Lolita
| Author: | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| Country | Russia | |
| Language(s) | English, Russian | |
| Publisher | Olympia Press, G. P. Putnam's, McGraw-Hill, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Fawcett, Transworld (Corgi), Phaedra | |
| Released | 1955 | |
| Media Type | Print: hardback & paperback | |
| Pages | 368 pp (recent paperback edition) | |
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1967 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 pre-pubescent twelve-year-old girl named Lolita Haze.
After its publication, the novel attained "classic" status, becoming one of the best known examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious young girl. The novel was adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons.
Plot summary
Humbert Humbert is a Swiss scholar of literature, born in 1910 in Paris, France and raised here by his wealthy, widower father after his young mother is killed by lightning. Humbert is tormented by a passion for what he calls 'nymphets' (sexually desirable pre-adolescent girls), which he believes was caused by his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart, named Annabel, before her premature death from typhus. After a ridiculously failed marriage, he leaves Paris for New York shortly before the start of World War II, during which he writes a textbook of French literature. In 1947 he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. By mischance he rents a room in the home of Charlotte Haze, a widow, but only after first seeing her twelve-year-old daughter Lolita (formally named Dolores) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert is instantly besotted by her, and does anything to be near her, including putting up with her mother, whom he dislikes. Gradually, the living Lolita supplants the memory of his childhood love completely.
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. Humbert chooses the former solely to make Lolita his stepdaughter, intending to use heavy sedatives on both her and her mother so he can molest Lolita in her sleep, his intention being to prevent the corruption of her innocence.
Humbert starts to write a diary recording his life in Ramsdale, and more specifically his relationship with Lolita, which he locks in a drawer of one of Charlotte's tables. While Humbert is in town and Lolita is away at camp, Charlotte manages to open the drawer and finds his diary, which details his lack of interest in Charlotte and impassioned lust for her daughter. Horrified and humiliated, 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 intended 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. Charlotte, meanwhile, leaves the house in order 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 and takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel of regional repute, intending to use the sleeping pills on her. They have little effect on her, however. She instead seduces Humbert (the first of only two times she is recorded as doing so) -- and he discovers that he isn't her first lover, having had a sexual affair at summer camp with the son of the camp mistress. Traumatized to learn of her mother's death, Lolita initially surrenders to Humbert's carnal demands. Later he must resort to bribery as he drives her around the country in Charlotte's car, moving from state to state. Eventually they settle down in another New England town, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father. After a stay of some months, however, they resume their travels. Humbert is puzzled and guarded, sure that they are being followed and that she is seeing someone else. He is right: playwright Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's, and himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer, is tailing the couple in accordance with Lolita's secret plan of escape, which is successful. Humbert, still clueless as to Quilty's identity, remains unaware of their whereabouts in spite of his farcical attempts to find them.
During this period Humbert has a chaotic, two year love-affair with an alcoholic named Rita, who at thirty is ten years younger than himself and a passable 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 now married, pregnant, and in need of funds. Armed with a gun, Humbert, still driving Charlotte's car, tracks her down. She tells him that her husband, a nearly deaf war-veteran and the father of her child, was not her abductor. Humbert offers to give Lolita his entire financial worth if she will reveal his identity. Lolita tells Humbert what he wants to know, and of Quilty's attempt to force her into pornographic films involving young boys. Lolita maintains that she merely wanted to be near the man she loved -- Quilty, not Humbert. Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert surprises Quilty in his house. Quilty slowly begins to go insane when he sees Humbert's gun. After a mutually exhausting struggle for it, Quilty, now fully mad with fear, merely responds politely as Humbert shoots him, and Quilty dies with a comical lack of interest. Humbert is unamused and disoriented. Arrested for murder, he writes the book he entitles Lolita, or The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. Upon finishing, he dies, of coronary thrombosis. Lolita leaves with her husband to the remote Northwest, where she too dies, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, 1952.
Possible real-life prototype
According to Alexander Dolinin [1], the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Sally Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by a 50-year-old pedophile mechanic, Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have had sex with her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to “turn her in" for the theft and to send her to "a place for girls like you." The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.
The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic idea – that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter – in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik. This not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have drawn on some details of the Florence Horner case in writing Lolita. In fact, the La Salle case is mentioned explicitly in the book, in Chapter 33 of Part II:
"(Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?)"
Nabokov's afterward
In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterward to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.
In the afterward, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.
In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct."
Nabokov concluded the afterward with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."
Trivia
Nabokov decided the name "Lolita" should be pronounced (LOL ita - similar to lollypop) to reinforce her age and naivete.
External links
- National Public Radio|NPR: 50 Years Later, Lolita Still Seduces Readers
- Slate magazine): Lolita at 50 - Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking?
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Lolita ]
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