I must apologise, because I am not clear what was contributed by Dieter Zimmer and what by Jansy Mello. That 52 is the periodic number of Tellurium is just too good to be a meaningless "coincidence", isn't it? I think this is Jansy Mello's contribution, in which case many congratulations to her! And might I point out that, although as Dieter Zimmer says, "Nabokov went to Telluride in the summer of 1951 expressly to find that special little blue butterfly", it was on 8 August 1952 that he published his discovery (in The Lepidopterists' News, Vol. 6, pp. 33-36)?

Jansy Mello adds: "(and it bothers me enormously having to admit that this episode represents the author's rendering of HH's epiphany)". Am I being presumptuous in thinking she may be bothered for the reason I gave the other day, that it is embarrassing if Nabokov -- and not merely Humbert -- claims a "moral apotheosis" (contributed to by the sounds on the mountain trail) following which Humbert loves Lolita "as a woman should be loved", although as he is her stepfather this would just be another variety of incest, with Dick as "incidental" and disposable, not to mention the little matter of the murder Humbert rushes straight off to commit?

Of course, I agree with Bruce Stone (with whom I was trying to be cordial, but emphatic in my anxiety lest my literal reading of "56 days ago" be swept aside without due consideration) when he implies that the nonsense about adding the car numbers to make 52 seems tedious and silly. But that was my point. Why on earth would Appel propose this nonsense unless Nabokov was putting him up to it, and pointing to a more serious (in so far as anything in this maddening and un-put-downable writer's writings is serious) sense in which 52 is significant (known only to the author, as Appel informs us!)?

I remember how impressed I was by Diana Butler's article "Lolita Lepidoptera" in New World Writing (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 16, 1960, pp. 58-84), when I came across it by chance in the London University Senate House in 1961 or 1962, only two or three years after first reading Lolita. That at least one level of Nabokov's book should be making fun of Freud by treating sexual abuse of a young girl as a disguised symbol of enchanted butterfly-hunting, rather than the reverse, struck me as immediately plausible. Nabokov remarked that Diana Butler didn't know much about butterflies, which was no doubt true as he said so, but beside the point of whether her fundamental interpretation is correct, upon which I do not know whether he ever pronounced.

Diana Butler saw Humbert's guilt -- in so far as he felt it -- at having destroyed Lolita's childhood as symbolising Nabokov's guilt at taking the life of his "little butterfly". In the one visit I was privileged to make to Dmitri Nabokov in Montreux, one thing I asked him was whether his father did, in fact, feel guilt about taking the life of a butterfly. To the best of my recollection, Dmitri replied to the effect that his father did not play down the gravity of taking a life but felt justified by the fact that the butterfly was anaesthetised before being killed and, of course, by the fact that this was a contribution to science.

Anthony Stadlen

Anthony Stadlen
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In a message dated 18/03/2012 02:20:08 GMT Standard Time, jansy@AETERN.US writes:

A Chronology of Lolita by Dieter E. Zimmer March 3, 2008

Lolita, USA - Trip Two

www.dezimmer.net/LolitaUSA/Trip2.htm

"...A detailed inner chronology of 'Lolita' is largely a matter of inference. There are few explicit exact dates in Humbert's account, but there are a number of relative ones, and there are time spans. Some of them are only approximate or plainly wrong. Yet the novel's temporal order is absolutely sound. In fact it is so sound that it is tempting to take the few inconsistencies one can find not as the authorial lapses they could well be but as deliberate. This temporal order can be deduced by checking Humbert's casual remarks on dates and durations against a perpetual calendar. .."

"...End of September to mid-November: Facing his trial, Humbert writes Lolita, first in a psychiatric ward, then in jail (p.308). In the third to last paragraph he says that he started to write Lolita "fifty-six days ago" (p.308). As he probably died right after finishing his memoir, he must have written this on the day of his death, that is on November 16. Counting back 56 days brings us to September 21, the day before he received Lolita's letter. If he had begun writing the day after his arrest on September 26, he would have had only 51 days at his disposal. Several critics have understood this to imply that he never went to Coalmont but instead began penning his memoir, at home or in a psychiatric clinic or in jail or anywhere − and that hence all the events after September 21 must be fictional in the second degree, an invention inside the invention. However, considering Humbert's demonstrated laxness in summing up time, it would seem much more parsimonious to take his "56 days" as simply one of several similar mistakes he makes." ***

*** I don’t care to open up another revisionist front, but it does seem to me that the real temporal problem of the novel is a more basic one than the missing five days (or three, as some contend). The problem is that it is very unlikely Humbert could have written his memoir in so short a time, whether it was 51 or 56 days. It is even more unlikely in view of the fact that for Humbert it was hardly a time of leisure. ...It took Nabokov almost three years of hard work to write the book and he was surely aware that he was imposing an impossible task on Humbert when he made him write it about forty times as fast... I personally find it tempting to believe that he "really" is "in legal captivity" and that he "really" didn’t have more than 51 days to complete his book, but that most of it had been written before his arrest, during the three years after Lolita’s disappearance. In this case all he had to do in prison was to go over the whole of it once more..."

.............................................................................................................................................................................

btw: This is certainly a coincidence worth noting: 52 is the atomic number of "Tellurium".

D.Zimmer writes: "In his 1956 postcript to Lolita, Nabokov described as one of the nerves of the novel "the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I could the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov)." This identifies Telluride, Colorado as the place of Humbert's final epiphany. Nabokov went to Telluride in the summer of 1951 expressly to find that special little blue butterfly."

(and it bothers me enormously having to admit that this episode represents the author's rendering of HH's epiphany )

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