Lolita
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir
Nabokov. The novel is notable for its
controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator,
a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is
obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually
involved after he becomes her stepfather. "Lolita" is his private
nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English and first
published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia
Press. Later it was translated into
Russian by Nabokov himself and published in New York City in 1967 by Phaedra
Publishers.
Lolita quickly attained a classic status. The novel was adapted
into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and another film by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an
acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful Broadway
musical. Its assimilation into popular
culture is such that the name "Lolita" has been used to imply that a young girl is sexually
precocious. Many authors consider it the greatest work of the 20th century,[2] and it has been included in several lists of best books,
such as Time's
List of the 100 Best Novels, Le Monde's
100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, Modern Library's 100
Best Novels, and The
Big Read.
Plot
The
novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray
states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym
"Humbert Humbert", who had recently died of heart disease while
awaiting a murder trial in jail. The memoir begins with Humbert's birth in
Paris in 1910. He spends his childhood on the French
Riviera, where he falls in love with his
friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is
interrupted by Annabel's premature death from typhus, which causes Humbert to become sexually obsessed with a
specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as "nymphets".
After graduation, Humbert works as an English teacher and begins editing an
academic literary textbook. Before the outbreak of World War II, Humbert moves
to New York. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small town in New England, where
he can calmly continue working on his book. The house that he intends to live
in is destroyed in a fire, and in his search for a new home, he meets the widow
Charlotte Haze, who is accepting tenants. Humbert visits Charlotte's residence
out of politeness and initially intends to decline her offer. However,
Charlotte leads Humbert to her garden, where her 12-year-old daughter Dolores
(also variably known as Dolly, Lo, Lola, and Lolita) is sunbathing. Humbert
sees in Dolores the perfect nymphet, the embodiment of his old love Annabel,
and quickly decides to move in.
The
impassioned Humbert constantly searches for discreet forms of fulfilling his
sexual urges, usually via the smallest physical contact with Dolores. When
Dolores is sent to summer camp, Humbert receives a letter from Charlotte, who
confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum – he is to either marry
her or move out immediately. Initially terrified, Humbert then begins to see
the charm in the situation of being Dolores's stepfather, and so marries
Charlotte for instrumental reasons. Charlotte later discovers Humbert's diary,
in which she learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust Charlotte
arouses in him. Shocked and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with Dolores
and writes letters addressed to her friends warning them of Humbert.
Disbelieving Humbert's false assurance that the diary is a sketch for a future
novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is killed by a
swerving car. Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp,
claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He
then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended.
Humbert knows he will feel guilty if he consciously rapes Dolores, and so
tricks her into taking sedatives in her ice cream. As he waits for the pill to
take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems
to be aware of Humbert's plan for Dolores. Humbert excuses himself from the
conversation and returns to the hotel room. There, he discovers that he had
been fobbed with a milder drug, as Dolores is merely drowsy and wakes up
frequently, drifting in and out of sleep. He dares not touch her that night. In
the morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she actually has already lost her
virginity, having engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at a different
camp a year ago. After leaving the hotel, Humbert reveals to Dolores that her
mother is dead.
Humbert
and Dolores travel across the country, driving all day and staying in motels.
