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Nabokov Studies, Volume 2, 1995, pp. 3-40 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/nab.2011.0099

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Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 1-86.

FORUM

Did Humbert Kill Quilty?

The Chronology of Lolita

$$t^L 9

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 3-40.

ALEXANDER DOLININ (St. Petersburg, Russia-Madison, Wl, USA)

NABOKOV'S TIME DOUBLING:

FROM THE GIFT TO LOLITA*

... if there were no future, then one had the right of making
up a future, and in that case, one's very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself.
Vladirhir Nabokov, Ada

In his university lectures on Leo Tolstoy, Nabokov devotes considerable attention to the problems of time in Anna Karenina and to the question of how to date the first part of the novel. Nabokov notes that the
action begins on a Friday and that Steve Oblonsky reads in the morning
paper about von Beust, the Austrian envoy to the British court, leaving for
Wiesbaden. Using historical data, Nabokov was able to determine which
particular day Tolstoy had in mind: February 23 (11 old style), 1872.
Nabokov explains to his students his interest in such details:
Some of you may still wonder why I and Tolstoy mention such trifles.
To make his magic, fiction, look real the artist sometimes places it as
Tolstoy does, within a definite, specific historical frame, citing facts
that can be checked in a librarythat citadel of illusion. The case of
Count Beust is an excellent example to bring into any discussion
about so-called real life and so-called fiction. There on the one hand

is a historical fact, a certain Beust, a statesman, a diplomat, who not

only has existed but has left a book of memoirs in two volumes,
wherein he carefully recalls all the witty repartees, and political puns,
which he had made in the course of his long political career on this
or that occasion. And here, on the other hand, is Steve Oblonski

whom Tolstoy created from top to toe, and the question is which of
the two, the "real-life" Count Beust, or the "fictitious" Prince Oblonski

is more alive, is more real, is more believable. Despite his memoirs

* This is a slightly revised version of my Russian essay "Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova:
ot Dara k Lolite " written in 1990 and accepted for publication by editors of a book with
the tentative title "Puti i mirazhi russkoi kul'tury," which, as far as I know, is still on its long
and mirage-like road to press. I am indebted to Angela Brintlinger and Dan Ungurianu who
translated the essay into English.

Nabokov Studies

long winded memoirs full of dead clichsthe good Beust remains a

vague and conventional figure, whereas Oblonski, who never existed,
is immortally vivid.'
Nabokov considers Tolstoy's referring to a specific historical fact, which
places the beginning of the narration into the framework of calendar time,
to be nothing more than a literary device aimed exclusively at mimicry,
the camouflaging of fiction as empirical reality. The final scene of Anna
Karenina can be dated in a similar way, though not with such precision,
since allusions to political events on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War
place the scene in July of 1876. However, within this historical frame, in
the world created by the author's imagination, "chronology is based on a
sense of artistic timing"2 and therefore follows not the calendar, but rather
the psychological laws of perceiving time as a Bergsonian pure
continuum. Analyzing the novel's structure in detail, Nabokov demonstrates that each of Anna Karenina's two sets of characters lives accord-

ing to its own clock. He compares their asynchronic existence to a race,

with the participants catching up to each other and then falling back and
spreading out along the track. Lyovin and Kitty's "spiritual time,"
Nabokov claims, passes much more slowly than the "physical time" of
Anna and Vronsky, and by the end of the novel lags behind by an entire
year.3 In this context, even Tolstoy's obvious anachronism, presumably
accidental, can be regarded as meaningful: in the first part of the novel,
the same day turns out to be Friday at the Oblonsky's ("It was a Friday,
the day on which a German clockmaker always came to wind up the
clocks"4) and Thursday at the Shcherbatski's ("We are at home on
Thursdays, as usual," says the Princess to Lyovin at the skating ring and he
replies, "To-day is Thursday"5). As Nabokov notes, "Lyovin's time
throughout the book is prone to lag behind the time of the other characters."6

Like many of Nabokov's thoughts on literature, his ideas on time in

Anna Karenina are clearly auto-referential. We find virtually the same
1. Vladimir Nabokov, lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

Jovanovich, 1981), p. 213.

2. Ibid., p. 190.
3. Ibid., p. 196.
4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 11.
5. Anna Karenina, p. 29. Cf. a poem by Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The CiIt: "On
Thursdays there comes from the clock shop / A courteous old man who proceeds / To
wind with a leisurely hand / All the clocks in the house." Vladimir Nabokov, The Cift (New
York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 15.
6. Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 220.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The G/'ft to i.o//ta

words in his novel Pnin, where they are uttered by the protagonist and
not only attest to Pnin's analytical mind, congenial to that of the author,
but also serve as a clue to the game with dates in the text.7 Nabokov
parodies Tolstoy's device: in contrast to Steve Oblonsky, his hero reads
not a "real" but a fictitious newspaper with a specific date, Saturday,
February 12, 1953. However, when checked in the "citadel of illusions,"
the date also turns out to be fictional.8 All of the peculiarities of artistic
time Nabokov discovered in Tolstoythe juxtaposition of objective and
subjective temporality, chronological gaps, asynchronic development of
plot lines, the combination of different temporal planes, the use of historical allusions to create an illusional frame of referenceare even more

characteristic of Nabokov's own prose. If Tolstoy, as Nabokov notes,

created the intricate structure of his novel "quite casually, quite unconsciously, "* Nabokov himself renders the movement of time consciously
and deliberately. If for Tolstoy time is but one of many "tools of the
artist," for Nabokov it is also a pivotal theme, a constructive principle,
and the object of a sophisticated literary game.
The temporal parameters of narration assume a leading role in
Nabokov's novels, since they are interwoven with the three central
themes of his work, themes that lie at the foundation of Nabokov's uni-

verse: the theme of a "paradise lost"a metaphysical loss of harmony

(manifested as the loss of childhood, homeland, father, innocence, first
love, language, freedom, and so on); the theme of the interrelationship
between empirical and fictional realities; and the theme of the other
world. On a higher level of abstraction, this triad can be represented as a
single metatheme of multiple realities: the parallel existence of two or
more worlds defined by oppositions of space (here/there), time
(present/past, moment/continuity), epistemology (l/the other, illu7. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 122, 129-30.
8. In actuality, February 12, 1953 was not a Saturday, but a Thursday. This is pivotal
for understanding the chapter, since Nabokov emphasizes several times that the action
happens on a Tuesday. Therefore the events receive two equally valid timings. According to
the real calendar, it is Tuesday, February 10, the anniversary of Pushkin's death, which is alluded to in Pnin's lecture; according to the fictional calendar, it is Tuesday, February 15, i.e.,
the hero's fiftieth birthdaysee Gennady Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Cuide to
Nabokov's Pnin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989), pp. 121-23. This time doubling in the novel, I
believe, is in direct connection with the doubling of the narrator. On the one hand we have
an omniscient author, a total dictator in the world he has created, who willfully cancels
"objective" calendar time; on the other we have his earthly "deputy," a messenger from
"super-reality," who intrudes into the text to collect distorted second-hand in formation
about Pnin. For this reason, when the pseudo-author appears in the last chapter of the
novel, the narrative dates begin to correspond to the real calendar.
9. Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 142.

Nabokov Studies

sion/reality), and poetics and rhetoric (author/character, discourse/narration, text/ncn-text). One should also take into consideration
that the notion of "reality" in Nabokov is relative. The world created by a
character's consciousness, be it a dream, delirium, reminiscence or artistic

fiction, often replaces the objective world. As a result, the latter is perceived either as "the theater of earthly habit, the livery of temporary substance,"10 or as some kind of indecipherable super-text, the creation of a
higher artistic mind.
In some of Nabokov's works this metatheme of multiple realities is
expressed almost exclusively through spatial images and metaphors, as in
the short story "Terra Incognita," where the hero simultaneously dies in
two topoi (in his room and in a tropical forest), in Glory, or in Invitation
to a Beheading, with its symbols of the prison fortress, mountains, staircase, garden, city, and so on. However, in most cases Nabokov constructs his parallel worlds as a chronotope, with the dominant framework
being time rather than space." Already in Mary, Nabokov's first and in
many ways immature novel, the hero's transition from the "false" reality
of migr life, from the "house of shadows," to the true reality of vivid
recollection about his first love and his lost homeland, is described as a

breaking away from the vicious "cinematographic" present:

He was so absorbed with his memories that he was unaware of

time. His shadow lodged in Frau Dorn's pension, while he himself

was in Russia, reliving his memories as though they were reality. Time
for him had become the progress of recollection, which unfolded
gradually. And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had
lasted not just for three days, not for a week but for much longer, he
did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time
in which he relived his past, since his memory did not take account
of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable
stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of his life past and life present
.... It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real,
much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin.12
10. The Gift, p. 367.

11. Only after this essay had been written and translated into English I had a chance to
read lurii Levin's insightful and well-argued article "Bispatzial'nosf kak invariant poeticheskogo mira V. Nabokova" ( Russian Literature 28 |1990), pp. 45-124) in which he discusses Nabokov's "double worlds" predominantly in terms of space. His basic premises,
though, do not seem to contradict mine and are equally valid for temporal structures which
he tends to underestimate.

12. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), pp. 55-56.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

"Real" time in Mary is a hostile element which human beings try in

vain to tame by means of mechanical devices (all the characters in the
novel constantly count days or hours). This time blends into physical
space (every five minutes trains rumble by the house where Ganin lives

and the pension's six rooms are marked with pages from an old calendar
which correspond to six days of the hero's "real" life and also to the six
years of his emigration). In contrast, the time of recollection is a continuum, ordered and structured by the human consciousness. It is experienced emotionally and therefore requires no clocks, no calendars, no

space. Only by plunging into it can Ganin escape from the prison of
"real" time and eventually master it: in the novel's conclusion, he is transformed into a potential creator, ready to construct his own world, which
is metaphorically equivalent to the House and the Book.13
In Mary the opposition of the two realities and the two times (the
"real" past and the "false" present) is still relatively simple and explicit.

The temporal structure of Nabokov's subsequent Russian novels is much

more intricate. This is especially true of The Gift, where we find an inces-

sant change of planes and a sliding back and forth along the temporal
axis. As lurii Levin has demonstrated, the temporal positions of the text's
narrator and its observer constantly shift: the narrator keeps returning
from indefinite future discourse into the present of the narration, and the
protagonist/observer makes leaps from his present into the future, into
the past, into historical time and into the time of recollections, as well as
into the time of fiction and dreams. Moreover, Nabokov introduces into
the narration a series of metatexts which justify "the equal validity of objective reality and recollection, of what really happened and what was
imagined, of historical time and time as experienced by the character."'4
In light of this, the American scholar Ronald Peterson's attempt to reconstruct the chronology of The Gift solely on the basis of historical allusions
seems somewhat naive.15 Peterson presupposes that historical references
are "real," regardless of their mode of narration and spatial/temporal
position. He correctly defines the general time span of the novel, which
13. This moment is marked with a numeric code peculiar to Nabokov: the hands of
the giant clock show six thirty-six (cf. the above-mentioned division of space and time into

six parts and also the three stages of the hero's metamorpho sis). This is a magic number,
which reads the same forwards and backwards and, if turned upside down, reveals two
ninesthe year of Nabokov's birth. A similar code, as we will see later, appears in the
Russian Lolita.

14. Iu. 1. Levin, "Ob osobennostiakh povestvovatel'noi struktury i obraznogo stroia

romana V. Nabokova Dar," Russian Literature, 9, No. 2 (1981), 201.

15. Ronald Peterson, Time in The G/ft." The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter,
No. 9 (1982), pp. 36-40.

Nabokov Studies

starts, as the opening phrase states, "on April the first, 192" and ends
some three years later on June 29. Peterson arrives at the conclusion that
Nabokov had in mind the period from 1925 to 1928. His hypothesis is
based on the list of historical events after Yasha's death in the first

chapter and the mention of Chemyshevsk/s centennial in the fifth.

