Lolita

• 1. Introduction

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  Lolita is a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and the girl at its centre is almost never allowed to answer to her own name. She is Dolores Haze, and she is 12 years old when the story begins. The narrator is a French literature professor who writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He labels her a "nymphet" and privately renames her Lolita. Nabokov, a Russian and American novelist, wrote the book in English, which was not his first language.

  How did a novel told by the man who victimizes Dolores end up on lists of the best books ever written? Why does a story named for a girl give her so little room to speak? And why do readers still argue about whether the man telling it can be trusted at all?

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• 2. A Memoir for a Jury

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  A foreword by John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books, opens the novel with news of a death. Ray says he is publishing a memoir by a man calling himself Humbert Humbert. The man died of heart disease in jail, awaiting trial for an unspecified crime. The memoir addresses its readers as his jury. Humbert was born in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and a Swiss father, and he grew up on the French Riviera. There he loved a friend named Annabel Leigh. Her death from typhus ended that romance, and in his telling it produced a lasting fixation on girls aged 9 to 14.

  Humbert's profession is French literature, and he edits an academic textbook. He mentions in passing that he has repeatedly stayed in mental institutions. A brief marriage to a woman named Valeria ends when she leaves him for another man.

  In 1947 Humbert arrives in Ramsdale, a small town in New England, hoping for quiet in which to keep working on his book. The house he planned to live in burns down. While searching for another, he meets Charlotte Haze, a widow with a room to let. He means to refuse until she leads him into her garden, where her daughter lies sunbathing. Dolores is also called Dolly, Lo and Lola. To Humbert she is the perfect nymphet and the embodiment of Annabel. He takes the room.

  When Dolores goes to summer camp, Charlotte writes to confess her love and demands that Humbert marry her or leave. He marries her, attracted by the prospect of becoming Dolores's stepfather. Charlotte then finds the diary he kept locked in a nightstand. It reveals his desire for her daughter and his disgust for herself. She writes warning letters to friends and prepares to flee with Dolores. Humbert insists the diary is only a sketch for a novel. Charlotte runs out to post her letters and is struck and killed by a swerving car. The inebriated driver pays for her funeral.

  Humbert destroys the letters, collects Dolores from camp and tells her that her mother is in hospital. At a high-end hotel he tricks her into swallowing a sedative by calling it a vitamin. A stranger in the hotel seems to know exactly what Humbert intends. The pill turns out to be milder than he hoped. The next morning Dolores tells him about sexual activity with an older boy at camp, and Humbert begins sexually abusing her. Only afterward does he admit that her mother is dead.

  The two drive across the country, sleeping in motels, and Dolores often cries at night. Humbert bribes her to keep her interested in travel and in him. They finally settle in Beardsley, another small New England town, where he enrolls her in a private girls' school. He forbids dates and parties. Only at the urging of the school headmaster does he allow her to join the school play. The day before the premiere, Dolores runs from the house after accusing him of murdering her mother. He finds her at a drugstore with an ice cream soda. She asks to leave town on another road trip.

  On that second journey Humbert becomes certain that someone Dolores knows is following them. In the Colorado mountains she falls ill, and he checks her into a hospital. One night a man calling himself her uncle takes her away. Humbert knows she has no living relatives. His frantic search fails, and for two years he drifts through a relationship with a young alcoholic named Rita.

  Then a letter arrives from Dolores, now 17. She is married, pregnant and desperate for money. Humbert tracks her down with a pistol in hand. At her request he poses as her estranged father in front of her husband, Richard. She tells him that her abductor was the famous playwright Clare Quilty. She had loved him, and he threw her out when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films. Humbert pays her the money from her inheritance, and she refuses to leave with him. He then drives to the mansion of the drug-addled Quilty and shoots him dead.

  Humbert is arrested soon afterward. He claims that in Dolores's presence he realized he had loved her all along, and he repeats the claim in his closing thoughts. He asks that his memoir stay sealed until she has died. Ray's foreword has already told the reader that Humbert died shortly after his imprisonment, and that Dolores died in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952.

