JM [ to RSGwynn: "...If we believe that his narration is no more than an inventive trope, a mere literary conceit orchestrated by VN, then the whole novel dissolves into the irrelevance of a madman's fantasy life and an author's playing tricks on us that we have failed to comprehend."] "...In two or three interviews in "Strong Opinions" Nabokov mentions that "Lolita" was a composition (like a chess problem?) that caused him a special thrill, and this is something that comes close to what you called "an inventive trope" ( I'll try to locate these sentences and copy them here, in the near future)." Here come the promised quotes (Strong Opinions, Vintage International, 1990):

p.10-12: "Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization [...].The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's magic [are components of literary deception]... All art is deception and so is nature [...] I am fond of chess but deception in chess, as in art, is only part of the game; it's part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps. I think a good combination should always contain a certain element of deception"

p.11-12: "I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity. Only the background of the novel can be said to contain some biographical touches."

p.15: "...Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real."

p..16:: [ answering "Why did you write Lolita?"] "Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like the composing riddles with elegant solutions" (1962)

p.20-2: "No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle - its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look....There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet." (1964)

I must still find the other reference about Lolita as a plain, common little girl and Emma Bovary. There are so many other things to correct! For one, the dentist I called Dr.Ivory is not Quilty's brother, and his name is Dr. Ivor, not Ivory. There are my regular spelling mistakes and misplaced prepositions.

While I was searching for "Melmoth" (trying to find a link with insects that twang against the netting) I separated an article which I haven't yet had the pleasure to take up and read: it's "Baudelaire, Melmoth, and Laughter" [..."Humbert Humbert refers to his car as a "Dream Blue MelmotrT (Annotated Lolita, 227). Near the end of the novel, Humbert draws further attention to the name of this car by parenthetically saying hello to it from the text:..."] by David Rutledge (THE NABOKOVIAN, Number 60 Spring 2008).

There's Bruce Stone's indication that he's arrived "at the latter conclusion--that Humbert has killed an innocent man--in my paper "Editorial In(ter)ference: Errata and Aporia in Lolita," which is available online in Miranda."

There's a lot of work lying ahead and the promptings from the List are often unsettling and inspiring (such as Stadlen's correction of who wrote the "sense of moral ...mortal beauty..." for the lines are by Nabokov, not HH's, confirmed by Alfred Appel's note).