However, one can easily discover that all historical allusions in the
novel referring to specific events of the 1920s are intentionally misleading
and create the effect of temporal uncertainty. For example, Nabokov introduces into a collage of sensational newspaper headlines several obvious anachronisms which prevent us from considering it to be a chronicle
of a specific year (the year 1924, according to Peterson):
In Russia one observed the spread of abortions and the revival of
summer houses; in England there were strikes of some kind or other;
Lenin met a sloppy end; Duse, Puccini and Anatole France died;
Mallory and Irvine perished near the summit of Everest; and old
Prince Dolgorukiy, in shoes of plaited leather thong, secretly visited
Russia to see again the buckwheat in bloom; while in Berlin threewheeled taxis appeared, only to disappear again shortly afterwards,
and the-first dirigible slowly stepped across the ocean and papers
spoke a great deal about Cou, Chang Tso-lin and Tutankha- men....16
While the deaths of Lenin, Duse, Puccini and France, as well as the ill-

fated British expedition up Mount Everest, did in fact occur in the year
1924, all other datable allusions did not: the major strikes in England
took place in 1925-26, the same years in which Prince Dolgorukov, the
oldest member of the Kadet Party, twice crossed the Soviet border illegally; already in 1919 the first dirigible flew over the Atlantic and one
16. The Cift, p. 50. The main target of literary parody here seems to be Roman Gul's
autobiographical book Zhizn' na fuksa (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927) in which the
author, a leftist migr in Berlin always hostile to Nabokov, used similar catalogues of
events to represent the flow of historical time. Cf., for instance, the chronicle of the 1920s:
"V reikhstage zasedala konferentsiia inter natsionalistov. V Genue zasedala konferentsiia go sudarstv Evropy. V Moskve byl 13 kongress RKP. V ltalii Mussolini sel na konia, i fashizm
prishel k vlasti. V stolitsakh Evropy ubili Narutovicha, Ertzberga i Ratenau. Professor Einstein
publikoval teoriiu otnositel'nosti. Professor Voronov reklamirovaf omolozhenie liudei. Pod
Moskvoi tikho umer Petr Kropotkin. I Charli Chaplin sdelal mirovoe imia" [The
Internationalists' Conference met in the Reichstag. A conference of the European states met
in Genoa. In Moscow there was the 13th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. In Italy
Mussolini mounted a horse and facism came to power. In the capitals of Europe
Narutovich, Ertzberg, and Ratenau were killed. Professor Einstein published the theory of
relativity. Professor Voronov advertised rejuvenation. Petr Kropotkin.died quietly outside
Moscow. And Charlie Chaplin was becoming world-famous) (p. 203).

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Cift to Loftta

traversed the Arctic Ocean in May of 1926 (Amundsen's famous flight

from Europe to America via the North Pole); the death of the French
psychiatrist Cou, much publicized in the newspapers, occurred in 1926;
Tutenkhamen's tomb had been excavated in 1922 and the Chinese general Chang Tso-lin came to power only five years later. We are obviously
dealing with a quasi-chronicle, the narrator's ironic glance back at the
twenties from an uncertain future, a glance that parodies that "newspaper
mentality" so alien to the protagonist.
Equally vague in relation to objective historical time is the mention of
Chernyshevsky's centennial, found in the author's rendering of reviews of
Godunov-Cherdyntsev's book:
The pro-Communist Russian-language daily in Berlin, Up\..., had an article devoted to the celebration of the centenary of Chernyshev- ski's
birth, and concluded thus: They have also bestirred themselves in
our blessed emigration...."17
Both the introductory phrase and the ensuing quotation are ambiguous,
since it is not clear what is meant: a preparation for the anniversary or its
actual celebration in the USSR. The latter version is more probable, since
most of the materials used by Godunov-Cherdyntsev for his book were
published only in 1928-30.18 Whatever the case, one thing is evident:
when historical time in The Gift is not rethought and relived by the narrator or the character, it turns into fiction, and therefore lacks a coherent
calendar. In this respect Nabokov's ironic remark about the peculiar
honesty of Russian writers who "omit the final digit" in the dates that
open their novels fully applies to Nabokov himself: in terms of historical
reality, the novel indeed begins and ends in 192-.
But in The Gift there is yet another, internally coherent chronology
which keeps track of a different time: a time which is subjective and
therefore, in Nabokov's world, more real, a time connected not with

newspaper headlines, but with major events in the protagonist's life. Its
7. The Gift, pp. 3089.
18. The most important publications on Chernyshevsky directly referred to by
Godunov-Cherdyntsev were identified in my Russian commentary to The Gift. See Vladimir
Nabokov, Izbrannoe (Moskva: Raduga, 1990), pp. 621-69. It is worth noting that a number of references to the sources in the novel are overtly anachronistic. For example, in chapter 3 the narrator quotes a letter by Herzen that ought to prove his poor knowledge of
English though it was first published only in 1933. Cf. Zven'ia (Moscow-Leningrad:
Akademiiia, 1933), p. 370. Another intentional anachronism is the citation of the "proCommunist" newspaper "Up" since its apparent real prototypethe Berlin Smenovekh
newspaper On the Eveceased to exist in the beginning of 1924 .

10

Nabokov Studies

calendar is based on the turning points of the hero's destiny: the loss and
death of his first love; the fatal day when he received the news of his father's passing, associated in Godunov-Cherdyntsev's mind with the loss
of his homeland; the first encounter with Zina; the history of his creative
projects. The protagonist perceives time as a series of Bergsonian specific
"intervals per se" between such landmark events and the "present." Thus
at the beginning of the narration, Godunov-Cherdynstev is keenly aware
that it is "Year Seven" of his emigration and that he has been lamenting
his first love "for the last eight years."19 Similarly, in the second chapter,
which unfolds a year and a half later, thinking of his mother on Christmas
Eve, he remarks that she has been refusing to believe in her husband's
death "for almost nine years now."20 In the novel's conclusion he observes that he has known Zina for exactly four hundred and fifty-five
days.21, i.e., sixty-five weeks. The precise dates of the events which begin
each interval are found throughout the text and can be easily compiled
into a chronology;22 thus simple arithmetic shows us that according to
the internal calendar of the novel the main time of narration begins on
April 1, 1926 and ends on June 29, 1929.23
Paradoxically, Nabokov turns the objective calendarhistorical
timeinto illusion and chaos, while the time of fiction becomes real and

ordered. The fictional calendar, however, has its own parameters. It is

significant that the few dates in The Gift that include the day of the week
(Tuesday, April 1, 1926 and Thursday, April 18, 1923) are factually inaccurate.24 This is yet another indication that we are dealing with a "second
reality," a "deceit," an implementation of Fyodor's artistic design which is
19. See The Gift, pp. 17 and 53.
20. Ibid., p. 87.
21./Wd., p. 362.
22. Here is a chronological outline:
Winter of 1917-18flight of Godunov-Cherdyntsev's first love from Petersburg and
her "terrible death" [The Gift, p. 149); December of 1919-news of his father's death (The
Gift, p. 135); Spring of 1920 (not later than April 1)the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs leave
Russia (The Gift, p. 136); April 18, 1923-Yasha Chemyshevsk/s suicide.
23. This is exactly how Nabokov himself dated the main narration of The Gift in the
preface to the English translation of the story "Krug" (The Circle). See Vladimir Nabokov, A
Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 225.
24. According to the calendar, April 1, 1926 was a Thursday. The narration of the
novel follows new style dating, as can be seen from an important detail: upon looking at
the date in a German newspaper, Godunov-Cherdyntsev realizes that he was made an April
fool. As for April 18the day of Yasha's suicide, in the period from 1920 to 1928, it never
fell on a Thursday. Let us also note that the ft nal day of the novel, June 29, 1929, was in
reality a Saturday, which conflicts with Zina's words: "I get my wages only tomorrow" ( The
Gift, p. 360).

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

11

based on an autobiography transformed and ground into dust, an

autobiography which describes its own prehistory, tracing the pattern of
destiny which eventually leads to the character's metamorphosis into the
author.25 In the conclusion of The Gift, a "second reality," a "ghost image
of reality," is in the process of being born, when, to use Nabokov's own
definition, "the past and the present and the future ... come together in a
sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another
way of saying that time ceases to exist."26 The final point of the
protagonist's "fictional time" proves to be the initial point of the
discourse; the past (the text we have read) proves to be the future from
the protagonist's point of view. And we are obliged to return to the
beginning of the narration, rereading it as a book written by the
protagonist.27 This Nabokovian paradox of double, reversible time is akin
to the well-known psychological phenomenon observed in a certain kind
of dreams when a person dreams a coherent plot made up of consecutive events, the last of which, as he realizes upon waking up, was
caused by some external interference (a noise or a touch). Thus, the final
moment of the dream, which coincides with the moment of transition to

a state of wakefulness, explains, in an incomprehensible manner, the previous events of the dream, as if time had been turned backwards.28 According to Boris Uspensky's hypothesis that dream images are semantically polyvalent, "in the sense that they are easily transformed
(reinterpreted) and are capable of being associated and interconnected
with each other in a great variety of ways," the final perception "turns out
25. See Sergej Davydov, "Teksry-matresh/ci" Vladimira Nabokova (Mnchen: Otto
Sagner, 1982), pp. 194-99.
26. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1980), p. 378. Italics are VN's.
27. In my essay on The Gift in The Garland Companion to Nabokov (New York: G. K.
Hall, 1994), I argue that the novel actually introduces three narrative points of view and
presupposes three rather than two readings: the first, when the status of the text being read
is indefinite, the second, when The Gift seems to be Fyodor's book, and the third, when the
reader can finally construe the persona of the omnipotent author who has hidden behind
the mask of the protagonist. The third reading, however, implies an ultimate denial of temporality and, because of that, will not be discussed here.
28. Cf. Pavel Florensky's unfinished piece "Ikonostas" (lconostasis), where he suggests
that in such dreams "time flies and flies quickly towards the present against the movement
of time in a state of wakefulness. It is turned inside out and therefore all its concrete images
are turned inside out as well." For Florensky, as for Nabokov, dreams "are those images
which separate the visible world from the invisible one, dividing and at the same time
uniting the two worlds. This liminal status of dream images defines their relationship both to
this world and to the other world." See Pavel Florenskii, Stat'/' po iskusstvu. (Paris: YMCA
Press, 1985), pp. 201-02.

12

Nabokov Studies

to be the semantic dominant which immediately sheds light on previous

events left in our memory.... We see them as if lit by a bright spotlight.
Thus a certain semantic code is being created which determines the interpretation of what has been seen: events are perceived in terms of their
relationship to the final event."29 Nabokov's text presupposes a similar
mechanism of perception: at the first reading, the text is meant to seem
ambivalent and contradictory, while at the second reading, after we have
learned the semantic code, it becomes coherent, whole and structured.

