLITA

Edited, with Preface, Introduction and Notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.

Preface

In the decades since its American publication (in 1958), Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita has emerged as a classic of contemporary literature. This annotated edition, a corrected and chastely revised version of the edition first published in 1970, is designed for the general reader and particularly for use in college literature courses. It has developed out of my own experiences in teaching and writing about Lolita, which have demonstrated that many readers are more troubled by Humbert Humberts use of language and lore than by his abuse of Lolita and law. Their sense of intimidation is not unwarranted; Lolita is surely the most allusive and linguistically playful novel in English since Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and, if its involuted and constantly evolving means bring to mind any previous novel, it should be that most elusive of works, The Confidence-Man (1857) by Herman Melville. As with Joyce and Melville, the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its overall meaning, while at the same time having to struggle with the difficulties posed by the recondite materials and rich, elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edition is to solve such local problems and to show how they contribute to the total design of the novel. Neither the Introduction nor the Notes attempts a total interpretation of Lolita.

The annotations keep in mind the specific needs of college students. Many kinds of allusions are identified: literary, historical, mythological, Biblical, anatomical, zoological, botanical, and geographical. Writers and artists long out of fashion (e.g., Maeterlinck) receive fuller treatment than more familiar names. Selective cross-references to identical or related allusions in other Nabokov works (a sort of mini-concordance) will help to place Lolita in a wider context and, one hopes, may be of some assistance to future critics of Nabokov. Many of the novels most important motifs are limned by brief cross-references. Humberts vocabulary is extraordinary, its range enlarged by the many portmanteau words he creates. Puns, coinages, and comic etymologies, as well as foreign, archaic, rare, or unusual words are defined. Although some of the unusual words are in collegiate dictionaries, they are nevertheless annotated as a matter of convenience. Not every neologism is identified (e.g., truckster), but many that should be obvious enough