Not only does Hugh, like Armand in the other HH's Lolita, kill his wife in a state of altered consciousness (dream vs. hallucination).  In ch. 5, he also admires briefly a

green figurine of a female skier made of a substance he could not identify through the show glass (it was "alabasterette," imitation aragonite, carved and colored in the Grumbel jail by a homosexual convict, rugged Armand Rave, who had strangled his boyfriend's incestuous sister).   . . .  Or should one buy (for one's college roommate["Jack Moore" (no relation)<ch 7]) that wooden plate with a central white cross surrounded by all twenty-two cantons?  Hugh, too, was twenty-two and had always been harrowed by coincident symbols. [end of paragraph]

As noted by Akiko Nakata in 2004 (who also refers to Alex De Jonge's "Nabokov's Use of Pattern", p. 70; more below), this Armandine figurine turns up again in Hugh's death-chamber (chapter 26), within a "nicely wrapped box," which may or may not have been purchased by Hugh eighteen years after he first saw it (his reunion gift for Armande?).

I wonder if some of these details figure in Houssaye's Lolita.  To me, an intruguing question is why does Nabokov interlink his novel with Houssaye's?  If, as seems likely, he had not read the earlier Lolita while writing his own, the Charlotte-Lolita-incest-murder coincidence may have struck him as unusual--enough so, perhaps, to incorporate the bizarre echo into his little novel.  If I am not mistaken, TT is the only finished post-Lolita novel that does not name Humbert's captive, although of course she is present in Mr. R's pursuit of Julia Moore (aka Juliet Romeo, Armande's saved/strangled dream-double) as a 13-year-old. 

The relationship between these works of fiction seems akin to the Terra/Antiterra connection, or the bizarre echoes between Sebastian Knight's novels and V.'s pursuit of Sebastian Knight's life.   Life imitates art? Art hallucinates life?  Art hallucinates art? Maybe these are all meant to be further play with, and complication of, the Carrollian "dream within a dream" trope.  Whether they are understood as metafictional jokes or metaphysical riddles probably depends upon who is doing the reading--and when.

Stephen Blackwell

--------
More from Akiko Nakata's and others' 2004 Annotations:
  101.01: the green figurine of a girl skier: The figurine could be actually
  the same one that HP saw in the show window when he came to Switzerland for
  the first time (Ch. 5). The figurine was carved and colored by a convict
  named Armand. In Ch. 15, we see Armande in a green ski suit just like the
  figurine.

  101.01-02: which shone through the double kix: Brian Boyd's note to "kix":
  "The husk of case of a chrysalis; hence, a protective covering."
  The double kix literally stands for the box and the wrapping paper. It is
  also a kind of double cocoon that warps both time (we are looking at the
  figurine that we saw 18 years ago) and space (as if it were miniature
  Armande ).


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