The paradox of time doubling first tested in The Gift appears in different variants in all Nabokov's later novels (most conspicuously in Ada
and Transparent Things), but it is absolutely central to Lolita. Despite the
obvious differences in subject matter, story, composition and general
tone, Lolita is akin to The Gift in many respects and can be viewed as a
travesty of the latter, where lofty themes are lowered to an erotic plane,
and the main artistic devices are inverted. Indeed, both protagonists are
poets (though one is truly talented and the other is endowed only with
the ability to stylize and mimic) who turn to autobiographical prose to
reconstruct the pattern of their lives. To different degrees, both possess
certain features of their creator: memories of a paradisiac childhood, a
knack for wordplay, erudition, an extraordinary perceptiveness of the
magic of games and an intolerance of poshlost'. As we have seen, it
takes Godunov-Cherdyntsev a little over three years to start his novel,
and, after the loss of Lolita, almost exactly the same amount of time Oust
eleven days less) passes before Humbert Humbert's idea for his book
matures. Like the protagonist of The Gift, during this period he composes
poems, "immerses himself in the poetry of others," writes non-fiction, revisits the sites of events and even studies documentary sources, leafing

through old newspapers. While The Gift begins with third-person narration
and later unexpectedly slides into the first person, in Lolita we see the

opposite: it starts like a traditional autobiography, as the clich which

opens the second chapter shows: "I was born in 1910, in Paris" (9), but

by chapter 5, for no apparent reason, the narrator introduces the third

person, "Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good" (19), and subsequently alternates between the two modes of narration. The game with
the reader's expectations takes on a similar mirror-like quality: while The
Gift eventually turns out to be the transformed autobiography of the pro-

tagonist in the guise of a traditional novel, Lolita is a novel in the guise of

an autobiographical confession. In his foreword to the English translation
29. B. A. Uspenskii, "lstoriia i semiotika. Vospriiarje vremeni kak semiotich eskaia problema. Stat'ia pervaia." Trudy po znakovym sistemam, vol. 22: Zerkalo. Semiotika zerkal'nosti
(Tartu: Izdatel'stvo TGU, 1988), p. 72.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

13

of The Gift, Nabokov remarks that his heroine "is not Zina, but Russian
Literature," and the very first sentence of the novel contains allusions to
Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter and Tolstoy's Childhood. Similarly,
Loi/'ta starts with allusions to several literary subtexts and genre models.
Its subtitle, "The Confessions of a White Widowed Male," parodies the
standard titles of cheap pornographic novels and also hints at a more
specific source: Paul Verlaine's collection of prose Memoirs of a Widower. 30 At the same time it refers to the long tradition of secular con-

30. Among the many historical figures and literary characters with whom Humbert
Humbert identifies himself throughout Lolita, Verlaine, whose poetry is quoted on several
occasions in the novel, has special significance. His stormy life includes a famous episode
when he wounded his "evil genius," the poet Rimbaud, with a pistol and was sentenced to
two years in prison, where he underwent a religious conversion and wrote a collection of
repentant poetry. The circumstances under which Humbert Humbert allegedly wrote his
"confessions" are represented in a very similar way. In his sketch "Ma fille," a part of Les
Mmoires d'un veuf, Verlaine speaks tenderly of his eleven-year-old daughter, whose portrait bears a certain resemblance to Lolita: "Ses yeux sont gris, les prunelles luisent comme
les pointes des flches ... les cils normes et noirs comme le corbeau palpitant comme la
colombe..." (Paul Verlaine, uvre complte [Paris: Le Club du meilleur livre, 1959-60], I,
715; cf. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita |New York: Vintage Books, 1991], p. 44:
"A poet mes heures, I composed a madrigal to the soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes"). The title of this vignette is deceptive and means "my fantasy, my dream, my
artistic creation," just like Humbert Humbert's frequently repeated words "my Lolita," since
we suddenly understand from the surprise ending that the gray-eyed girl in fact "n'a jamais
exist et ne natra probablement plus!" (Verlaine, uvre complte, I, 714). It should be
noted also that the line "mon grand pch radieux" [my great radiant sin] Humbert quotes
at the turning point of his narration when he "cancels and curses" his "sterile and selfish
vice" (The Annotated Lolita, p. 278) is taken from Verlaine's poem "Laeti et errabundi" written when the poet received the news (false, as it turned out later) about Rimbaud's death in
Africa. Cf.:
On vous dit mort, vous. Que le Diable

Emporte avec qui la colporte

La nouvelle irrmdiable

Qui vient ainsi battre ma porte!

Je n'y veux rien croire. Mort, vous,

Toi, dieu parmi les demi-dieux!

Ceux qui le disent sont des fous.
Mort, mon grand pch radieux.
Tout ce pass brlant encore
Dans mes veines et ma cervelle

Et qui rayonne et qui fulgore

Sur ma ferveur toujours nouvelle!
(Verlaine, uvre complte, II, 80)

14

Nabokov Studies

fessional writings, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Andr Gide, or more

precisely to that branch of it which favors shockingly frank admissions.
In Nabokov's view, "frank confessions" belong to fake, false, philistine literature. The object of art, he writes, "lies next to art's source (that is
in lofty and desert placesand certainly not in the over-populated vale of
soulful effusions."31 Nabokov also advises young writers "to abandon
fashionable clichs, sodoms, heart-rending complaints."32 When in the

1930's Vladislav Khodasevich entered into polemics with Georgii

Adamovich, arguing against the idea that modern literature required
above all sincere "human documents,"33 Nabokov sided with Khodase-

vich and caustically lampooned Adamovich in The Gift, where he is represented as the narrow-minded and pretentious female literary mogul
who writes under the pen-name Mortus.34 Mortus, who is "suffering from
an incurable eye illness," also suffers from aesthetic blindness, as is
31. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: vintage Books, 1990), p. 223 24.

32. Vladimir Nabokov, Rasskazy. Priglashenie na kazn'. Esse. Interv'iu (Moscow: Kniga,
1989), p. 392.
33. On this literary battle see Gleb Struve, Russskaia literatura izgnanii (Paris: YMCA
Press, 1984), pp. 220-21; R. Hagglund, The Adamovich-Khodasevich Polemics." The Slavic
and East European journal, 20 (1976), 239-52.

34. John Malmstead notes that the "telling pen-name" Mortus (Latin: dead) points to
Adamovich through the double name in Russian of a butterfly, "dead head or Adam's
head." See Dzhon Mal'mstad, "Iz perepiski V. F. Khodasevicha." Minuvshee. Istoricheskii
al'manakh (Paris: Atheneum, 1987), III, 286. Also cf. Nabokov's attack on Adamovich in
"Iz kalmbrudovoi poemy Nochnoe puteshestvie" (From Kalmbrud's poem The Night
lourney -1931 ) which is a "translation" from the non-existent poet Kalmbrud: "K nomu kritiku nemilost' / ia popadaiu ottogo,/ chto mne smeshna ego unylosf, / chuvstvitel'noe kumovstvo,/ suzhdenii tomnosf, slog zhemannyj,/ obidy otzvuk postoian nyi,/ a glavnoe
stikhi ego./ Bedniaga! On skripit kostiami, / brencha na lire zhestianoi.../ on klonitsia k
mogil'noj iame / adamovoiu golovoi" (Into disfavor with yet another critic/ I fall, because I
laugh at his depression,/ his sentimental familiarity,/ his languid judgments, his coy style,/ his
ever-insulted tone, / and, most importantlyhis verse./ Poor guy! His bones creak,/ as he
strums his lyre of tin;/ he is leaning over his open grave/ with his Adam's head [i.e. skull].)
Vladimir Nabokov, Stikhi (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), pp. 240-41. The name of his antagonist, Koncheev, is likely derived from the Greek konch and the English "conch," and is connected with the notion of the conch as a symbol of eternity and divine prophetic sound. Cf.
Mandel'shtam's "Rakovina" (The Conch) and the lines from Khodasevich's "Dusha" (The
Soul), "K chemu rukopleskat' shutam? zhivi na beregu ugriumom./ Tarn, rakoviny prilozhiv k
usham, vnemli plenennym shumam,/ Pronikni otdalennyi mir..." (Why applaud the

jesters? Live on a gloomy shore./ There, putting conches to your ear, hearken to the captive
sounds,/ Penetrate the distant world...), or the name of Gumilev's poetic circle,
"Zvuchashchaia rakovina" (The Resounding Conch), or Nabokov's own poem
"Budushchemu chitateliu" (To a Future Reader) (1930) with his appeal: "Oblokotis'.
Prislushaisia. Kak zvuchno/ byloe vremiarakovina muz" (Prop yourself up. Listen closely.
How sonorous/ is bygone time, the conch of muses).

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

15

evident from her disparagement of the "dreamy visions" of Koncheev's

poetry, to which she prefers any "artless and sorrowful confession," including "a private letter dictated by emotion and despair."35 Nabokov
shares Khodasevich's credo that "a work of art is a transfiguration of the
world, an attempt to create it anew, revealing its hidden essence as it
appears to the artist."36 Therefore, from Nabokov's point of view, it is
unacceptable for an autobiography to be a confession; it should be either a text in which the writer transforms himself and his life into a new

reality, as in The Gift, or one which recreates down to the most minuscule
detail the lost world of the past and explores the intricate pattern of the
author's destiny without any emotional reflection, like Speak, Memory.
"Any, albeit the smallest, reflection on one's own behavior is already
a stylization," notes Grigorii Vinokur. "It clearly occurs every time when
one's own behavior becomes an event in one's personal life and is experienced as such."37 This type of stylization is only one step from the deliberate organization and theatricalization of events according to certain
aesthetic models. The cultural history of the past two centuries has seen
many attempts (at times comic, but more frequently tragic) to equate life
and art, to demolish the border between them, to use reality as a screen
onto which one's own fantasies and whimsies can be projected. Very often these attempts represent a demonstrative breaking of social norms
and taboos, including sexual ones. The wave of suicides which overtook
Europe in the wake of the publication of Werther; the cruel sexual performances of the Marquis de Sade; the scandal surrounding Schlegel's
Lucinda, in which the author made public certain facts of his private life;
Byron and his followers with their cult of criminal passion; the French
ladies who, like Emma Bovary, cuckolded their husbands according to
recipes borrowed from the novels of George Sand and Balzac; the
strange relations between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; the London
aesthetes of the 1890s, led by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, who
tended to equate "paradox in the sphere of thought" with "perversity in
the sphere of passion;"38 the dangerous experiments of Russian Decadents and Symbolists, who, to use the words of Khodasevich, were
drawn to a "constant... acting out of their own lives in the theater of tan-

35. The Gift, pp. 168-69.

36. Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobrante sochinenii, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), p.
341.

37. Grigorii Vinokur, Biograf-ia i kul'tura (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1927), p. 67.
38. Oscar Wilde, The Works (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954), p. 857.

16

Nabokov Studies

talizing improvisations;"39 the neo-Rousseauian utopias of D. H.

Lawrence, whom Nabokov considered a pornographerall these plots
and characters are mentioned in one way or another in Lolita, and the
main thing they have in common is the idea that one can, and even
should, "deliberately construct artistic images in real life."40
In many respects, Nabokov continues the Romantic and Symbolist
tradition, since it is from them that he borrows the cornerstone concept
of "dvoemirie," "two-worldedness," yet he departed drastically from
these traditions in the question of the interrelationship of life and art, the
personal biography and the artistic text. The highly trained and disciplined
vision of a natural scientist, who maintained the "primacy of the detail
over the general picture, of the part over the whole," and the restraint of
an Anglophile aristocrat carefully protecting his privacy, made Nabokov
extremely skeptical of any attempts to create poetry out of one's own
life, to impose literary plots on reality, to confuse the word and the
world, Dichtung and Wahrheit For him this is the equivalent of blindness,
a solipsistic unawareness of the living world which the true artist studies
and transforms through imagination and memory. In this sense, Nabokov
is akin not to the Romantics and Symbolists, but to their critics, such as
Pushkin or Flaubert, the Acmeists or Khodasevich, or, for example, Gustav Shpet, who wrote, "a perverted outcry: life is art! Such conversions/perversions repeat themselves.... This is a trait of an epoch when lies
are cheap. This is the scream of degenerates.... Life as art, turning life into
art, life as the highest artall this is typically decadent."41 In a series of
interviews, essays and reviews, as well as in his lectures (especially on
Madame Bovary) Nabokov consistently subjects to harsh criticism both
the Romantic solipsism confusing life and art, and its offspring, confessional literature that imposes models of stylized behavior on its reader.
The first chapter of The Gift tells the "simple and sad" story of Yasha
Chernyshevsky, a young epigonic poet who lives according to the rules
of "late Petersburg romanticism" and is lost in the reveries of "heart and
mind." Ultimately he turns out to be a victim of the same "book disease"
that proved fatal for Emma Bovary (it is hardly a coincidence that the
vulgar objects of their passion share the same name: Rudolf). Following
the Decadent and Symbolist canon, he and his friends act out a perverted love drama which somewhat resembles the triangle of Kuzmin/
39. Vladislav Khodasevich, Nekropol': vospominaniia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1976), p.
13.

40. See Lidiia Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi proze (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel',

1977), pp. 27-29.