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• 3. Humbert's Dazzling Prose

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  The word nymphet, coined for Humbert's chosen girls, now sits in most dictionaries, while its lesser-used cousin faunlet has had a quieter career. Humbert fills his narration with double entendres, multilingual puns and anagrams, along with wry observations of American culture. Critics argue that this glitter is exactly how he wins readers over.

  Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, calls Humbert a "monster of incuriosity". Humbert, he writes, is "exquisitely sensitive to everything which affects or provides expression for his own obsession." He is also "entirely incurious about anything that affects anyone else."

  Nabokov disliked social satire, novels with political messages and writers he considered moralists, and he rarely explained his own work. In 1967, however, an interviewer said that men of forty and girls barely older than Lolita draw only public cooing in Hollywood and New York. Nabokov rejected the comparison. Humbert, he said, was fond of "little girls" and not merely young ones. Nymphets are girl-children, he said, not starlets. The sense of immorality belongs to Humbert and not to the author: "He cares, I do not." Nabokov called Humbert a vain and cruel wretch who can still appear touching. Asked about the doubled name, he called it "a hateful name for a hateful person." He added that it is also a kingly name, and that Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble needed a royal vibration.

  The Great Soviet Encyclopedia described the book as "an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners". Facts on File: Companion to the American Short Story also calls it an erotic novel, as does Michael Perkins in The Secret Record. Other critics push back. Malcolm Bradbury says it was first famous as an erotic novel and then won its way as a literary one. Lance Olsen counts only the first 13 chapters as suggestive of the erotic. Nabokov noted in his afterword that some readers expected a rising succession of erotic scenes. When those stopped, he wrote, "the readers stopped, too, and felt bored."

  Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism Koba the Dread, reads the whole book as a metaphor. He sees it as a story of the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood. Nabokov insists in his afterword that he detests symbols and allegories. Amis answers that Nabokov writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, and concludes: "Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny."

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• 4. The Girl Behind the Name

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  Nomi Tamir-Ghez observes that Dolores's point of view "is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader." Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar likewise argue that the novel silences and objectifies her. Christine Clegg notes that this was a recurring theme in criticism of the 1990s. Clegg links the silence to the name. Her real name is Dolores, and only Humbert calls her Lolita. Eric Lemay goes further: "Lolita" was always the creation of Humbert's craven self, and to make Dolores into Lolita, Humbert "must deny her her humanity."

  Azar Nafisi, an Iranian expatriate, published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003. It describes a covert women's reading group. In an NPR interview she pointed out that Dolores comes from the Latin word for dolour. "Her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence," she said. Lolita, by contrast, sounds light-headed and seductive. The interviewer, Madeleine Brand, listed Britney Spears, the Olsen twins and Sue Lyon in Kubrick's film as embodiments of that lighter side. For Nafisi, the heart of the book is Humbert's erasure of the girl. Yet she writes that the past he tries to rob from her "is still given to us in glimpses."

  Lionel Trilling, one of the novel's early champions, warned in 1958 about the moral trap of so eloquent a narrator. He wrote that readers "have been seduced into conniving in the violation." Their own fantasies, he said, accepted what they knew to be revolting. Other early voices read the girl harshly. In 1958 Dorothy Parker described her as "a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered." In 1959 the novelist Robertson Davies wrote that the theme was not the corruption of an innocent child. He saw instead the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.

  Near the end of the book, Humbert says that as his own judge he "would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape." Nafisi also calls him a rapist. Elizabeth Patnoe, surveying the critics, found that many interpreters resist the word. Others who use it, she notes, go on to weaken the claim by confusing love with rape. Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd denies that it was rape "in any ordinary sense," because Dolores herself proposes the trick she learned at camp. Peter Rabinowitz sharply disputes that view. He argues that academic readers treating the book as high art stand back from the situation. The result, he says, is a blame-the-victim reading that turns a victimized child into a femme fatale. His essay carries a title that poses the dilemma as a question: "Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?"

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• 5. The Unreliable Narrator

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  The critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term "unreliable narrator" for a storyteller whose ethical norms differ from those of the implied author. Nearly all commentators regard Humbert as unreliable, though they disagree about how. Some set Booth's definition aside and call Humbert unreliable simply because his character and motives are dishonest.

