The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov Page A
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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novelists of the
fin de siècle
as he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and Paris and writing
Ulysses
, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course, Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally encyclopedic mind was able to store.
Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at randomand then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cornell lectures on
Ulysses
suggest. 22 In singling out the flaws in what is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the “needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabokov also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the rich textures of
Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire
, and
Ada
a most “Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fiction writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning. Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
or Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
, or those unclassifiable masterpieces such as
Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy
, and
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, in which the writer makes fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxtapositions—for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A hostile review of Nabokov’s
Eugene Onegin
offered as typical of the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum; but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of early nineteenth-century Russia and is an excellent example of the anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justification of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Monday morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, staggering beneath a run of
The Edinburgh Review
, which Nabokov had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelousads!” explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that enabled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of
Onegin
Commentary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson, Sterne, and Joyce—an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane discourse, in its own right a transcendent work of imagination.
Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces in his novels as early as
The Defense
(1930), as when Luzhin’s means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper—just about to fall off into the abyss”—a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film,
Safety Last
. Although present throughout his work of the thirties, and culminating logically in
The Gift
, his last novel in Russian, Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American culture and American university
fin de siècle
as he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and Paris and writing
Ulysses
, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course, Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally encyclopedic mind was able to store.
Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at randomand then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cornell lectures on
Ulysses
suggest. 22 In singling out the flaws in what is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the “needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabokov also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the rich textures of
Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire
, and
Ada
a most “Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fiction writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning. Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
or Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
, or those unclassifiable masterpieces such as
Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy
, and
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, in which the writer makes fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxtapositions—for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A hostile review of Nabokov’s
Eugene Onegin
offered as typical of the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum; but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of early nineteenth-century Russia and is an excellent example of the anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justification of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Monday morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, staggering beneath a run of
The Edinburgh Review
, which Nabokov had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelousads!” explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that enabled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of
Onegin
Commentary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson, Sterne, and Joyce—an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane discourse, in its own right a transcendent work of imagination.
Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces in his novels as early as
The Defense
(1930), as when Luzhin’s means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper—just about to fall off into the abyss”—a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film,
Safety Last
. Although present throughout his work of the thirties, and culminating logically in
The Gift
, his last novel in Russian, Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American culture and American university
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