41. Gustav Shpet, Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), p. 352.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

17

Kniazev/ Glebova-Sudeikina described by Anna Akhmatova in her

"Poem without a Hero." Like its possible prototype, the drama in The

Gift ends in a senseless suicide in the worst tradition of hackneyed literary

clichs. But whereas the participants and spectators of such performances view them as an ideal basis for a "confessional text," Nabokov

introduces the latter into his novel only as an object of polemics, as an

antithesis to the natural creative metamorphosis of Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev, who is prepared to write the biography of Nikolai
Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, but not of his young namesake: "This was the
banal triangle of tragedy, formed within an idyllic circle, and the mere
presence of such a suspiciously neat structure, to say nothing of the fashionable counterpoint of its development, would never have permitted me
to make it into a short story or novel."42
It is this secondary theme of The Gift that Nabokov brings to the
forefront in Lolita. In a sense Lolita can be interpreted as a philosophical
novel about an artist who, to use Viacheslav Ivanov's formula, "yearned
for a human being" and endeavored to create his fiction "in the image of
the superior incarnations." This is why the "confession" of the erotomaniac and perverted aesthete Humbert Humbert alludes to a whole multi-

tude of texts intended to supersede life in various literatures and periods,

from pre-Romanticism to contemporary times, and why the narrator constantly refers to himself as a romantic soul, a poet, a dreamer, a Dostoevskian "great sinner."
The protagonist of Lolita does not conceal whom he counts as kin
amongst writers, artists and literary characters. Some of those after whom
he models himself, consciously or subconsciously, are Werther and Euphorion, Byron and Edgar Allan Poe, Stavrogin and Svidrigailov, Verlaine
and Rimbaud, Wilde and Beardsley, Bal'monf s "poet-spider" and Blok's
Pierrot, the hero of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues and the
sexy superman of pulp novels. Similar prototypes are given in the novel
to Humbert Humbert's "doubles": the homosexual Gaston Godin, who

plastered the walls of his room with the portraits of Andr Gide, Nijinsky
and other well-known "uranists," and the "American Maeterlinck" and

great fan of the Marquis de Sade, Clare Quilty.43 In addition, Humbert

42. The Gift, pp. 42-43.
43. The main subtexts of Lolita were identified by Carl Proffer and Alfred Appel, Jr., as
well as by Nabokov's German translator D. Zimmer. See Carl Proffer, Keys to Lolita
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968); The Annotated Lolita, pp. 319-457; Vladimir
Nabokov, Gesammelte Werke, Band 8 (Hamburg: Rowolt, 1989), pp. 531-654. Some additions and elaborations can be found in my commentary to the Russian version of the
novel: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: perevod s angliiskogo (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), pp. 356-414.

18

Nabokov Studies

Humbert's "confession" contains obvious thematic and stylistic cross-references with the erotic poetry and prose of the Russian Symbolists, including Bal'mont's "Zacharovannyi grot" ("The Enchanted Grotto"; cf.
Nabokov's "The Enchanted Hunters"); Zinov'eva-Annibal's tale "33
uroda" (33 Freaks; also written as a diary, a form parodied in the first
part of Lolita), where a "romantic" lesbian dreams of stopping time in order to enjoy for all eternity the "tender flesh" of the girl she seduced; the
stories and novels of Fyodor Sologub; and Briusov's cycle "V buinoi slepote" (In Raging Blindness) as well as many of his other works.44 At the
44. For example: "ltak, eto son, moia malen'kaia, / ltak, eto son, moia milaia, / Dvoim
nam prisnivshiisia son! / Poloska zasvetitsia alen'kaia, / I greza vsporkhnet srebrokrylaia, /

Chtob kanuf dnevnoi nebosklon. / ... Tak gde zh tvoi guby medlitePnye? / Dai szhat' tvoi
plechiki detskie! / Bud' blizko, resnitsy smezhiv..." (Thus, it's just a dream, my little one,/
Thus, it's just a dream, my darling,/ A dream the two of us dreamed together!/ The scarlet

strip will appear,/ And the silver-winged reverie will take flight,/ Disappearing in the daytime
sky./... So where are your languid lips?/ Let me hug your little childlike shoulders!/ Lower
your lashes and come closer...); "Bezumie belogo utra smotrelo okno, / I byk> vse stranno

vozmozhno i vse-vse ravno, / I bylo tak stranno kasat'sia, kak k tainym mechtam, / K
prozrachnomu detskomu telu shchastlivym gubam..." (The white morning's madness looked

through the window,/ And everything was strangely possible and permitted,/ And my
happy lips felt so strange,/ Touching the child's translucent body as if they were touching
secret dreams... ["V buinoi slepote"]). "Nymphetophile" motifs are found in other Briusov's
poems as well "Prodazhnaia:" "Edva Ii ei bylo chetyrnadtsat' let / Tak zadumchfvo
gasli linii biusta..." (The Prostitute: "She was hardly fourteen/ The lines of her breasts were
fading so pensively...); "Devochka:" "Chto zhe ty plachesh', / Devochka vo sne? /
Golovu priachesh' / Na grud' ko mne?.." (The Little Girl: Why are you crying,/ Little girlin
the dream?/ Why are you burying your head/ In my chest?..); "Portret:" "Ei let
chetyrnadtsat'... ee glaza / ... No vzgliad ee poroi tak stranno grub... / II' potseluia bylo by
ei malo?" (The Portrait: She is about fourteen; her eyes... / But her glance is sometimes so
strangely vulgar.../ Or just a kiss would not be enough for her?); "Kvartet:" "Chetyre
devochki po chetyrnadtsat' let / Na peschannoi ploshchadke igraiut kroket. /
Molotochek postaviat mezhdu nog, i-stuk! / Shar chuzhoi daleko otletaet vdrug./ A solntse, luchi posylaia vkos', / Belye plat'itsa pronzaet naskvoz', / Chtob kazhdyi mechtatel'
videt' mog / Detskie formy khudoshchavykh nog." (The Quartet: Four fourteen-yearold
girls/ Are playing croquet on the sandy court./ They place the mallet between their legs
and-crackl/ The ball suddenly flies. / And the sun, casting its rays diagonally,/ Pierces
through the white dresses,/ So that every dreamer can see/ The childlike shapes of thin
legs.) In life Briusov was an "actor," erotomaniac, amoralist, imitator, and it is quite possible
that he is one of the prototypes for Humbert Humbert. As Khodasevich remarks, "Briusov's
erotic writings are indeed deeply tragic, not in the ontological sense, as Briusov himself
would like to think, but rather in the psychological sense. He did not love or respect human
beings, and therefore he never really fell in love with any of the women with whom he happened to "fall into bed." The women in Briusov's poetry are as alike as two peas in a pod,
because he did not love them, nor did he discern any difference between them or get to
know any of them" (Nekropol', p. 38). This is exactly how Humbert Humbert treats people,
and thus he makes a fatal blundertaking Lolita for a clone of his childhood sweetheart

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

19

level of plot and genre, Lolita parodies two famous confessions by writers whose work Nabokov always viewed with demonstrative antipathy.
The first is so-called "Stavrogin's Confession," a suppressed chapter of
Dostoevsky's The Possessed, in which the protagonist of the novel admits to having molested a twelve-year-old girt (the exact age of Lolita in
the beginning of the novel). In the 1920s the "Confession" was made
public as a separate text, thought to prove its author's excessive familiarity with the psychology of this sin.45 The second work is "De profundis,"
a "confession" written in prison by Oscar Wilde (in all likelihood one of
the two unnamed English writers in Gaston Godin's gallery) and marked

and onfy when he loses Lolita does he start to realize that she is someone else, a unique
individual, worthy of love and attention in her own right
45. See Iu. Aleksandrovich, Matreshkina problema. Ispoved' Stavrogina
F.M.Dostoevskogo i problema zhenskoi dushi (Moscow: Pomor'e, 1922), p. 33.
"Stavrogin's Confession" was reprinted by the Berlin Russian migr paper Ruf in late
March and early April 1922, simultaneously with the news of the assassination of
Nabokov's father and numerous obituaries in memory of him. This fact alone might have
created negative associations for Nabokov. In addition, for him Dostoevsky is not so much
an artist as a journalist and ideologue; he writes: "Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a
rather mediocre onewith flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary
platitudes in between" (Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 98). It is in connection with
Dostoevsky that Nabokov speaks of how to enjoy bad literature by imagining ways to
rephrase and express differently what a disliked author tries to narrate (Lectures on Russian
Literature, p. 105). And indeed, in Lolita one can easily see such a paraphrase of certain topics in "Stavrogin's Confession" and in Crime and Punishment. There are many allusions to
Dostoevsky in the novel. Humbert Humbert uses famous formulations from The Possessed
and The Brothers Karamazov, calling himself a "great sinner," proclaiming that for him
"everything is allowed" and that he "refuses to accept the afterlife." Constantly addressing
his readers, he parodies the Dostoevskian technique of narration with its "awareness of the
other" (see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1972], p. 407). While describing his voyage around America, Humbert Humbert
mentions "a man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park"
(The Annotated Lolita, p. 1 SB). This recalls the epilepsy of Dostoevsky and his characters, a
disease which Nabokov refers to as a "mysterious sickness" (Lectures on Russian Literature,
pp. 99, 107), and the name Russian Gulch describes metaphor ically the Dostoevskiian
"narrow" and "naked" world. And finally, at the turning point of his life, Humbert Humbert
compares himself directly to a character out of Dostoevski: "... I... ruminated, and rumpled
my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly
Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun" (The Annotated Lolita, p. 70).
Distinctive features of Dostoevsky's style are being parodied here: the emphatic
"suddenly," repeated twice, a fondness for descriptive clichs (the "grimace" is a standard
trait of the sinner, including Stavrogin) and diminutive suffixes (which can be seen in the
Russian version, where "grin" is rendered as "usmeshechka").

20

Nabokov Studies

by flagrant self-admiration and self-praise.46 All these subtexts create a

complex literary and cultural backdrop for the protagonist's insane
attempt to transform unyielding reality into "a paradise whose skies were
the color of hell-flames."47

Nabokov chooses the form of a journal in two of his major Russian

works, the novel Sogliadatai (The Eye) and the novel Otchaianie
(Despair). In both cases, the journal serves to undermine the narrator's

point of view, exposing his inability to perceive the world correctly and
his aesthetic, existential and metaphysical "blindness." The scoundrel
Smurov in The Eye and the failed writer/murderer Hermann in Despair are
imprisoned by false and distorted notions about themselves and others,
about art and reality, and therefore they suffer humiliating defeats in their
encounters with fate. They claim to be geniuses and prophets, but in fact
turn out to be impostors, fakes and imitators who create an erroneous
picture of the world by projecting onto it their own overblown egos.
Humbert Humbert, along with his "doubles" Clare Quilty and Gaston
Godin, continues this line of self-enamored pseudo-artists48 against whom
Nabokov contrasts true artists, such as Godunov-Cherdyntsev and
Koncheev in The Gift, Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, John Shade in Pale Fire, and so on. Like Hermann in Despair,49
46. Like toil'ta's protagonist, Oscar Wilde declares that life is just a mode of fiction
and extols his own genius and beauty, comparing himself to Byron and Verlaine and complaining that the epoch dressed his greatness in the clothes of a jester. Aestheticizing sin and
suffering, he also admires himself in his new role of the repentant sinner.
47. The Annotated Lolita, p. 166. Subsequently all the page references to this edition
will be given in the text alongside the quotations.
48. Perhaps the daring idea to embody an aesthetic ideal in a nymphet and to liken
romantic role playing to sexual perversion was triggered by a story in the migr newspaper
Poslednie novosti (Latest News) on June 9, 1934 about a certain Russian migr by the
name of Artov (cf. art, artist). This "well-dressed gentleman" "stopped a twelve-year-old girl
playing in the street" of an English seaside town "and, promising to give her a goldfish, lured
her to his home ... and raped her. Afterwards the rapist shot himself." Another possible
Russian source of Lolita a story "Skazochnaia printsessa" (A Fairytale Princess) by Valentin
Samsonovhas been discussed in my "Nabokov and Third-Rate Literature.' On a Source of
Lolita." Elementa, 1, No. 2 (1993), 167-73.
49. In his foreword to the English translation of Despair, Nabokov draws parallels between the two characters, saying that Hermann and Humbert are alike "in the sense that
two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other.
Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann" (Vladimir
Nabokov, Despair [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966], p. 9). We should note that
in the Russian Lolita the protagonist's car is an Icarus, just as in Despair, and that Hermann
also compares his writings to those of Dostoevsky and Wilde. Incidentally, in his essay
"Pen, Pencil and Poison" in the collection Intentions, Wilde speaks of Thomas Griffiths