  Booth sees the novel's central appeal as "watching Humbert almost make a case for himself." Nabokov gives Humbert "full and unlimited control of the rhetorical resources." Skilful and mature readers, Booth trusts, will reject Humbert's blandishments and pick up Nabokov's ironies and clues. Many other readers, he warns, will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends.

  James Phelan, building on Booth, separates two techniques. "Estranging unreliability" widens the gap between narrator and audience, while "bonding unreliability" narrows it. Phelan argues that Nabokov first marks the narration with many signs of bonding and only later reveals it as estranging. The effect is to draw the hypothetical audience the author writes for toward Humbert, and then pull them away. Phelan concludes that this produces two misreadings. Some readers are taken in and miss the signs of estrangement. Others decode the estrangement and decide that every word Humbert says is false.

  William Riggan places Humbert in a tradition of fools and clowns. By Riggan's reading, Humbert casts himself as "a combination of urbane satirist, brutish satyr, and sadly gleeful Harlequin." He caricatures Lolita as commonplace, and he also idealizes her into a figure unlike the real girl.

  Some critics treat the book's chronological slips as deliberate. Christina Tekiner takes them as evidence that the last nine chapters are a product of Humbert's imagination. Leona Toker thinks the crafty handling of dates exposes his "cognitive unreliability." Brian Boyd offers the plainest explanation, that the discrepancies are simply Nabokov's errors.

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• 6. Banned and Bestselling

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  On the 6th of December 1953, five years after he began, Nabokov finished Lolita. Because of its subject, he planned to publish it pseudonymously, though the anagrammatic character Vivian Darkbloom would tip off an alert reader. Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus and Doubleday all turned the manuscript down, some with more regret than others. Through his translator Doussia Ergaz, it reached Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press in France. Much of Girodias's list, by one account three-quarters of it, was "pornographic trash." Nabokov's friend Morris Bishop at Cornell warned him against the deal. Nabokov signed anyway, under his own name.

  The book appeared in September 1955 as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors". The first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, yet no substantial reviews appeared. At the very end of 1955, Graham Greene named it in the London Sunday Times as one of the three best books of 1955. John Gordon, editor of the London Sunday Express, answered by calling it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." The Home Office told British Customs officers to seize every copy entering the country. In December 1956 France's Minister of the Interior banned it, and that ban lasted two years. Weidenfeld & Nicolson published it in London in 1959. The controversy helped end the political career of Nigel Nicolson, a Conservative member of parliament and one of the firm's partners.

  Danish and Dutch translations followed, and two editions of a Swedish translation were withdrawn at the author's request. In the United States no official response came, and G. P. Putnam's Sons issued the first American edition in August 1958. It reached a third printing within days. It was the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. A month later the Cincinnati Public Library banned it for "the theme of perversion." Orville Prescott of the New York Times called it "dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion." His review did not dent sales, and by 2005 Lolita is estimated to have sold 50 million copies.

  Time's list of the 100 best novels includes the book. So do Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels and The Big Read. Nabokov himself translated it into Russian, and Phaedra Publishers issued that version in New York City in 1967.

  Besides the United Kingdom and France, the book has been banned in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Myanmar and parts of the United States. In October 2023 the Canby School District banned it from its schools. The next month the Catawba County Schools Board of Education required students to obtain a parent's permission before reading it.

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• 7. Echoes and Sources

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  In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson about a short novel concerning a man who liked little girls. He planned to call it The Kingdom by the Sea. Over the next eight years it grew into Lolita. The theme had older roots in his work. His 1939 novella Volshebnik was published only after his death, and appeared in English as The Enchanter in 1986. Its protagonist cannot consummate his passion for his stepdaughter, and he kills himself. In the 1935-37 Russian novel The Gift, a landlord named Shchyogolev sketches a similar plot to the hero, Fyodor Cherdyntsev. In Pale Fire, a poem mentions a Hurricane Lolita in 1958. No such hurricane existed, but 1958 was the year Lolita appeared in North America.