Humbert desperately tries to maintain Dolores's interest in travel and himself,
and increasingly bribes her in exchange for sexual favors. They finally settle
in Beardsley, a small New England town. Humbert adopts the role of Dolores's
father and enrolls her in a local private school for girls. Humbert jealously and strictly controls all of Dolores's
social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties. It is only
at the instigation of the school headmaster, who regards Humbert as a strict
and conservative European parent, that he agrees to Dolores's participation in
the school play, the title of which is the same as the hotel in which Humbert
met the mysterious man. The day before the premiere of the performance, a
serious quarrel breaks out between Dolores and Humbert, and Dolores runs out of
the house. When Humbert finds her a few moments later, she tells him that she
wants to leave town and continue traveling. Humbert is initially delighted, but
as he travels, he becomes increasingly suspicious – he feels that he is being
followed by someone Dolores is familiar with. The man following them is Clare
Quilty – a friend of Charlotte and a famous playwright who wrote the play that
Dolores was to participate in. In the Colorado mountains, Dolores falls ill. Humbert
checks her into a local hospital, from where she is discharged one night by her
"uncle". Humbert knows she has no living relatives and he immediately
embarks on a frantic search to find Dolores and her abductor, but ultimately
fails. For the next two years, Humbert barely sustains himself in a moderately
functional relationship with a young alcoholic named Rita. Deeply depressed,
Humbert unexpectedly receives a letter from Dolores, now 17, telling him that
she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert, armed with a
pistol, tracks down Dolores's address and gives her the money, which was due as
an inheritance from her mother. Humbert learns that Dolores's husband, a deaf
mechanic, is not her abductor. Dolores reveals to Humbert that Quilty took her
from the hospital and that she was in love with him, but she was rejected when
she refused to star in one of his pornographic films. Dolores also rejects
Humbert's request to leave with him. Humbert goes to the drug-addled Quilty's
mansion and shoots him several times. Shortly afterward, Humbert is arrested,
and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and asks for his
memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death. Dolores dies
in childbirth on Christmas Eve, 1952.
Erotic motifs and controversy
Lolita is frequently described as an "erotic novel",
both by some critics but also in a standard reference work on literature Facts
on File: Companion to the American Short Story.[3] The Great Soviet Encyclopedia called Lolita "an experiment in combining an
erotic novel with an instructive novel
of manners".[4] The same description of the novel is found in Desmond
Morris's reference work The Book of
Ages.[5] A survey of books for Women's Studies courses describes it
as a "tongue-in-cheek
erotic novel".[6] Books focused on the history of erotic literature such as
Michael Perkins' The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature also so
classify Lolita.[7]
More
cautious classifications have included a "novel with erotic motifs"[8] or one of "a number of works of classical erotic
literature and art, and to novels that contain elements of eroticism, such
as Ulysses
and Lady Chatterley's Lover".[9]
This
classification has been disputed. Malcolm Bradbury writes "at first famous
as an erotic novel, Lolita soon won its way as a literary one—a late modernist distillation of the whole crucial mythology."[10] Samuel Schuman says that Nabokov "is a surrealist, linked to Gogol, Dostoyevsky,
and Kafka.
Lolita is characterized by irony and sarcasm; it is not an erotic
novel."[11]
Lance
Olsen writes: "The first 13 chapters
of the text, culminating with the oft-cited scene of Lo unwittingly stretching
her legs across Humbert's excited lap ... are the only chapters suggestive
of the erotic."[12] Nabokov himself observes in the novel's afterword that a
few readers were "misled. [by the opening of the book] ... into
assuming this was going to be a lewd book ... [expecting] the rising
succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and
felt bored."[13]
Style and interpretation
The
novel is narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word
play and his wry observations of American
culture. The novel's flamboyant style is
characterized by double entendres,
multilingual puns, anagrams,
and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of
its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser-used
"faunlet". Most writers see Humbert as an unreliable narrator
and credit Nabokov's powers as an ironist. For Richard
Rorty, in his interpretation of Lolita
in Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of
incuriosity." Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel
wretch"[14][15] and "a hateful person."[16]
Critics
have further noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by
Humbert, the novel gives very little information about what Lolita is like as a
person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book's narrator.
Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes "Not only is Lolita's voice silenced, her point of
view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned
and can be only surmised by the reader ... since it is Humbert who tells
the story ... throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in
Humbert's feelings".[17] Similarly Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar write that
the novel silences and objectifies Lolita.[18] Christine Clegg notes that this is a recurring theme in
criticism of the novel in the 1990s.[19] Actor Brian Cox,
who played Humbert in a 2009 one-man stage monologue based on the novel, stated
that the novel is "not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It's
Lolita as a memory". He concluded that a stage monologue would be truer to
the book than any film could possibly be.[20] Elizabeth Janeway writing in The New York Times
Book Review holds "Humbert is every man
who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to
him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made
flesh".[21]
Clegg
sees the novel's non-disclosure of Lolita's feelings as directly linked to the
fact that her "real" name is Dolores and only Humbert refers to her
as Lolita.[22] Humbert also states he has effectively "solipsized"
Lolita early in the novel.[23] Eric Lemay writes:
The
human child, the one noticed by non-nymphomaniacs, answers to other names, "Lo", "Lola",
"Dolly", and, least alluring of all, "Dolores". "But
in my arms," asserts Humbert, "she was always Lolita." And in
his arms or out, "Lolita" was always the creation of Humbert's craven
self ... The Siren-like Humbert sings a song of himself, to himself, and
titles that self and that song "Lolita". ... To transform
Dolores into Lolita, to seal this sad adolescent within his musky self, Humbert
must deny her her humanity.[24]
In
2003, Iranian
expatriate Azar Nafisi
published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a covert women's reading group. In an NPR interview Nafisi contrasts the sorrowful and seductive
sides of Dolores/Lolita's character. She notes "Because her name is not
Lolita, her real name is Dolores which as you know in Latin means dolour, so
her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence,
while Lolita becomes a sort of light-headed, seductive, and airy name. The
Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time and in our culture here
today we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl and the crassest
interpretation of her." Following Nafisi's comments, the NPR interviewer,
Madeleine Brand, lists as embodiments of the latter side of Lolita, "the Long
Island Lolita, Britney
Spears, the Olsen
twins, and Sue
Lyon in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita".[25]
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."[26]
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."[27]
A
minority of critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In
1958, Dorothy Parker
described the novel as "the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of
taste and culture, who can love only little girls" and Lolita as "a
dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered".[28] 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. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social
workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar."[29]
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External video
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In
his essay on Stalinism
Koba the Dread,
Martin
Amis proposes that Lolita is an
elaborate metaphor
for the totalitarianism
that 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. "Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with
incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and
lies," he says. "Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a
study in tyranny."
Publication and reception
Nabokov
finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it.[30] Because of its subject matter, Nabokov intended to publish
it pseudonymously (although the anagrammatic character Vivian Darkbloom would
tip off the alert reader).[31] The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret,
by Viking,
Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday.[32] After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to
publication in France. Via his translator Doussia Ergaz, it reached Maurice
Girodias of Olympia
Press, "three-quarters of [whose]
list was pornographic trash".[33] Underinformed about Olympia, overlooking hints of
Girodias's approval of the conduct of a protagonist Girodias presumed was based
on the author, and despite warnings from Morris
Bishop, his friend at Cornell,
Nabokov signed a contract with Olympia Press for publication of the book, to
come out under his own name.[34]
Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green
paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors".[35] Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out,[citation needed] there were no
substantial reviews. Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham
Greene, in the London Sunday
Times, called it one of the three best
books of 1955.[36] This statement provoked a response from the London Sunday
Express, whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read"
and "sheer unrestrained pornography".[37] British Customs officers were then instructed by the Home
Office to seize all copies entering the
United Kingdom.[38] In December 1956, France followed suit, and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita;[39]
the ban lasted for two years. Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London in 1959 was controversial enough to contribute to
the end of the political career of the Conservative
member of parliament Nigel
Nicolson, one of the company's partners.[40]
The
novel then appeared in Danish and Dutch translations. Two editions of a Swedish
translation were withdrawn at the author's request.[41][42]
Despite
initial trepidation, there was no official response in the U.S., and the first
American edition was issued by G. P. Putnam's Sons
in August 1958. The book was into a third printing within days and became the
first since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks.[43] Orville
Prescott, the influential book reviewer of
the New York Times,
greatly disliked the book, describing it as "dull, dull, dull in a
pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion".[44] This review failed to influence the book's sales.