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

21

Humbert Humbert makes a series of deranged epistemological blunders;

for example, he mistakes "an obese partly clad man reading the paper"
for "a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair" (264, 20), he sees in Lolita his resurrected "Riviera love"
(39), and he also deludes himself about his own appearance. Humbert
Humbert considers himself to be "an exceptionally handsome man" (25).
Only when Lolita starts to mimic him does he discover that his face is
constantly being disfigured by a "tic nerveux" (161, 193). Like Smurov in
The Eye, he seeks in others only flattering opinions about himself; thus he
is especially cruel to Lolita, who, unlike her mother, relatively quickly realizes that he is not a "somber romantic" but a fake and a pretender, an
"old baboon," as she says in the Russian version.50
Just as other Nabokovian characters of this type, Humbert Humbert
is endowed with considerable artistic potential and aesthetic subtlety.
However, he fails to use his gift properiy. Instead of transfiguring his precious memories and observations into fiction, into the reality of art, he
cannot go beyond his childhood love. Instead of stopping time in art, he
tries to stop it in life. Instead of contemplating and "reading" the outside
world, he imposes onto it his maniacal fantasies and literary clichs. Instead of "capturing the pulse of other souls" (as the artist's goal is formulated in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and as Godunov-Cherdyntsev
strives to do), he gratifies and caresses his own soul. (Cf. "It was always
my habit and method to ignore Lolita's state of mind while comforting
my own base self [287].) Ultimately, Humbert Humbert's insanity, his illness, that "sterile and selfish vice" which he himself eventually "cancelled
and cursed" (278), is a disease of the "Romantic" consciousness, an inherent fallacy of a certain aesthetic worldview51 against which Nabokov
Wainewright, an English dandy, aesthete, connoisseur of romantic poetry, artist and critic,
who murdered several people in cold blood. This essay, which formulates the idea of crime
as an art, is a possible source for Despair, Lolita and other works by Nabokov.
50. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, perevel s angliiskogo avtor (New York: Phaedra
Publishers, 1967), p. 174. All the subsequent page references to this Russian edition are
given in the text as to Lolita.
51. A similar interpretation of Humbert Humbert's "disease" is proposed in Prisdlla
Meyer's book Find what the Sailor Has Hidden. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Rre (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 13-38. However, Meyer significantly narrows the
range of Nabokov's polemic by stating that Lolita represents a translation of the antiRomantic themes of Eugene Onegin into the language of American culture. Even the direct
literary quotes included in Lolita show that the main object of polemic and parody here is
"romanticism," not in the sense of the specific literary school of the early nineteenth century,
but as a general cul tural phenomenon. (Cf. Nabokov's definition of romantic in his lecture
on Madame Bovary as "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to
dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature" [Lectures on Literature, p.

22

Nabokov Studies

waged a long war and with which he contrasted his own "classical"
variant of pan-aestheticism. What is criminal is not the protagonist's erotic
reverie as such (the nature of the fantasy itself is irrelevant), but his desire
to impose it on the outside world, incarnating it in poorly understood
reality instead of in art. The enchanted hunter Humbert Humbert needs
not the actual Lolita, but her ghost, the imagined demonic nymphet, who,
in his words, "was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita

perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating

between me and her, and having no will, no consciousnessindeed, no
life of her own" (162). His attitude toward Lolita parodies various
programs of blurring art and reality including Blok's famous declaration in
the article "About the Contemporary State of Russian Symbolism":
... my very own magic world has become the arena of my personal
actions, my anatomical theater or puppet theater, where I myself act
alongside my amazing puppets.... Life became art, I chanted incantations, and finally I conjured up that which I personally call the
stranger, the puppet-beauty, the blue specter, the miracle on earth.52

132]). "Romanticism" in Lolita is represented by a wide spectrum of texts and biographies

from different epochs and countries and includes on equal footing both high art and mass
culture, both the original tradition and its worn-out contemporary variants. ("The superman
carrying a young soul in his arms" from Transparent Things is a double allusion, telescoping

Lermontov's "Angel" and "Demon" with a popular comic book hero. An analogous image
is found in Lolita: "blue-caped star-men" [256] refer not to the Romantic tradition as such,
but to Symbolism and the color blue from Blok's "Neznakomka" [A Stranger].) In view of
this, Edgar Allan Poe's significance in Lolita grows; he is important not only because, as
Meyer states, Nabokov needs an American author to serve as a target for his polemics with
European Romanticism, but also because in the history of culture Poe proves to be a link
between Romanticism and Symbolism, a favorite poet of Baudelaire, Bal'mont and Briusov,
who all wrote about him and translated his work.

52. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii vos'mi tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow-Leningrad:

Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), p. 429. To a certain extent Lolita reflects Nabokov's ambivalent attitude toward Alexander Blok's poetry. On the
one hand, in the Russian version Vladimir Nabokov-the author appears on the scene of his
novel under the anagram Vivian Damor-Blok, which suggests his certain kinship with Blok.
Perhaps this is the reason that Humbert Humbert speaks with such hatred and bitterness
about the "belle dame toute en bleu" (244), which is an obvious allusion to Blok's lyric poems. On the other hand, the protagonist's confession contains a series of parodie cross-references with Blok's writings and his artistic posturing. Thus the vulgar American song
"Carmen" (61-62) refers to Blok's cycle of the same name; the ironic descriptions of Marie
as a "stellar name" (24) and "blue-caped star-men" (256) refer to his play "The Stranger";
and the colors lilac, blue and violet scattered throughout the novel (Humbert Humbert's
and Clare Quilty's violet robes, the lilac sleeping pills, the "dreamy blue automobile") are
reminiscent of Blok's color sym bolism.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

23

However, to Nabokov any fanciful substitution, be it Blok's stranger or

Humbert's nymphet, attests to the weakness and the deficiency of an
imagination which is incapable of penetrating the essence of outside
phenomena.
Nabokov's artist characters are endowed with two drastically different types of imagination. This can be seen from a comparison of functionally similar episodes in The Gift and Lolita which, like the novels themselves, represent a lofty original and its travesty. When Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev goes to the Shchyogolevs searching for a room, he is irritated both by the vulgar landlord and the apartment itself, so "he decided at once that he would not take it";53 however, at the last moment

he notices that in the dining room "by the far window, near a small bamboo table, stood a high-backed armchair: across its arms there lay in airy
repose a gauze dress, pale bluish and very short (as was worn then at
dances), and on the little table gleamed a silvery flower and a pair of
scissors."54 And seeing this magic dactylic triad (in Russian it sounds as
"nozh-ni-tsy, pla-t'e, tsve-tok," not unlike "ozero, oblako, bashnia" in the
story of the same title), he immediately agrees to move into the
"repellent, hostile" apartment. These few insignificant details enable his
poetic imagination to create the image of the girl who is fated to be his
wife. When he actually sees Zina, he will have "the feeling that he already
knew a good deal about her, that even her name had been long familiar
to him, and certain characteristics of her life." Godunov-Cherdyntsev is attentive to "signs and symbols," to rhythm and patterns, and fate rewards
him for that by making him lucky in love, although he later realizes that
the "bluish ball dress on the chair" belonged not to Zina, but to her
cousin, and therefore represented a "delightful deceit" (at a phonetic level
as well: Zina -cousin, in Russian Zina - kuz/na), a subtle stroke in the ingenious game of fate.55
Humbert Humbert's search for a room unfolds in a strikingly similar
way. When he arrives at Charlotte Haze's house, he too is irritated by the
vulgar landlady and by the dwelling itself. Fate also sends him signs to
enable him to create the image of the real Lolita: he sees a tennis ball (let
us recall that it is in tennis that Lolita expresses the underdeveloped and
suppressed potential of her personality), an apple core, "bedraggled
magazines on every chair," a white sock on the floor, a plum stone in a
vase; he even hears the name "Lo" (37-39). But in contrast to GodunovCherdynstev, Humbert Humbert remains deaf and blind to new impres53. The Gift, p. 143.
54. Ibid., p. 144.
55. Ibid., p. 364.

24

Nabokov Studies

sions; his imagination keeps recycling the previously known and experienced, be it in the emotional sphere or in the sphere of culture (hence the
imitative nature of most of his literary works). He is looking for stereotypes and rough analogies, and therefore identifies Lolita, a new and
unique person, as a clone of his dead sweetheart. Yet even the latter he
recalls vaguely and projects a literary prototype, Poe's Annabel Lee, onto
his memory of her. Neglecting details and thinking in generic terms
(nymphet/non-nymphet), Humbert Humbert commits what is according
to Nabokov the deadliest epistemological sin, the sin of generalization,
which renders the world and its mysteries impenetrable.
A true creative act for Nabokov is a moment of epiphany, a merging
of the subject and the object, "a combined sensation of having the whole
universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away
with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisonerwho is
already dancing in the open."56 In other words, he sees art as self-transcendence, an overcoming of the limits of self and a way to pass from
time into eternity, and, hence, a form of love, which has the supreme ontological value in Nabokov's universe. Throughout the novel Humbert
Humbert's attitude toward the "nonego" is in direct opposition to this
model of love/art. In attempting to assert himself, to maintain control
over everything and everybody, to use and suppress others, he brings
absolute evil to every aspect of existence: he defiles nature and "the

lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country" (176); he profanes the classical tradition of literature;57 he deceives the naive Charlotte and drives her
to her death; and finally, he rapes and torments the defenseless Lolita,
striving to turn her into an obedient puppet. In response, the outside

world, governed by the almighty McFate, does not free him from the
prison of his self, but on the contrary mocks and humiliates him and delivers blow after blow, destroying all his plans and illusions. Only after
having suffered a miserable defeat in this uneven battle, having lost Lolita
forever, does Humbert Humbert begin to replay in his mind the pattern
56. Lectures on Literature, p. 378.

