Read The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated for Free Online Page A

should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.” 11 Prescott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in
The Southern Quarterly Review
(January 1852), who found an earlier, somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolerable: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners, is a monstrous bore.…”
    Not surprisingly, Humbert Humbert’s obsession has moved commentators to search for equivalent situations in Nabokov’s earlier work, and they have not been disappointed. In
The Gift
(written between 1935 and 1937), some manuscript pages on the desk of the young poet Fyodor move a character to say:
    “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! 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? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul.…” (pp. 176–77)
     
    Although the passage 12 seems to anticipate
Lolita
(“It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works,” says Fyodor [p. 194]),
Laughter in the Dark
(1932) is mentioned most often in this regard, since Albert Albinus sacrifices everything, including his eyesight, for a girl, and loses her to a hack artist, Axel Rex. “Yes,” agrees Nabokov, “some affinities between Rex and Quilty exist, as they do between Margot and Lo. Actually, of course, Margot was a common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita [and, technically speaking, no nymphet at all—A.A.]. Anyway I do not think that those recurrent sexual oddities and morbidities are of much interest or importance. My Lolita has been compared to Emmie in
Invitation
, to Mariette in
Bend Sinister
, and even Colette in
Speak, Memory.…” (Wisconsin Studies
interview, see Bibliography ). Nabokov is justly impatient with those who hunt for Ur-Lolitas, for a preoccupation with specific “sexual morbidities” obscures the more general context in which these oddities should be seen, and his Afterword offers an urgent corrective. The reader of this Introduction should turn to that Afterword, “On a Book Entitled
Lolita
,” but not before placing a bookmark here, one substantial enough to remind him to return—a brightly colored piece of clothing would be suitable (the Notes Palearctic … Nearctic through My private tragedy … my natural idiom are particularly recommended). Now please turn to the Afterword .
    Having just completed the Afterword, the serious reader is familiar with Nabokov’s account of
Lolita
’s origins. That “initial shiver of inspiration”resulted in a novella,
the Enchanter (Volshebnik)
, written in Russian in 1939 and published posthumously in a translation by Dmitri