meaning - Confusion within Nabokov's Lolita



In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, right at the end of the 10th chapter, there is the following line that managed to perplex me:



[T]he vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that ''princedom by the sea'' in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them.



Now, it's the last sentence in this fragment that bewilders me. What did Nabokov (or Humbert, for that matter) want to say with this construction? That everything the two events (the encountering of a young girl in a princedom by the sea in his youth, and the stumbling upon Lolita now) shared brought them together and merged them into one? Or that everything that sprawled between these two extremes contributed to the making of one of them? I confess, this phrase confuses me, and this book frustrates me. What does it actually mean?



Answer



This sentence is already awkward, regardless of what meaning we might ascribe to it. The correct contemporary English phrase would have been "made them one." This awkwardness suggests to me that the sentence was simply a mistranslation. English was not Nabokov's native language, so it's not unlikely.


The Russian version reads:



Все, что было общего между этими двумя существами, делало их единым для меня.



Which literally means:



Everything that was in common between these two creatures made them one to me.



I think this resolves the ambiguity. Nabokov is referring to the two people Humbert is thinking about. Humbert is conflating the two of them in his mind.


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