I would like to contribute to the Lolita thread. In Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, chapter 6 "Emma Bovary's Eyes", there is a short discussion of mistakes in literature, and among his examples the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite mentions Nabokov: "Nabokov was wrong - rather surprising, this - about the phonetics of the name Lolita." I wonder what made him think so?

Also, while we're on this topic of mistakes. The French monthly Magazine Litteraire, the July-August, 2003, issue, features an interview with an Argentinian-born writer, translator, essayist Alberto Manguel who says: "Quand Nabokov traduit Eugène Onéguine et veut garder les petites faiblesses, les petites erreurs, il ne fait qu’ajouter ses laideurs à un texte anglais qui n’en a pas besoin."

And returning to the Lolita question. There are some differences between the English and the Russian versions. In the Russian monthly "Innostrannaya Litaratura" there was a short article on the subject, but, unfortunately, I can't say in what issue it appeared (in the early 1990s I think). Apart from Aleksandr Svirilin's find (the missing paragraph in Part 2, Chapter 3), in the English original (Part 2, Chapter 33) Humbert Humbert says: "I said didn't she think 'vient de', with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English 'just' with the past?" - while the Russian version goes: "В самом деле, - сказал я (пользуясь дивной свободою, свойственной сновидениям). - Вот так судьба! Бедный мальчик пробивал нежнейшие, невосстановимейшие перепоночки, прыскал гадючьим ядом - и ничего, жил превесело да ещё получил посмертный орденок." What was it that made VN change the dry piece of comparative grammar in English to the physiological particularity and ophidian venom in Russian? In the "Post Script" to the Russian translation of Lolita he wrote that he had held back with an arm of iron the daemons which had incited him to changes and omissions. It doesn't seem, with all the evidence amassed, to be the case after all, does it?

(Dear Don, I don't know if it will be of any interest or value to Nabokovians, but in White Teeth, page 362, Zadie Smith invokes some Cockney housewife with a rather peculiar English name - Mrs Winterbottom. The author seems to need a funny peculiar name here. In "Conversation piece, 1945" Nabokov says that Sinepuzov (blue belly) is a surname "which affects a Russian imagination in much the same way as Winterbottom does an English one". A bit of trivia.)