Lolita.doc

1、Vladimir NabokovLolitato VraForeword“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,“ such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,“ their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 1

2、6, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his clients will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his d

3、iscretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita“ for print. Mr. Clarks decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?“) wherein certain morbid states and perversions ha

4、d been discussed.My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.“s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that

5、taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its authors bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearers wish. While “Haze“ only rhymes with t

6、he heroines real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H.H.“s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers

7、for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real“ people beyond the “true“ story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,“ of “Ramsdale,“ wh

8、o desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business“ should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,“ is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl“ is a student in Paris. “Rita“ has recently married the proprietor of a hotel

9、 in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller“ died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom“ has written a biography, “My Cue,“ to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it

10、her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita“ deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a s

11、ingle obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prudes comfor

12、t, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac“ (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “

13、Lolita“ altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes th

14、e same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H.“s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males a “conservative“ estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experie

15、nce “H.H.“ describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his o

16、wn books and lectures, namely that “offensive“ is frequently but a synonym for “unusual;“ and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.“ No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, h

17、e is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throb

18、s through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!As a case history, “Lolita“

19、will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there

20、lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita“ should make all of us parents, social workers, educators apply ourselves with still great

21、er vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.Widworth, Mass. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.August 5, 1955 Part One1Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at th

22、ree, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, ther

23、e might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit

24、 number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.2I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in

25、 his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and gran

26、ddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and de

27、lls of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a h

28、ill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.My mothers elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my fathers had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he

29、 had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity the fatal rigidity of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil

30、had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acqui

31、red a bit of real estate.I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that bla

32、zed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit

33、 papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misrables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed

34、and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having o

35、ccurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the thr

36、ee-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichons sumptuous Le Beaut Humaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his del

37、ightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lyce in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter,

38、and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.3Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillful

39、ly recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,“ “think arms,“ “brown bobbed hair,“ “long lashes,“ “big bright mouth“); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of yo

40、ur eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunts, and

41、 as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. O

42、ur brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby ani

43、mals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assua

44、ged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each others soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only priv

45、acy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each oth

46、er: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each others salty

47、lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot

48、taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk caf. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glac, and her thin bare sh

49、oulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day o