O Window in the Dark!
The Early Career of Vladimir Nabokov
appendix G: Echoes of Things to Come
From “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “The first
little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939
or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up
with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia.” A few little
“pre-throbbings” can be found even before that:
- (from The Gift): Boris Ivanovich
Shchyogolev, a rather boorish old codger, tells young
Fyodor: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two,
what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this
kind of thing: an old dog — but still in his
prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness — gets to know a
widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl
— you know what I mean — when nothing is formed yet but
already she has a way of walking that drives you out of
your mind — a slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue
under the eyes — and of course she doesn’t even look at
the old goat. What to do?” (The very last line is a quick
jab at Chernyshevsky.)
- (from Laughter in the Dark): “This
had been the night of which he had dreamed for years. The
very way she had drawn her shoulder blades together and
purred when he first kissed her downy back had told him
that he would get exactly what he wanted, and what he
wanted was not the chill of innocence. . . .”
(cf. Lolita): “So this was le grand
moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of
the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at
the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side
of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties — she had
always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or
both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic
vision of her which I had locked in — after satisfying
myself that the door carried no inside bolt.”
- (from Laughter in the Dark): “Her
nudity was as natural as though she had long been wont to
run along the shore of his dreams. There was something
delightfully acrobatic about her bed manners. And
afterward she would skip out and prance up and down the
room swinging her girlish hip and gnawing at a dry roll
left over from supper.”
(cf. Lolita): “Brown, naked, frail
Lo, her narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a
door mirror, stood, arms akimbo, feet (in new slippers
with pussyfur tops) wide apart, and through a
forechanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass.
. . . The bed was a frightful mess with
overtones of potato chips.”
- (from The Gift): “Chernyshevsky
held him back in the full sense of the word:
for a long time they would wrestle, both of them limp,
scrawny and sweaty — toppling all over the floor,
colliding with the furniture — all the time silent, all
you could hear was their wheezing; then, stumbling into
one another, they would both search for their spectacles
beneath the upturned chairs.”
(cf. Lolita): “We fell to wrestling
again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s
arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and
goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he
rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me.
They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”
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