Lolita

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-11-01
Features: Lolita is the author's most widely known work, with most of its content being the confession of the condemned man Humbert Humbert, narrating the twisted love story between a middle-aged man and an underage girl. The novel was initially not approved for publication in the United States and was first published in Europe by Olympia Press in Paris in 1955. In 1958, the American edition was finally published, and the work rose to the bestseller list of The New York Times. Lolita has been adapted into a film. One of the most astonishing achievements of Lolita is that as an immigrant writer, Nabokov created the American social and cultural background more authentically than the vast majority of native-born American writers. However, this "authenticity" is largely just an essential natural backdrop and does not give Humbert's desire world any sociological sense of reality. Nabokov has always been a magician obsessed with manipulating illusions. Like many characters in Nabokov's works, Humbert is an artist in disguise with extreme individualism. He is sensitive, imaginative, but almost obsessive. He once quoted a poet in the novel who said, "The moral sense in human nature is an obligation, and we must give the soul beauty." Of course, in Lolita, this so-called "beauty" is both artistically poetic and filled with the evil guilt of a fallen lover. As his object of desire, Lolita is merely a product of Humbert's consciousness, an illusion he whimsically attempts to snatch from external reality and time. The median age of puberty for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies from individuals as early as ten or earlier to seventeen. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her algebra lessons. Jem was in a green cellar. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. 'Monsieur Poe-poe,' as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet. Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had for object a speed of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me 'Barbara.' Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised motionlessly over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his home-made parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to the south of my stone-cold heels—and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me. To my surprise I found her dress. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in slacks and a T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not washed; her mouth was freshly though smudgy-painted, and her broad teeth gleamed like white-tipped ivory, or pinkish poker chips. 'And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relation to me whatever. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.