When a child’s parents die he/she necessarily inherits a percentage of the patrimony in my country: no lawful offspring can be deprived of a share in an inheritance when there is something material to inherit.

Are matters different in America? Following the progression of Lolita’s travels away from her home and HH’s menaces that she’ll be left under state care if she divulges the violence she is suffering in his hands we find her being totally dependent on her stepfather who became the sole inheritor of house, furniture, pensions, even of her father’s ashes. When she writes him to ask for money, HH separates a generous sum to offer her as a gift as if, after the death of her mother, she had stopped to have any unalienable right to personal objects and history. Didn’t Charlotte Haze get a pension or an insurance after her husband died? (She was mainly a housekeeper, or not?). I cannot remember references to death taxes, inventories, documentation, whatever*. Her destiny is quite similar to V.Nabokov’s when forced to leave Russia.

I lack the necessary legal vocabulary to better direct my questions. Her “homelessness” was not only a consequence of HH’s perverse actions but it also resulted from a specific kind of social organization?  

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*Humbert mentions letter-exchanges with a lawyer in Ramsdale: were these sufficient to deal with all the paperwork required in her situation?