Alfred Appel Jr., a former student of Nabokov and a Nabokovian whose edition of The Annotated Lolita shaped many readers' understanding of that novel, is dead. Appel played a major role in helping to establish the academic study of Nabokov in the 1970s, and he will be greatly missed. Here is his obituary from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?_r=1&hpw