The
novel continues to generate controversy today as modern society has become
increasingly aware of the lasting damage created by child sexual abuse.
In 2008, an entire book was published on the best ways to teach the novel in a
college classroom given that "its particular mix of narrative strategies,
ornate allusive prose, and troublesome subject matter complicates its
presentation to students".[45] In this book, one author urges teachers to note that
Dolores' suffering is noted in the book even if the main focus is on Humbert.
Many critics describe Humbert as a rapist, notably Azar
Nafisi in her best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran,[46] though in a survey of critics David Larmour notes that
other interpreters of the novel have been reluctant to use that term.[47] Near the end of the novel, Humbert accuses himself, as
noted in the above plot synopsis, of statutory rape. However, Nabokov
biographer Brian Boyd denies that it was rape "in any ordinary
sense," on the grounds that "it is she who suggests that they try out
the naughty trick" which she has already learned at summer camp.[48] This perspective is vigorously disputed by Peter Rabinowitz in his essay "Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?".[49]
Sources and links
Links in Nabokov's work
In
1928 Nabokov wrote a poem named Lilith (Лилит), depicting a sexually
attractive underage girl who seduces the male protagonist just to leave him
humiliated in public.[50] In 1939 he wrote a novella, Volshebnik (Волшебник),
that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The
Enchanter. It bears many similarities to Lolita,
but also has 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 hebephilia 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 had already had an affair when
middle-aged Albinus becomes attracted to her.
In
chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–37) the similar gist of Lolita's
first chapter is outlined to the protagonist, Fyodor Cherdyntsev, by his
landlord Shchyogolev 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 resists all his passes. Shchyogolev 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 (15 at the time of Shchyogolev's
marriage to her mother) who becomes the love of Fyodor's life.
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".[51] The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight
years. Nabokov used the title A Kingdom by the Sea in his 1974
pseudo-autobiographical 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.
In
Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire,
the titular poem by fictional John Shade mentions Hurricane Lolita coming up
the American east coast in 1958, and narrator Charles Kinbote (in the
commentary later in the book) notes it, questioning why anyone would have
chosen an obscure Spanish nickname for a hurricane. There were no hurricanes
named Lolita that year, but that is the year that Lolita the novel was
published in North America.
The
unfinished novel The Original of Laura, published posthumously, features the character Hubert H.
Hubert, an older man preying upon then-child protagonist, Flora. Unlike those
of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Hubert's advances are unsuccessful.
Literary pastiches, allusions and prototypes
The
novel abounds in allusions
to classical and modern literature. Virtually all of them have been noted in The
Annotated Lolita, edited and annotated by Alfred
Appel, Jr. Many are references to Humbert's
own favorite poet, Edgar
Allan Poe.
Humbert's
first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the "maiden" in the poem
"Annabel Lee"
by Poe; this poem is alluded to many times in the novel, and its lines are
borrowed to describe Humbert's love. A passage in chapter 11 reuses verbatim
Poe's phrase ...by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride.[52] In the opening of the novel, the phrase Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed,
simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied, is a pastiche of two passages of the poem, the winged seraphs of
heaven (line 11), and The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went
envying her and me (lines 21–2).[53] Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The
Kingdom by the Sea,[54]
drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's
work. A variant of this line is reprised in the opening of chapter one, which reads ...had I not
loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.[53]
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. The theme of
the doppelgänger also occurs in Nabokov's earlier novel, Despair.
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, Honoré de Balzac,
and Pierre de Ronsard.
Nabokov
was fond of the works of Lewis
Carroll, and had translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He even called Carroll the "first
Humbert Humbert".[56] Lolita contains a few brief allusions in the text to
the Alice books, though overall Nabokov avoided direct allusions to Carroll.