57. Cf. his irreverent identification of Virgil, Dante and Petrarch as nymphet-kovers or
his attacks on Robert Browning. The worst degree of profanation is Clare Quilty's rude

punning on a line from MacBeth in the English original and from Eugene Onegin in the
Russian translation (301; cf. Lolita, p. 280). For Nabokov, Shakespeare and Pushkin are the

two greatest authors; they have attained the ultimate perfection; they are his teachers and
constant companions. In his Russian poem "Vot to my zovem lunoi..." (1942; And this is
what we call the moon...), he writes: "U nas est' shakhmaty s soboi, / Shekspir i Pushkin. S
nas dovol'no." (We have a chess set with us, / Shakespeare and Pushkin. That's all we
need.). Vladimir Nabokov, Stikhi (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), p. 269.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

25

of his life, trying to break the vicious circle. In retrospect, his view of the
other undergoes drastic changes: in his consciousness Lolita is transformed from a nymphet into a unique personality, another self, and he
realizes that "behind the awful juvenile clichs, there was in her a garden
and a twilight, and a palace gatedim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags
and miserable convulsions" (284). Thus Humbert Humbert gains the ability to love, which liberates him from his maniacal fear of time. Previously
he had intended to get rid of Lolita when she passed the age of being a
nymphet, but now he declares his love for the prematurely wilted pregnant young woman:

and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am

to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.... I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita,
this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still
gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita,
still mine.... No matter, even those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad
with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere
sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita (277-78).
However, this belated love does not bring salvation to Humbert
Humbert; it only deepens his tragedy, because the real Lolita is lost forever, and also because, having passed the boundaries of his self, he is
beginning to understand himself for the first time. He discovers, just as
Lolita had, that far from a refined aesthete, a superior Poe or Proust he
had thought himself to be, he was just a "maniac," a monster who deprived "a North American girl-child ... of her childhood" (283). His
epiphany in the conclusion of the novel brings not happiness, but complete and total despair, when, listening to "the melody of children at
play," he suddenly comes to understand that "the hopelessly poignant
thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her
voice from that concord" (308). Unlike Nabokov's other false artists,
Humbert Humbert proves capable of compassion and repentance and
therefore can rise to a new, higher level of consciousness which brings
him closer to true artists. Thus in the last paragraph of his "confession" he
quite unexpectedly begins to sing the praises of "blessed matter" (309) in
which he previously saw "everything soiled, torn, dead" (185). In a sense
he is approaching the faith of his creator and such Nabokov's characters
as Godunov-Cherdyntsev who accept the gift of the "nonego" with grati-

26

Nabokov Studies

tude and feel that behind the "blessed matter" there "really is something."
As Nabokov noted in an interview:

I do think that Humbert Humbert in his last stage is a moral man because he realizes that he loves Lolita [italicized in the text of the interview] like any woman should be loved. But it is too late, he has
destroyed her childhood.58
From the point of view of some American scholars, Humbert Humbert's repentance is simply another deceit, a fiction, a calculated move to

mislead gullible readers into sympathizing with him. The structure and
style of the "confession" are so intricate, so sophisticated and artful, that
according to these scholars, all the narrator's words about himself should

be considered rhetorical devices ingeniously manipulated for the purpose

of self-justification and self-aggrandizement. Such interpretations, I believe,
are essentially misleading, though one has to admit that they draw on certain features of the text, particularly of its narrative structure. Humbert
Humbert is indeed an unreliable narrator whose highly subjective rendering of the events undermines the presumption of truthfulness and can distort, hide or mask information and confuse fiction and reality, thus producing a false picture with false explanations. This unreliability is motivated psychologically by the narrator's mental illness and his romantic
imagination. The story of Humbert Humbert's life prior to the writing of
the "confession" also reveals him to be a fabricator and a liar: "I... con-

cocted a perfectly spurious and very racy report" (34); "The Muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear" (45); "I ... had to invent ... a long series of mistresses" (79); "So artistically did I impersonate
the calm of ultimate despair" (101 [Emphasis mine.A.D.J), and so on.
This, together with some rather unbelievable episodes at the beginning of
the novel "practically undistinguishable from a madman's fancy" (for example, the Arctic expedition or the fate of Valeria and her husband), give
the reader just cause to question the truth of any and all of Humbert
Humbert's utterances.

But unlike many texts with unreliable narrators, Lolita does not seek
to reveal the inner logic of the delirium, as is the case with Gogol's
"Notes of a Madman" or Henry James' Turn of the Screw. On the contrary, it strives to hide that logic. Humbert Humbert contradicts himself so
often and speaks in so many different voices that his personality loses all
integrity, splitting into "Humbert the Writing" and "Humbert the De58. Cited in David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 202, n. 34.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

27

scribed," each of whom in turn splits into several other "Humberts." The
split is evident from the start in the double name of the protagonist and
becomes even more obvious throughout the novel in the numerous epithets, nicknames and definitions he applies to himself: "all the way Valeria
talked, and Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the Small
whether Humbert Humbert should kill her or her lover" (29); "said highand-dry Humbert to floundering Humbert" (229).
This split often parodies the reflection and self-analysis of traditional
confessions, and yet it is of a different nature. It is more reminiscent of
the author's attitude toward his characters, with shifts in the narration between external and internal points of view. Humbert the Author does not
merely resurrect, but creates his past anew, plays with it, simultaneously
constructing several contradictory images of his past self. He constantly
hides Humbert the Character behind a multitude of theatrical masks-

comic, tragic, melodramaticeach of which is subsequently replaced by

its opposite. The mask of a mocking jester gives way to that of a tragic
hero, a victim of fate; the mask of the deceived Pierrot to that of the
scoundrel Harlequin; the mask of the avenging Hamlet to that of the hapless King Lear; the mask of the fairy tale vampire Bluebeard to that of an
enchanted hunter, and so on. And relatively early on the protagonist lets
drop one of the key phrases of the novel: "Is 'mask' the keyword?"
(53).59
Humbert the Author not only experiments with different masks for
Humbert the Character, but he also plays with them himself. On some
occasions he merges with the mask, but more often distances himself
from it, giving it a name or a definition that emphasizes the gap between
"now" (the time of discourse) and "then" (the time of the story). When introducing entries from his journal into the text, he notes in passing that in
some places they have been "perhaps amended" (42), and later on he
declares that the entire journal is a stylization, a fake, and he abdicates
the point of view represented in the journal:
It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to
tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze
was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more; but I
have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no mat59. It is interesting that in his speech about Blok, delivered in Berlin on September 11,
1931, Nabokov defines him as a romantic poet "playing with images as with masks behind
which he keeps hiding his face." Nabokov names several such masks: Hamlet, Pierrot, the
page. See the newspaper report "Vecher pamiati Bloka i Gumileva." RuI', Sept. 16, 1931,
p. 4.

28

Nabokov Studies

ter how false and brutal they may seem to me now. Fortunately, my
story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor Charlotte
for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude (71 ).
More often, the shifts in the narrator's point of view and his temporal position are not this explicit. But still within a single paragraph, or even
phrase, "I" can refer to different hypostases and masks, making it difficult
to ascertain the exact referent of the utterance, to determine whether we

are dealing with an event in the main time of the story or with its replaying in the time of discourse. For example, in one of the riskiest episodes
of the novel, the description of his first "tactile correspondence" with
Lolita, Humbert Humbert writes: "I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had
begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing
tingle which now had reached the state of absolute security, confidence
and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life" (60). At first glance

this passage seems to describe an exclusively sexual arousal; however,

the phrase "entered a plane" (in Russian "pereshel," crossed into) and the
emphasis of the adverb "now" suggest that the narrator has slid from the
past into another temporal plane and is describing the state of creative
ecstasy he is experiencing as he writes.
Thus, like Humbert the Character, Humbert the Author does not have

one identifiable voice, but constantly changes the tone, intonation and

style of his narration. "Oh, let me be mawkish for the noncel I am so tired
of being cynical" (109), he exclaims at one of the turning points of his
"confession." However, as has been noted, his emotional outpourings
can often be a disguise, bait for a trusting reader. From the very start of
the book, Humbert Humbert conducts a dialogue with the implied addressees of the text, both internal and external. On the one hand, he talks
to Lolita, Chariotte, himself and certain secondary characters, and on the
other, appeals to "the ladies and gentlemen of the jury" and the judges,
i.e. the readers, whose standard responses he anticipates and provokes.
The narrative mask changes depending on the addressee. The text is
framed by two addresses to Lolita, and it begins and ends with her
name; in fact, all speech directed to Lolita is markedly serious and passionate, while that directed at others is permeated with irony, parody,

playfulness, albeit mixed with complaints, invectives, supplications and

confessional clichs. The narrative structure becomes even more complicated due to the subtle presence of the text's true master, the almighty

author, a presence hinted at by Humbert Humbert himself who, already

in the second chapter of the book, admits: "I am writing under observation" (10). The authorial interference in the text is especially visible in the

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

29

Russian translation of Lolita, where it manifests itself in otherwise unmotivated hidden quotations from Russian literature, which increase in frequency toward the end of the book.60
At first reading, this polyphony makes the text semantically uncertain,
polyvalent, filled with oxymorons (even more so than The Gift). The main
paradox of Lolita lies in the fact that the first-person narration contains a
multitude of mutually exclusive, logically incompatible statements with regard to some major events of the novel, traits of the characters (including
the narrator himself), their acts and motives. For example, Humbert
Humbert insists on repeatedly calling himself a murderer, yet at one point
in his "confession" he unexpectedly sheds doubt on this seemingly irrefutable label: "Incidentally: if I ever commit a ... murder... Mark the 'if"
(47). Elsewhere he staunchly denies it: "Emphatically, no killers are we.
Poets never kill" (88). However, in defining himself as a poet, Humbert
Humbert contradicts another self-characterization: "But I am no poet. I
am only a very conscientious recorder" (72).
Such conflicting statements reflect the deeper contradiction between
the declared and the implicit status of the text. On the one hand, Lolita
initially passes itself off as a spontaneous confession, a chronicle of "real"
events, where the only time that matters is the linear time of the story. In
this case, Humbert Humbert is indeed a "recorder," a "murderer," a "nonpoet." But on the other hand, the structure of Lolita is overwhelmingly
sophisticated, with its multiple masks, thematic patterns, intricate intertextuality and, most importantly, the self-metadescriptions which permeate
every chapter of the book. This moves the alleged confession into the
category of self-conscious fiction, where the storytelling itself is relevant,
as is the time of discourse. As in The Gift, this time, or to be more precise,
the point of its intersection with the main time of the story, can provide
the semantic code for eliminating contradictions and, therefore, for a coherent second reading.
Contrary to the situation we find in The Gift, it might seem that all the
circumstances of Lolita's creation are rendered in sufficient detail, and all
60. As Gennady Barabtarlo noticed, "...V vozdukhe kak by khrustal'nom" (...In the
crystal-like air [Lolita, 241]) is a reminiscence of a line in Tiutchev's poem "Est' oseni
pervonachal'noi..." (There is in early autumn...): "Ves' den' stoit kak by khrustal'nyi"
(Gennady Barabtarlo, "Onus Probandi: On the Russian Lolita." The Russian Review, 47
[1988], 238). Let me cite two other examples. "Zhalkii shifr laskovykh men i svoenravnykh
prozvanii" (A pathetic code of tender names and whimsical pet names [Lolita, 231]) is a
quotation from Evgenii Boratynskii: "Svoenravnoe prozvan'e / DaI ia mlloi lasku ei" (I
have given a whimsical pet name/ to my darling in order to be tender with her). "Uchasr/
ego reshena" (His fate has been decided [Lolita, 262]) resonates with the opening phrase of
a prose fragment by Pushkin: "llchaer* moia reshena" (My fate has been decided).

30

Nabokov Studies

the main events connected with the time of discourse have exact dates.

Their chronology is as follows:

September 22 - Humbert Humbert receives letters from John Farlow

and Lolita, who is now Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, and sets out on his
journey.

September 23 - Humbert Humbert meets with Lolita in Coalmont.

September 24 - Humbert Humbert visits Ramsdale and goes on to

Parkington.

