Intimations of Lo:
Sirens, Joyce and Nabokov's Lolita
by Neil Cornwell
page two of two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Works by Nabokov

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

Other Sources

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

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

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

NS Nabokov Studies

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

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

Plus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pifer, Ellen, '"Did She Have a Precursor?": Lolita and Edith Wharton's The Children', in Grayson, Jane et al. (eds), Nabokov's World. Volume 2: Reading Nabokov (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002, 171-85).

Pifer, Ellen (ed.), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Rayfield, Donald (ed.), The Confessions of Victor X (London: Caliban, 1984)

Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth [Sweeney 2003a], '"Ballet Attitudes": Nabokov's Lolita and Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty', in Pifer (ed.), A Casebook, 121-36 (essay first published 1999)

Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth [Sweeney 2003b], 'The Enchanter and the Beauties of Sleeping', in Shapiro, Gavriel (ed.), Nabokov at Cornell (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003, 30-45

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