The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Read Free Page A

sure, this is dangerous talk, easilymisunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in
Speak, Memory
Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel
The Gift
with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of
Speak, Memory
with
The Gift
, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in
Speak, Memory
with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in
Pale Fire
Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré. Exile is a correlative for all human loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as
Lolita
, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. “Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mirrors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant Producer” [1943], in
Nabokov’s Dozen
[1958]).
    The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of
Lolita
that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In
Pnin
the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary,Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “ The past [is] the past ,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past,
Lolita
is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of
Speak, Memory
. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac.
Lolita
is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in
The Gift
, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody … there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”.
    An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new