Free The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and announces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chessplayer Luzhin in
The Defense
(1930), the butterfly collector Pilgram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and critic Albert Albinus in
Laughter in the Dark
(1932), the imprisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in
Invitation to a Beheading
(1935–1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz in
The Waltz Invention
(1938), and the philosopher Krug in
Bend Sinister
(1947), as well as poets
manqués
suchas Humbert Humbert in
Lolita
(1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in
The Gift
(1937–1938), Sebastian Knight in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941), and John Shade in
Pale Fire
(1962). When perceived by the reader, the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in Nabokov’s work.
    Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special, too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps nothing is
more
personal by implication and hence more relevant than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the closing moments of
Lolita
, and he speaks for more than one of Nabokov’s characters.
    It was the major émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich who first pointed out, more than fifty years ago, that whatever their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the artist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the creative process. 28 Khodasevich died in 1939, and until the 1960s, his criticism remained untranslated. If it
had
been available earlier, Nabokov’s English and American readers would have recognized his deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of
Lolita
, where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not obscured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But what may have been a brilliant formulation in the thirties should be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a commonplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about itself (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau, Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Fellini’s film
8½
—to name but a baker’s dozen). Whatis not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of involution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strategies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations.

3. THE ARTIFICE OF
LOLITA
     
    Although
Lolita
has received much serious attention (see this edition’s Selected Bibliography ), the criticism which it has elicited usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommodate the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described in the Notes to this edition,