The most enjoyable edition of Lolita on the market. Brilliant! Sad to see him go. He was a worthy guide through a great book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?hpw=&pagewanted=printMay 7, 2009
Alfred Appel Jr., Expert on Nabokov and Author, Dies at 75
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Alfred Appel Jr., a scholarly expert on Vladimir Nabokov, whose lecture course he attended at Cornell, and the author of wide-ranging interpretive books on modern art and jazz, died on Sunday in Evanston, Ill. He was 75 and lived in Wilmette, Ill.
The cause was heart failure, said his son, Richard.
One of the first academic Nabokovians, Mr. Appel (pronounced a-PELL) turned the extraordinary experience of attending Nabokov’s lectures on literature into a scholarly cottage industry of articles, books and an essay collection. In “The Annotated Lolita,” first published in 1970 and reissued in a revised edition in 1991, he explicated, virtually line-by-line, the myriad allusions, multilingual puns and sly jokes in Nabokov’s most famous novel. “Nabokov’s Dark Cinema” (1974) explored the influence of cinematic scenes and techniques on Nabokov’s fiction.
Mr. Appel later turned his attention to modern art in all forms but most importantly jazz, in several sweeping cultural studies. The best known of these was “Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce” (2002), an attempt to place jazz in the larger context of the modern movement in 20th-century art.
Mr. Appel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Great Neck, on Long Island.
He enrolled at Cornell but after serving in the Army (and buying a copy of “Lolita” in France, where he was stationed), he transferred to Columbia University. He earned a doctorate in English literature in 1963, writing his dissertation on Eudora Welty. He taught at Columbia for several years, then accepted a position at Northwestern University in 1968 and remained there until retiring in 2000.
...
Speaking at a memorial service for Nabokov in Manhattan in 1977, Mr. Appel recalled telling him about an antiwar protest at Northwestern during which a student had called Mr. Appel a eunuch. Nabokov said quickly, “Oh no, Alfred, you misunderstood him. He called you a unique.”
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