September 25 - Humbert Humbert kills Clare Quilty and surrenders

to the police. On this day or soon afterwards he is sent for evaluation to the psychiatric ward, where he starts writing Lolita.
November T6 - Humbert Humbert, now in prison, completes his
manuscript and dies of coronary thrombosis.
Thus we know that the earliest day that Humbert Humbert could have
started working on his book is the 25th of September, and therefore he
could not have worked on it longer than fifty-three days. However, at the
end of his "confession," he reports that he began writing io//ta exactly
fifty-six days ago (308), i.e., as a simple calculation shows, on the 22nd of
September, not the 25th or 26th.61
Of course, it is possible to dismiss this discrepancy, attributing it to a
chronological mistake by the confused protagonist and/or by the absentminded writer.62 Yet in the second part of Lolita Humbert Humbert is
absolutely precise in terms of chronology. For example, he correctly
identifies the Fourth of July, 1949, the day of Lolita's disappearance, as a
Monday, and even calculates that on the next day she would turn exactly
five thousand three hundred days old (255).63 Therefore such an explanation is not convincing. Another fact that reduces the possibility of a
mistake on Humbert Humbert's part is that the time of discourse (56
days) comes out to exactly eight weeks, and the week, as a segment of
time, is an indication that the time experienced is "real," just as in The Gift
61. For the more detailed discussion of the chronology, see Christina Tekiner, Time in
Lolita." Modem Fiction Studies, 25, No. 3 (1979), 463-69.
62. Cf. Proffer, Keys to Lolita , p. 154.
63. It is most interesting that Humbert Humbert makes this calculation in his poem
written several months after Lolita's disappearance, in a Quebec sanatorium where he

spends the winter of 1949-50 and the following spring: "Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. /
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. / Age: five thousand three hundred days..." (255). Thereby he
discloses that for him Lolita's life had stopped on July 5, 1949 and that he uses the word

"age" here in the meaning of "the complete duration of the life or existence of a being, a
lifetime." I am indebted to Ms. Anne Berggren, a graduate student in my Nabokov class at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for this observation that leads one to suspect that

Humbert is hiding the fact of Lolita's death in the Elphinstone hospital.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

31

four hundred and fifty-five days, which can also be divided by seven, refer to a "real" temporal interval. It is difficult to imagine that such an im-

portant chronological divergence at the point where the story time and
the discourse time intersect was not a part of Nabokov's design. In all
likelihood we are again dealing with the thoroughly calculated device of

time doubling and with two chronologiesvirtual and realthat resemble

the temporal structure of The Gift. This reading is supported by the Russian translation of Lolita, which, like all the other self-translations of
Nabokov, served him as a means of amending the original text and
obliquely influencing its interpretations.64 Collating English and Russian
versions of the novel shows that in the latter Nabokov did took great
pains to correct a number of anachronisms, as he stated later in a letter
to Carl Proffer.65 Yet he conspicuously did not change a single contradictory date in the final section of the novel indicating the existence of
two chronologies. Moreover, the key dateSeptember 22, 1952is even
more strongly marked in the Russian translation; it is mentioned directly in
the description of the events of that day, alongside Humbert's extremely
ambiguous allusions to Proust and to the art of writing {Lolita, 245),
whereas in the English original it appears only in the following chapter,
hidden within casual brackets (267J.66

If, on the other hand, we accept Humbert's final avowal as the

"truth" he has tried to hide and revealed only in the very end of the
book, it can not but drastically change the interpretation of the entire
text. For in this case, as Elizabeth Bruss and Christina Tekiner were first to
suggest, all the incidents in the novel which Humbert claimed had occurred after September 22his last meeting with pregnant Lolita, going to
64. On the Russian Lolita as an interpretative key to the original, see my ar tide in
Garland's Companion to Nabokov.
65. In response to Carl Proffer's note about a chronological mistake concerning the
age of Lolita's brother, Nabokov wrote: "I... dimly recall correcting something of the kind,
and other Tolstoy-time items, in my Russian translation of Lolita." Vladimir Nabokov,
Selected Letters: 1940-1977 (San Diego, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), p.
434. The allusion is to Tolstoy's similar anachronisms in Anna Karenina that Nabokov noticed and discussed in his lectures and glosses on the novel.
66. Incredible as it might seem, there is a chance that Nabokov could overlook the
same anachronism for the second time and unintentionally make it more prominent But
even if such were the case, in the final analysis Nabokov's "non-intention" would be irrelevant, for the existence of the auto-translation implies a semiotic strategy that obliges a
mode! bilingual reader to interpret any repeated breach of the internal coherence as a
meaningful clue. Neither Lolita nor its Russian translation resist a reading based on a conjecture about double timing. Nor does the latter, in its turn, contradict our hermeneutic expectations in regard to Nabokov's texts and their (in contradistinction to the authorial) intentions.

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Nabokov Studies

Ramsdale and Parkington, killing off Claire Quilty and getting arrested
should be interpreted as cunning fabrications of the hero, his purely verbal adventures on the way to Readsburg (as he calls his destination in the
final conversation with Lolita), his desperate gamble and gambit designed
to outwit and defeat omnipotent "McFate."67 Once we find out that
Humbert Humbert began writing his book on September 22, his description of that very day in chapter 27 of the second part of the novel acquires pivotal significance. The narrator seems to banter the readers with
the quasi-realistic account of irrelevant trifleshis coming down to "grope
for his mail" in the entrance hall, listening to complaints of "the dapper
and bilious janitor" and reading a letter from John Farlowthat camouflages the metaliterary design underlying all his ramblings. I believe that
the whole chapter can be reinterpreted as a series of metaphors whose
tenor is the birth of the text itselfthe story of Humbert's groping for a
plan, a structural idea, a plot for his future book (so to say, his armor or
"mail") and finally coming up with a solution that allows him to enter into
the process of writing.
The clue to the narrator's overall strategy is found in the opening
phrase of the chapter: "My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the
type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glass
slit" (263). A very careful selection and positioning of words {letterbox,
entrance, type, contents, glass, slit) turn them into semi-transparent double-entendres that refer, besides quite ordinary things, to the space of the
book being born and to the hidden, self-reflective content of the following description recovered only if the reader makes a focal shift. In fact,
almost any phrase in chapter 27 might be decoded as an "auto-meta-descriptor" referring to the text itself. The motifs of distorted vision (cf. "a
trick of harlequin light," "the lighted image," "the ever alert periscope" ),
doubling (cf. "a revised and politer version of the incident"), displaced
and transformed meaning (cf. the transformation of Lolita's scrawl into
"the dull hand,"), deception and simulation (cf. "a semblance of Lolita's
script," "a promise ... to be simulated seductively," or Humbert's
"deception was bearable")that is the motifs associated with artistic creationpermeate the chapter and are combined with those of writing,
reading and imagination (263-64). Humbert Humbert once again recalls
episodes from his "pre-dolorian" past, when his "lurking eye would make
67. See Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary
Genre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 145-46; and Christina Tekiner,
"Time in Lolita." More recently a comparable line of argument was developed in Leona
Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989),
pp. 209-11.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

33

out from afar" a half-naked nymphet in a lit window who would suddenly turn into a "partly clad man reading the paper" (264; cf. 20), but if
the first time these recollections had only one meaning, now a second
meaning is revealed. The description is now constructed in such a way
that it can be read as a metaphor for an artist's torments, his oscillations
between two realities, between the "fiery phantasm" of the "great
promised" and "the little given," between fancy and memory. This is supported by the literary allusions in the chapter: the mention of Alice in
Wonderland refers us to a fairy tale, to pure fiction, while Humbert's
French exclamation Mes fentres that telescopes the titles of Verlaine's
autobiographical book Mes prisons and the famous poem by Mallarm
"Les fentres" simultaneously refers to experienced reality and to its symbolic poetic transformation. When Humbert Humbert says that on the
22 nd of September he was involved "in the race between his fancy and
nature's reality," and his "fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized" (264), he clearly has in mind not his morning trip to the
mailbox and his confrontation with the "bilious janitor," but something
very differentthe writer's struggle with his material, with the chaos of his
own biography, which he is striving to structure into a coherent artistic
text.

The main object of Humbert's contemplation in the chapter is "the

stability of type" (in Russian, "stability of characteristics and fate") "that
literary characters acquire in the reader's mind" (265):
No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we
find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs.
Never will Emma rally, revived by sympathetic salts in Flaubert's fa-

ther's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character

has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our
minds, and similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will
never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit
murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us.... Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only
anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all
our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has
just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen (265).
It is obvious that this digression, sloppily disguised as a commentary to
John Farlow's letter, describes Humbert Humbert's own situation in the

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Nabokov Studies

"entrance hall" of his future novel. If he has lost Lolita forever,68 the only
goal of his life is to find the "very local palliative of articulate art," to write
an "anomalous" book about her and himself and thus to escape the Procrustean bed of his fate. As an aspiring artist, he wants to become the
"X" who, contrary to all expectations, composes a masterpiece. But since
Humbert Humbert is nurturing a plan for an autobiographical novel
based on the "real" story of his life and since his "real" past, we may presume, is too ugly, mean and meaningless for "Proustianization," he can
not just indulge in the Proustian art of memory. What he also needs to
find for himself and for Lolita as literary characters is an aesthetically perfect future, the finale of his book (and, hence, the plausible end of his life)
which, like the conclusions of King Lear, Madame Bovary and Eugene
Onegin (the latter is mentioned only in the Russian translation), would forever fix his destiny in the reader's mind.69
The three letters referred in chapter 27 (which correspond to the
three letters received by Humbert Humbert in the first part of the novel,
68. Assuming that Humbert's account of his visiting Mr. and Mrs. Schiller is a skillful
fabrication, one can only make guesses about Lolita's "real" fate untold by the narrator.
Again, the most plausible conjecture seems to be that she is dead (see note 63) and
Humbert Humbert knows it when he starts writing his confessions but refuses to admit his
unbearable loss and his unpardonable guilt. He tries to encode her death as an abduction,

daydreams of impossible revenge and talks to Lolita and of Lolita as if she were alive. If this
is the case, Humbert Humbert is doing to his readers what "a very old barber" in Kasbeam
has done to him: the latter, let us recall, "babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, ... wiped
his glasses ... interrupted his tremulous scissors work to produce faded newspaper clip-

pings," and only in the very end Humbert realized with a shock "that the mustached young
ball player had been dead for the last thirty years" (213). In his postscript "On a Book
Entitled Lolita" Nabokov named the Kasbeam barber among the images he would pick up
for "special delectation" and remarked that the scene had cost him a month of work (316).
Evidently the writer hints at his having looked for a natural, inconspicuous, casual portrayal
that could at the same time serve as a veiled metapoetic description of the novel's hidden
plot-a deceptive masterstroke of the kind Nabokov was especially good at. It should be
noted that Kasbeam anagrammatizes "be a mask" and "same," that Lolita, like the barber's
son, is a "young ball player," and that Humbert will leaf through the old newspaper files trying to recapture Lolita's image.
69. Humbert Humbert's literary examples indicate what alternative endings of his life
he had in mind: like King Lear, he could discover that his beloved "daughter" is dead and
perish by grief or, like Emma Bovary, he could commit suicide. Instead he chooses the parodie analog to the open ending of Eugene Onegin with the admixture of King Lear's revenge
theme. Cf. King Lear's wail addressed to his dead daughter: "Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little!
/ I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee" and Humbert's appeal to Lolita: "And do not
pity CQ. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least
a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations" (309). I discuss another, more important allusion to King Lear in my essay on the
Russian version of Lolita in the Garland Companion to Nabokov.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

35

from McCoo, Charlotte and Lolita) are three options for the future of
Humbert the Character and, following the novelistic tradition, all of them
include marriage. The first option, marriage to Rita, is tantamount to oblivion, to giving up his past (the symbolic fruit of their union is the pimply
albino struck by amnesia who is discovered in Humbert Humbert and Rita's double bed), and therefore the protagonist rejects it with contempt.
He is more tempted by a banal happy ending, a blissful reunification with
Lolita (or her substitute), their marriage and flight abroad. This option is
outlined in John Farlow's letter which informs Humbert Humbert that he
has married a very young Spanish girl from Chile whose father is an exceedingly wealthy aristocrat (let us recall that Humbert was once infatuated with a "pale Spanish child," "the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman" [161]). However, at the very moment when Humbert Humbert is
ready to pursue this storyline ("at least we shall now track them down,"
he thinks upon "reading" Farlow's letter), his consciousness breaks
through the "prison walls" and creates the image of the "real" seventeenyear-old Lolita, a unique person outside of his control: he suddenly hears
her "small, matter-of-fact voice," and this shapes his future book.
On an existential plane, the hearing, i.e. imagining, of the letter from
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller marks his passage beyond the limits of his own
self, a leap from egoism to love. To use a description belonging to
Vladimir Solov'ev, whose views are close to Nabokov's, love:

makes us ascribe to the other with all our being that central meaning
which we, due to our egoism, reserve only for ourselves. Love is important not as one of our emotions, but as a transfer of all our vital
interests from ourselves to the other, as a shift in the very core of our
personal life.70
Having imagined the "real" Lolita and her plausible "present," having spoken not in his own but in her voice, Humbert Humbert makes this shift

that allows him to see himself and his love "with the utmost simplicity
and clarity" (282). Hence the opening words of his "confession:" "Lolita,
light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul" sound as a desperate response to Lolita's imagined voice, as a belated tremor of recognition of
the other.

On the aesthetic plane, the moment when Lolita's voice started to

sound in Humbert's consciousness is the instant of the "stellar explosion"
when everything "falls into order" merging the past and the imagined fu70. Vladimir Solov'ev, Sobrante sochinenii desiati tomakh, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg:
Prosveshchenie, n.d.), p. 21.

