num_pages: 411
description: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. 2 Volumes. Paris. 1959. Olympia Press. 411 pages... LOLITA is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955 in Paris. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book’s narrator and main character Humbert Humbert becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl, who is aged 12 years when most of the novel takes place. The novel was adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick (Nabokov was involved in the writing) and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. A divorced scholar in his late thirties, Humbert leaves Europe for the United States and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter Dolores (whom her mother affectionately calls ‘Lo’) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, who has had a lifelong passion for ‘nymphets’ (sexually alluring pubescent girls) - as a pre-adolescent, he experienced the loss of his childhood sweetheart to typhus - is instantly smitten, and will do anything to be near her. He immediately dubs the girl with the romantic nickname ‘Lolita,’ although he is the only character in the book to call her this (her friends and teachers refer to her as ‘Dolly’). Charlotte, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert’s unwitting pawn in his silent quest to seduce Lolita. When Mrs. Haze sends Lolita off to camp, she leaves an ultimatum for Humbert saying that he must marry her (for she has fallen madly in love with him) or move out. Humbert marries Charlotte solely to maintain access to Lolita, intending to use heavy sedatives on both of them so he can sexually molest Lolita without fear of discovery. Humbert has a table in their home with a locked drawer. He tells Charlotte that it contains ‘love letters’ and that the key is hidden. While Humbert is out of the house and Lolita is away at camp, Charlotte finds the key and opens the drawer. It contains Humbert’s diary, which details his lack of interest in Charlotte and impassioned lust for her daughter. Horrified, Charlotte decides to flee with Lolita. Before doing so, she writes three letters—to Humbert, Lolita, and a strict boarding school to which she apparently intends to send Lolita. Humbert comes home. Charlotte confronts him and runs from the house with the letters, but is struck and killed by a passing car. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and takes her to a motel, where they have sex for the first of many times. They travel around the United States, moving from one motel to another. Eventually they settle down in a New England town, with Humbert posing as Lolita’s father. Humbert becomes convinced that Lolita is seeing someone else, so they go on the road again. He is sure that they are being followed. He is right: playwright Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of the Hazes, and himself a pedophile and child pornographer, is tailing the couple. Lo runs away with Quilty, while Humbert remains unaware of his identity. Humbert embarks on a long quest to find Lolita and her abductor, whom he intends to kill. During this period Humbert has a ‘normal’ love-affair with an alcoholic named Rita. He eventually receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is now married, pregnant, and in need of money. She asks him to send money to her at the local post office. Humbert tracks down Lolita, who tells him that her husband was not the abductor, and is coaxed by Humbert into revealing that man’s identity. At this point Humbert also learns that Quilty was involved in various forms of pornography, including pornography with children. Lolita maintains that she did not want to be in the films, but merely wanted to be near the man she loved—Quilty. Humbert is visibly shaken upon hearing this news and goes to Quilty’s home. He finds Quilty in a state of madness and a waltz of insanity commences with Quilty mistaking Humbert as an angry father, amongst others. Quilty’s insanity has him eating a cigarette at one moment, running to play the piano the next, whilst naked, and seemingly uninterested in Humbert and his gun. Humbert, although confused, finishes the job; Quilty is dead. Arrested for murder, Humbert writes his memoirs, then dies in prison of coronary thrombosis. Lolita dies in childbirth while giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day 1952. The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel’s flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used ‘faunlet’. Nabokov’s LOLITA is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert’s obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as ‘a vain and cruel wretch’ and ‘a hateful person’ Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European émigré. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of LOLITA in CONTINGENCY, IRONY, AND SOLIDARITY, Humbert is a ‘monster of incuriosity’. Some critics have accepted Humbert’s version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of LOLITA is ‘not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child’. Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov’s powers as an ironist. Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, KOBA THE DREAD, proposes that LOLITA is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood (though Nabokov states in his Afterword that he ‘[detests] symbols and allegories’). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. ‘All of Nabokov’s books are about tyranny,’ he says, ‘even LOLITA. Perhaps LOLITA most of all’. In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN about an illicit women’s reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Although rejecting a too-easy identification of Lolita’s captivity with that of her students (‘. . . we were not LOLITA, the Ayatollah was not Humbert. . . ’) Nafisi writes of her students’ strong emotional connection with the book: ‘what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer’ and ‘like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom’. For Nafisi the essence of the novel is Humbert’s solipsism and his erasure of Lolita’s independent identity. She writes: ‘Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature [. . . ] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [. . . ] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses’. One of the novel’s early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: ‘we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [. . . ] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting’. Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of ‘erotica’ in Paris, which published LOLITA in September 15, 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U.S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
language: English
title: Lolita
titlecomplete: Lolita
characters: Dolores “Lolita” Haze, Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert, Charlotte Haze
genres: Fiction, Russian Literature, 20th Century, Classics, Russia, Adult, Literary Fiction, Romance, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 818576
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: -347126400000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Premios Fervenzas Literarias
category: Traducción 
publisher: Olympia Press