Former posting by  JM: quoting an interview with Jorio Dauster:  “ With Nabokov it was literary love at first sight... through words and images he leads the reader to inquire himself , for example, about the color of the shadow of an apple…” [  ]  is it a direct quote, and then, where can it be found?

Jansy Mello:  Our attentive ED, Steve Blackwell, located what might have been the source of Jorio Dauster’s recollection: it derives from “Pnin”.

"Victor already distinguished what so many adults never learn to see--the colours of
shadows, the difference in tint between the shadow of an orange and that of a plum or of an
avocado pear." (A few pages into chapter 4).

SB added: “It's funny, apples seem to be the archetypal fruit, at least in the West.  Although no fruit name is mentioned in Genesis, it's been thought to be an apple since at least John Milton.  (Nabokov calls Dolly's apple "Eden-red", remember?)  It seems that when the vague idea "fruit", or the memory of some sitting fruits, comes to mind, apples tend to fill in the blanks!”

During my exploring I found another lovely sentence mentioning an apple and I couldn’t resist the impulse to share it with the VN-L (sentences that have the quality of a painting must be revisited from time to time):

"A village girl was eating an apple and her black shadow on the fence was eating a slightly larger apple." The Defense

SIGHTING: Theo Hobson: Milton’s vision: the Birth of Christian Liberty

“Blake learned from Milton to apply his prophetic style to the immanent Fall, the gulf between our best and worst attitudes. And I also see a (less direct) parallel in Nabokov’s novel Lolita. For it forces us to confront the adult’s exile from natural goodness, as well as childhood innocence, and out terrible attraction to witty evil. The voice of Humbert Humbert seduces its style-loving readers, makes Eves of them. // Humbert’s resemblance to Satan is foregrounded at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen. The narrator comes downstairs in his pyjamas and dressing-gown and finds his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter bunking church[  ]. The scene is peppered with references to Paradise Lost. We are meant to associate our witty narrator with the Prince of Darkness himself. There are some rather obvious hints, including the fact that the tussle begins over the ‘Eden-red apple’  Lolita is eating [   ] He also tells us that his surreptitious act of self-gratification sets ‘all paradise loose’. // A subtler reference to Eden comes right at the start of the chapter [   ]The creeping and eavesdropping are quiet allusions to Book Nine of Paradise Lost, in which Satan takes on snakey form in order to spy on Eden… “(Ch. The Epics, p.153)