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Nabokov Studies

ture, or, to quote Nabokov's words about Proust's Marcel, "a shock of
inspiration ... causing him to decide to work without delay upon his
book."71 It is at this moment that the real time of Lolitathe time of its

being writtenstarts and the narrator keeps returning to it again and

again, though never naming it directly. The merging of the past and future
in the act of creation is implied in Humbert's essay, with the mythological

title "Mimir and Memory,"72 where he develops the idea of "perceptual

time based on the circulation of the blood ... a continuous spanning of
two points (the storable future and the stored past)" (260). The marriage
of a certain Murphy (probably from both the Creek morph and Mor-

pheus) and Stella Fantasia (Stella, i.e., star, is a symbol of poetic inspiration for Nabokov; also cf. Gray Star, the town in which Lolita dies) takes
on a similar meaning in the context of the novel. The exact time when
Humbert Humbert witnesses their preparations for the ceremony is meaningful: "It was eight minutes to three" (289), or 2:52, a number which
refers us to the starting dates of the two chronologies, 9/25/52 and
9/22/52 (9 here being the sum of all the numbers in 252).

Having ascended into another plane of awareness, Humbert Humbert gains artistic strength; now he is motivated not only by self-admiration but by love and turns from a romantic epigone into a minor master
in his own right (hence Lolita's new name he invents, as the transliteration
in the Russian version proves, should be pronounced as "Skiller," hinting
at his artistic skill). His highest artistic achievement is the entirely fictional
episode of his meeting with the adult Lolita; he endows Lolita with a destiny in which there is no room for him, but which, while plausibly banal,
fulfills her wishes. Humbert Humbert not only presents his lost (or dead?)
love with forty-five hundred dollars, but also imagines for her a dog
(which she had dreamed of having) and pink-rimmed glasses, since she

had in the past been "curiously fascinated by the photographs of local

brides ... holding bouquets and wearing glasses" (165). And most importantly, he gives her a caring husband with "arctic blue eyes, black hair,
ruddy cheeks," who seems to have stepped out of her favorite picture in
childhood, which portrayed "a dark-haired young husband with a kind of
drained look in his Irish eyes" (69). All these repetitions indicate that
71. Lectures on Literature, p. 210.

72. In Scandinavian mythology, Mimir is the mysterious master of the honeyed source
of wisdom which springs from the roots of the world tree lggdracil. The honey from the
source gives Mimir knowledge of the future. According to Nabokov, the artist, creating a
second reality, combines the magic powers of Mimir and Mnemosine; he both foresees and
remembers. Perceptual time is for him the forming memory of the subject. The most detailed outline of this concept is found in the novel Ada.

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

37

Humbert Humbert concocts the image of the grown-up Lolita from fragments of memories, chance observations and even old newspapers. This
is the reason why the pregnant Lolita reminds him of the "young woman,
far gone in a family way, smiling gently at an unborn baby" whom he had
seen at the Kasbeam Motel (213); incidentally, this woman's husband is
another "strong and handsome young man with a shock of black hair
and blue eyes."73.
As soon as Humbert's personal and aesthetic interest is refocused
from himself onto the other, the "fictional" reality becomes much more
real than the empirical one. Having imagined such a Lolita and such a
Humbert, Humbert the Author demonstrates the true potential of his
imagination. However, the design of the immortal book conceived by
Humbert Humbert on September 22 is not limited solely to the theme of
his love for his victimto this single, albeit central, plot line, which he now
brings to its logical conclusion. While taking advantage of his newly
gained artistic freedom, he also longs to carry out "poetical justice"
(299), to get even with all his enemies and offenders, and above all with
the hostile outside force that he has nicknamed McFate. Humbert Hum-

bert feels that he is enmeshed in some kind of an ingenious play where

he is playing, against his will, a role written just for him, but unlike
Nabokov's true artists he is incapable of metasensual insights into the
higher world, of "cosmic synchronization."74 For Cincinatus C, in Invitation to a Beheading, the other world appears to be "dreamy, round, and
blue," "suffused with such radiant, tremulous kindness" and a place where
one is struck "by the simplicity of a perfect good."75 but for Humbert
Humbert it is a gloomy bewitched forest swarming with evil elves,
demons and witches who are constantly plotting against him. He hates
his creator and erroneously thinks that in retrospect he has managed to
penetrate McFate's design and "to decipher... a past destiny" (210), just
like a reader of a detective novel who finally learns the murderer's identity. But in fact he falls into an epistemological trap set by the almighty
author and, hastily grasping at the obligingly proffered misleading hints, he
misses the correct solution and the signs and symbols which point to it
(such as butterflies or the anagram Vivian Darkbloom ).
73. Julian Connolly's detailed discussion of repetitions and echoes in the reunion scene
(see his article below on pp. 46-52 allows me not to dwell on the topic. Suffice it to say
that "translation check" fully supports such a reading since in the Russian version the scene
echoes previous events even more emphatically.
74. On this point see Vladimir Alexandrov, Nabokov's Other World (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 163-66.
75. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1959), pp. 84-85.

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Nabokov Studies

Mistakenly assuming that he has discovered McFate's design and

therefore can take his revenge on him, Humbert Humbert introduces into
his book a plot line in the spirit of a classic detective story. He plays with
his readers, scattering "obscure indications" of a prepared denouement
all about and suspending the final revelation almost until the last minute.
He wants to trade places with McFate, demoting him to the status of a

mere character, subjecting him to a derisive exposure, and then crushing

him in a spectacular finale, thereby emerging victorious "in the reader's
mind" from the battle. He merely has to find the key to McFate's games,
the hidden name of the demon, but here a bitter disappointment awaits
the cunning Humbert Humbert. He ascribes the role of his main adversary, the mastermind of the plot to kidnap Lolita, to one of her idols, the
American playwright Clare Quilty, whose picture hung in her bedroom.
But inspired by jealousy and hate, not love, Humbert Humbert fails to
notice that in portraying him, he only creates a caricature of himself.
Thanks to the cruel irony of McFate, the unknown object is incarnated as
a grotesque reflection of the subject, the alterego of the "blind" and selfabsorbed narrator. And Humbert Humbert's anticipated apotheosis becomes a smashing defeat. While imagining his fight with Quilty, he suddenly realizes that he and his enemy are twin puppets, manipulated by
the invisible puppetmaster, whose design is still inscrutable to him: "I
rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over
us.... He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and
rags" (299). Thus the imagined murder does not bring Humbert any satisfaction or relief; it only proves once again his ethical and aesthetic deficiency and casts him back into the prison of his self.
Many critics have noted that the description of Clare Quilty's murder
is written as the phantasmagorical delirium of the narrator, his hallucination or nightmare: space changes its parameters and the movement of
the characters resembles a pantomime and a ballet. The chain of cause
and effect is broken,76 and objects become animated. This can be seen in
numerous comparisons: "the elaborate house seemed to stand in a kind
of daze;" "the front door ... swung open as in a medieval fairy tale"
(294); "he ... dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination;"
"he rose from his chair higher and higher, like ... mad Nijinsky, like some
old nightmare of mine..." "the door was not properly closed" (Russian
76. In the Russian translation Nabokov corrected one logical mistake of the original,
when Humbert Humbert locks all the doors in the house and Quilty subsequently trudges
from room to room. However, eventually Nabokov restored the original version, choosing
to preserve this "curious dream-distortion," as he calls it in a letter to Alfred Appel, who was
working on the definitive edition of Lolita {Selected Letters, p. 408).

Nabokov's Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita

39

addition"as in a dream" [302]). However, similar emblems of dream-like

fiction are present in other chapters, the action of which takes place after
September 22. The meeting with Lolita is preceded by the same pun as
in the episode of the murder: "Personne. Ie resonne. Repersonne" (i.e.,
"again nobody" [269; 294]). The episodes share a black rocking chair,
which is "subdued, frightened-to-death" (274) at Lolita's and "rocking in a
panic" (302) at Quilry's. Declining the Schillers' invitation to stay longer,
Humbert Humbert explains to them that he "had merely dropped in on
[his] way to Readsburg where [he] was to be entertained by some
friends and admirers" (273).77 And during his visit to Ramsdale in chapter
33, he experiences "a delicious dream-feeling" (291) which in the Russian
translation is enhanced by the addition of a similar image: "miraculous
freedom characteristic of dreams" (Lolita, 269).
In the final analysis, it is the collation of the Lolita's Russian version
and the original that can provide conclusive evidence in support of the
"double timing" interpretation suggested above. The Russian Humbert not
only keeps intact the chronological clue in the penultimate paragraph of
the novel, but makes another, very suggestive chronological slip (also
connected with a Proustian allusion): he specifies that the last part of his
book which describes "three empty years" of his life and might be called,
after Proust, "Dolores Disparue"78 (253) covers the period "from early
July, 1949 to mid-November, 1952" (ot nachala iiulia 1949 do serediny
noiabria 1952 [Lolita, 234; the italics are mine])that is from his loss of
Lolita to the days when he was finishing his book and, according to
"John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.," his life. It may mean only one thingthat after the
fatal Independence Day of 1949 Humbert Humbert has nothing (Lolita
and Quilty included) to remember and to report but his own efforts to
write the "immortal" book in which he would transfigure his past and
make up a future. That is why in the last paragraph of the Russian Lolita
the narrator suddenly states that he is currently not in a New England
prison but in New York: "I am in New York, and you are in Alaska"
(Lolita, 286; in English we have simply "I can still talk to you from here to
Alaska" [309]), and, therefore, at home, at his writing desk but not in a
cell awaiting trial, as he has tried to convince his gullible readers.
77. Readsburg is the only toponym in the novel whose lexical meaning Nabokov
brings out in the Russian translation, where he renames it Lektoburg.
78. The allusion is to Albertine disparue (Vanished Albertine, or, in Moncrieffs translation, "The Sweet Cheat Gone"), the penultimate part of Remembrance of Things Past-one
of the most important (and least studied) subtexts of Lolita which deserves special discussion. It should be noted that the "Vanished" of the title in the context actually means
"dead," for the novel describes the narrator's tormenting efforts to recapture the image of
his lover after her sudden death.

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Nabokov Studies

All this proves that Nabokov at least anticipated the possibility that
the last chapters of the novel would be reread as a pure fiction created
by the unreliable narrator and interpreted in the manner suggested above.
If we notice the introduction of the second chronology and take
September 22 to be the beginning of the time of discourse, we obtain a
new semantic code which explains many contradictions in the text. The
text itself reveals a structure similar to a Mcebius strip, a brilliant metaphor
coined by Irena and Omri Ronen to describe the structure of The Gift,79
but now it has the more complex figure of eight, or, to quote Pale Fire,
"the miracle of the lemniscate."80 In The Gift, at the intersection of the
story time and the discourse time, the protagonist turns into the author
and the reader has to return to the beginning of the book to read it as a
novel by Godunov-Cherdyntsev. A similar metamorphosis in Lolita has
three stages: the time doubling paradox turns the author of the
"confession" into the author of self-conscious fiction. The latter is in turn

transformed into a character of a larger text, controlled by its real author,

"Vivian Darkbloom." In order to avoid the cunning Humbert's deception,
the reader must find the correct chronology and, having returned to its
starting point, September 22, begin traveling from this center along all the
curves of the "eight." With this approach, the text turns into kind of
palimpsest, where one faded layer shows through another, only to be
complicated by a third. Deciphering these texts, we learn to recognize
true reality (without quotation marks), which, according to Nabokov, is
multi-layered and multi-colored.
Pushkinskii Dom & University of Wisconsin-Madison

79. See Irena and Omri Ronen, "'Diabolically Evocative': An Inquiry into the Meaning
of a Metaphor." Slavica Hierosorymitana. Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University, 5-6
(1981), 371-86.
80. Leona Toker discusses the motif of the lemniscate (a symbol of infinity) and, in

general, of figure-eight shapes in The Gift See her Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary
Structures, pp. 159-60.