In her book, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, Joyce Milton claims
that a major inspiration for the novel was Charlie
Chaplin's relationship with his second
wife, Lita
Grey, whose real name was Lillita and is
often misstated as Lolita. Graham Vickers in his book Chasing Lolita: How
Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again argues that
the two major real-world predecessors of Humbert are Lewis Carroll and Charlie
Chaplin. Although Appel's comprehensive Annotated Lolita contains no
references to Charlie Chaplin, others have picked up several oblique references
to Chaplin's life in Nabokov's book. Bill Delaney notes that at the end Lolita
and her husband move to the fictional Alaskan town of "Gray Star" while Chaplin's The
Gold Rush, set in Alaska, was originally set
to star Lita Grey. Lolita's first sexual encounter was with a boy named Charlie
Holmes, whom Humbert describes as "the silent...but indefatigable
Charlie." Chaplin had an artist paint Lita Grey in imitation of Joshua
Reynolds's painting The Age of Innocence.
When Humbert visits Lolita in a class at her school, he notes a print of the
same painting in the classroom. Delaney's article notes many other parallels as
well.[57]
The
foreword refers to "the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933 by
Hon. John M. Woolsey
in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book"—that is, the
decision in the case United States v. One
Book Called Ulysses, in which
Woolsey ruled that Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.
In
chapter 29 of Part Two, Humbert comments that Lolita looks "like
Botticelli's russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty",
referencing Sandro Botticelli's
depiction of Venus
in, perhaps, The Birth of Venus or Venus and Mars.
In
chapter 35 of Part Two, Humbert's "death
sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm
and use of anaphora
in T. S. Eliot's
poem Ash Wednesday.
Many
other references to classical and Romantic literature
abound, including references to Lord
Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and to the poetry of Laurence
Sterne.
Other possible real-life prototypes
In
addition to the possible prototypes of Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin,
Alexander Dolinin suggests[58]
that the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner,
kidnapped in 1948 by 50-year-old 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 raped 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 notes various similarities in events
and descriptions.
While
Nabokov had already used the same basic idea – that of a child
molester and his victim booking into a hotel
as father and daughter—in his then-unpublished 1939 work The
Enchanter (Волшебник), he mentions the
Horner case explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II of Lolita:
Had
I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had
done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita"
German
academic Michael Maar's
book The Two Lolitas[59] describes his recent discovery of a 1916 German short story
titled "Lolita" whose middle-aged narrator describes travelling
abroad as a student. He takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed
with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has
speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia ("hidden memory") while he was composing Lolita
during the 1950s. Maar says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section
of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg),
and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in
Germany during Nabokov's time there.[60][61] The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the article "Lolita at 50: Did Nabokov take
literary liberties?" says that, according to Maar, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature
has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually
recast... Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in
the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter." See also Jonathan
Lethem's essay "The Ecstasy of
Influence: A Plagiarism" in Harper's Magazine on this story.[62]
Nabokov on Lolita
Afterword
In
1956, Nabokov wrote an afterword
to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita"), that first
appeared in the first U.S. edition and has appeared thereafter.[63]
One
of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is that, despite John Ray
Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story.[64]
Nabokov
adds 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".[65] 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 writes that
"the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make
this elegant formula more correct".[66]
Nabokov
concludes the afterword 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 language for a second-rate brand of English".[67]
Estimation
Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult
book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my
own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational
talent to make it real.[68]
No,
I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful
puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror
view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely
eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot
grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.[16][69]
In
the same year, in an interview with Life, Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased
him. He answered:
I
would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most
pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most
abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact
that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of
young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.[70]
Russian translation
The Russian translation includes a "Postscriptum"[71] in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his
native language. Referring to the afterword to the English edition, Nabokov
states that only "the scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the
last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text..." He
further explains that the "story of this translation is the story of a
disappointment. Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined,
still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the
locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out
to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some
burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks
rather like a lock pick."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita
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