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Lolita ( 1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1957 in New York. The novel is both internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book's narrator and protagonist, Humbert Humbert, becoming sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.

Contents 1 Specifications 2 Background 3 Plot summary 4 Sources and links 4.1 Links in Nabokov's work 4.2 Allusions/references to other works 5 Film, TV or theatrical adaptations 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Specifications

• Author = Vladimir Nabokov
• Cover illustrator =
• Series =
• Genre = Tragicomedy, novel
• Publisher = Olympia Press, G. P. Putnam's, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Fawcett, Transworld (Corgi), Phaedra
• Country = Russia/USA
• Publication Date = 1955
• Nature of Rarity =
• Number in Existence =
• Estimated Value =

[edit] Background

After its publication, Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious young girl. The novel has been adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert, with Sue Lyon as Lolita, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, and Dominique Swain as Lolita.

[edit] Plot summary

Lolita is a novel narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literature scholar born in 1910 in Paris, France, who is obsessed by what he refers to as ' nymphets' (defined as sexually desirable girls between the ages of nine and 14). This obsession with young girls appears to have been a result of his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, before her premature death from typhus. Shortly before the start of World War II, Humbert leaves Paris for New York. In 1947 he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. When the house in which he is promised a room burns down, he ends up at the door of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who has a sexually charged interpretation of taking in a lodger. As the two make their way through Mrs. Haze's tour of the house, Humbert rehearses different ways of turning her down, but then, after being led out into the garden, he spies Haze's 12-year-old daughter Dolores (variously referred to in the novel as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, L) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, seeing the Annabel Leigh in her, is instantly smitten with the daughter and eagerly agrees to rent the room.

Charlotte becomes his unwitting pawn in his quest to make Lolita a part of his living fantasy. When Mrs. Haze drives Lolita off to summer 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. He is absolutely horrified at first, but after much contemplation he warms himself to the idea of living with Charlotte for the sole reason of making Lolita his stepdaughter, intending to use heavy sedatives on both her and her mother so he can express his sexual desire on Lolita in her sleep. Although we never learn specifically what he plans to do, he does say he wishes to keep her purity intact. Humbert marries Charlotte and they live a domestic lifestyle, with Charlotte completely oblivious to his distaste for her.

Humbert starts to write a diary in which he records his life in Ramsdale and, more specifically, his relationship with Lolita. He locks the diary in a drawer. While Lolita is away at camp and Humbert has gone into town, Charlotte opens the drawer and finds his diary, which details his lack of interest in her and impassioned lust for her daughter. Horrified and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with her daughter. Before doing so, she writes three letters -- to Humbert, Lolita and a strict boarding school for young ladies to which she apparently intends to send her daughter. Charlotte confronts Humbert when he returns home. Retreating to the kitchen, he tells her that the diary entries are just notes for a novel. But Charlotte has already bolted from the house to post the letters. Crossing the street, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them.

Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, telling her that her mother is desperately ill in a hospital, and takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel of regional repute, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert intends to use the sleeping pills on Lolita, but they have little effect. Instead, she seduces Humbert (the first of only two times she is recorded as doing so), and he discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had had a sexual affair at summer camp. After leaving the hotel, Humbert tells the now-troublesome Lolita that her mother is dead. Alone and frightened, Lolita has no choice but to accept Humbert into her life on his terms.

Driving Lolita around the country in Charlotte's car, moving from state to state and motel to motel, Humbert bribes the girl for sexual favours; he falls genuinely in love with her, but is conscious that she is not attracted to him and shares none of his interests. She is, in fact, a very crass and ordinary adolescent, who merely puts up with him and is not above manipulating him sexually when she can. Eventually, the two settle down in another New England town, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father and Lolita enrolled in a private girls' school where the headmistress views Humbert's possessive supervision as that of a strict, old-world Europe an parent.

Humbert nevertheless is persuaded to allow Lolita to take part in a school theatrical club (extracting additional sexual favours from her in exchange for his permission). Ominously, the title of the play -- The Enchanted Hunters -- is identical to the name of the hotel where they technically became lovers. Lolita is enthusiastic about the play and is said to have impressed the playwright, who attended a rehearsal, but before opening night she and Humbert have a ferocious argument, and she bolts from the house. Found by Humbert a few minutes later, Lolita declares that she wants to immediately leave town and resume their travels. Humbert is delighted, but increasingly guarded as they again drive westward, nagged by a feeling that they are being followed and that Lolita knows who the follower is. He is right. Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's, the nephew of the local dentist in Ramsdale, and the author of the play being performed at Lolita's school, is himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer. He is tailing the couple in accordance with a secret plan of escape devised with Lolita. While Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, Lolita becomes ill and recuperates in a nearby hospital. One night she checks out with her "uncle", who has paid the hospital bill. Humbert, still clueless as to the identity of Lolita's "abductor", makes farcical and frantic attempts to find them by inspecting various motel-register aliases which have been laced by Quilty with insults and jokes flavored with literary allusions.

During this period, Humbert has a chaotic, two-year love-affair with a petite alcoholic named Rita who, at 30, is 10 years younger than him and a passable physical substitute for Lolita. By 1952, Humbert has settled down as a scholar at a small academic institute. One day, he receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant and in desperate need of funds. Armed with a gun, Humbert, still driving Charlotte's car, visits his young obsession and turns over to her the money she was due from her mother's estate. He also asks her to leave with him, but she refuses. During their conversation, Lolita explains that her husband, a nearly deaf war-veteran and the father of her unborn child, was not her abductor, whereupon Humbert offers to give her all the money he has if she will reveal the man's identity. Lolita complies, saying that she had really loved Clare Quilty, but that he threw her out after she refused to perform in a pornographic film he was making.

Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert surprises Quilty at his mansion. Quilty goes mad when he sees Humbert's gun. After a mutually exhausting struggle for it, Quilty, now insane with fear, merely responds politely as Humbert repeatedly shoots him. He finally dies with a comical lack of interest, expressing his slight concern in an affected English accent. Humbert is left exhausted and disoriented. Arrested for murder, he writes the book he entitles Lolita or, The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. He is thus unaware that Lolita dies, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, 1952.

[edit] Sources and links

[edit] Links in Nabokov's work

In 1939, Nabokov wrote a novella Volshebnik (Волшебник) that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The Enchanter. It can be seen as an early version of Lolita but with significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of ephebophilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story A Nursery Tale, written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 Laughter in the Dark, Margot Peters is 16 and already had an affair when middle-aged Albinus is attracted to her.

In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–1937) the similar gist of Lolita's first chapter is outlined to the protagonist Fyodor Cherdyntsev by his obnoxious landlord Shchegolev as an idea of a novel he would write "if I only had the time": a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who however resists all his passes. Schegolev says it happened "in reality" to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (fifteen at the time of marriage) who becomes the love of Fyodor's life and his wife.

In April 1947 Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls – and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea..."^[1] The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight years. Nabokov used the title A Kingdom by the Sea in his 1974 pseudo-autobiographic novel Look at the Harlequins! for a Lolita-like book written by the narrator who, in addition, travels with his teenage daughter Bel from motel to motel after the death of her mother; later, his fourth wife is Bel's look-alike and shares her birthday.

[edit] Allusions/references to other works

• Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the woman in the poem " Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem. Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea,^[2] drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work. The part of the beginning of chapter one -- "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns" -- is also a reference to the poem. ("With a love that the winged seraphs in heaven / Coveted her and me".)

• Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym.

• Humbert Humbert's field of expertise is French literature (one of his jobs is writing a series of educational works that compare French writers to English writers), and as such there are several references to French literature, including the authors Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mérimée, Remy Belleau and Pierre de Ronsard.

• In chapter 17 of Part I, Humbert quotes "to hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

• In chapter 35 of Part II, Humbert's " death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot' poem Ash Wednesday.

• The line "I cannot get out, said the starling" from Humbert's poem is taken from a passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "The Passport, the Hotel De Paris".

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

• Lolita has been filmed twice: the first adaptation was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and, as Lolita, Sue Lyon; and a second adaptation in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the earlier film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen. The more recent version was given mixed reviews by critics. It was delayed for over a year because of its controversial subject matter, and was not released in Australia until 1999.

• Nabokov's own version of the screenplay (dated Summer 1960 and revised December 1973) for Kubrick's film was published by McGraw-Hill in 1974.

• The book was adapted into a musical in 1971 by librettist/ lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer John Barry under the title Lolita, My Love. Critics were surprised at how sensitively the story was translated to the stage, but the show nonetheless closed on the road before it opened in New York.^[3]

• In 1982, Edward Albee adapted the book into a non-musical play. It was savaged by critics, Frank Rich notably attributing the temporary death of Albee's career to it.

• In 2003, Russian director Victor Sobchak wrote a second non-musical stage adaptation, which played in England at the Lion and Unicorn Fringe Theater in London. It drops the character of Quilty and updates the story to modern England.^[4]

• The novel Lo's Diary by Pia Pera retells the novel from Lolita's point of view, making major plot changes on the premise that Humbert's version is incorrect on many points. Lolita is characterized as being herself quite sadistic and manipulative. ^[5]

• The poetry collection Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita by Kim Morrissey takes the form of a series of poems written by Lolita herself reflecting on the events in the story, a sort of diary in poetry form. In strong contrast to Pera's novel, Morrissey portrays Lolita as an innocent, wounded soul. Morrissey had earlier done a stage adaptation of Sigmund Freud's famous Dora case.^[6]

• R. Schedrin adapted Lolita into a Russian language opera which premiered in Moscow in 2006 and was published that same year. It had a much earlier performance in Sweden in 1992. It was nominated for Russia's Golden Mask award.^[7]

• The Boston-based composer John Harbison began an opera of Lolita which he abandoned in the wake of the clergy child-abuse scandal that rocked Boston. Fragments of what he had done were woven into seven-minute piece "Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera". Vivian Darkbloom is a character in Lolita.^[8]

• Steve Martin wrote a short story entitled "Lolita at Fifty" (included in his collection Pure Drivel), which is a gently humorous look at how Dolores Haze's life might have turned out had she survived the events of the novel.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Nabokov Library
• Appel, Alfred Jr. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (revised ed.). New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-72729-9. . One of the best guides to the complexities of Lolita. First published by McGraw-Hill in 1970. (Nabokov was able to comment on Appel's earliest annotations, creating a situation which Appel described as being like John Shade revising Charles Kinbote's comments on Shade's poem Pale Fire. Oddly enough, this is exactly the situation Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd proposed to resolve the literary complexities of Pale Fire.)
• Levine, Peter (1967). "Lolita and Aristotle's Ethics" in Philosophy and Literature Volume 19, Number 1, April 1995, pp. 32–47.
• Nabokov, Vladimir (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0-679-72316-1. The original novel.

[edit] External links

• NPR: "50 Years Later, Lolita Still Seduces Readers"
• Stanford Magazine: "The Lolita Question"
• Slate (magazine): "Lolita at 50 - Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking?"
• Photos of the first edition of Lolita
• Lolita USA: The itineraries of Humbert's and Lolita's two voyages across the U.S.A. 1947–1949, with maps and pictures.
• Lolita Calendar—A detailed and referenced inner chronology of Nabokov's novel.
• Zembla—A resource of the Arts & Humanities Library of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, home of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and its publication The Nabokovian.