  Edgar Allan Poe hangs over the book. Humbert's first love is named Annabel Leigh after the maiden of Poe's poem "Annabel Lee," and the opening reworks lines from it. Nabokov even considered titling the novel The Kingdom by the Sea to echo the poem's first verse. Poe's tale "William Wilson," about a man haunted by his double, shadows Humbert's own double, Clare Quilty. Alfred Appel Jr. catalogued virtually every allusion in The Annotated Lolita.

  Real people may have shaped the book too. Alexander Dolinin suggests that its prototype was Florence Horner, who was 11 when a 50-year-old mechanic named Frank La Salle kidnapped her in 1948. He had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. For 21 months he traveled with her through several states and is believed to have raped her. Humbert himself mentions the case in Chapter 33 of Part II, calling the girl Sally Horner. Others point to Lewis Carroll, whom Nabokov called the "first Humbert Humbert," and to Charlie Chaplin and his second wife, Lita Grey.

  The German academic Michael Maar found a 1916 short story called "Lolita" by Heinz von Lichberg, in which a middle-aged lodger becomes obsessed with a girl of that name. Maar speculated that Nabokov, who lived in the same part of Berlin until 1937, may have absorbed it unconsciously. He did not call it plagiarism. Nothing that readers admire in Nabokov's novel, he said, can be deduced from the tale.

  Nabokov offered his own origin story in a 1956 afterword. The first shiver of inspiration, he wrote, came from a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des plantes. After months of coaxing, it produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal. The sketch showed the bars of its cage. Neither the article nor the drawing has been found. In the postscript to the Russian edition he mourned his native language. The gate he imagined it waiting behind was empty, he wrote, and the key in his hand "looks rather like a lock pick."

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, though Kubrick and James Harris rewrote most of it without taking credit. The film raised Lolita's age to 14 and greatly expanded the part of Quilty. Nelson Riddle wrote the music, and the soundtrack produced the hit single "Lolita Ya Ya." Adrian Lyne's 1997 version starred Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith and Frank Langella.

  On stage, the 1971 musical Lolita, My Love by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry closed before it reached New York. Edward Albee's 1981 play renamed Nabokov onstage as "A Certain Gentleman" after a threatened lawsuit, and the production became a fiasco. In 1992 Rodion Shchedrin composed a Russian-language opera that premiered in Swedish at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1994. John Harbison began another in 1999. He abandoned it after the clergy child abuse scandal in Boston, leaving only the seven-minute "Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera." In 2009 Richard Nelson put only Humbert onstage in a jail cell, with Brian Cox in the role. Cox said the book is "not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It's Lolita as a memory."

  Writers answered the novel almost at once. In 1959 Umberto Eco published "Granita," whose narrator, Umberto Umberto, pursues an elderly woman. Jean Kerr sent Lolita and Humbert to a marriage counselor in a parody of a Ladies' Home Journal column. Kim Morrissey's 1992 Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita gives the girl a voice. In Lolita Unclothed, Morrissey complains that in the novel she has "no voice". Pia Pera's 1995 Diario di Lo retells the story from Lolita's side. Nabokov's son sued to halt the English translation, and a settlement later allowed it. Kate Elizabeth Russell's 2020 debut My Dark Vanessa carries a dedication. It is to "the real-life Dolores Hazes and Vanessa Wyes whose stories have not yet been heard, believed, or understood."

  The debate has not cooled. A 2008 volume, Approaches to Teaching Nabokov's Lolita, was devoted to the problem of presenting the novel in college classrooms. In 2015 Joanne Harris wrote in The Independent that the book contains not a single explicit phrase. In 2020 a podcast hosted by Jamie Loftus argued that adaptations have twisted Nabokov's intention to condemn Humbert.

  The name itself escaped the book. "Lolita" came to describe a girl who is "precociously seductive" without any sense of victimization, and in Japan in the early 1980s the novel gave rise to lolicon, a genre of fictional media. Nabokov told Life that he was probably responsible for the odd fact that people no longer seem to name their daughters Lolita. He had heard of young female poodles given the name since 1956, he said, but of no human beings.

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