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Lolita (Censorship (Ready Reference series))

At a glance:

The Work

Vladimir Nabokov was already a widely respected Russian American novelist when his third novel in English, Lolita, was published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1955. It had been rejected by five American publishers and was not published in America until 1958. Although Lolita is now widely regarded as a classic, in the 1950’s it was regularly denounced, even generating calls for the deportation of its author. Although the novel became a best-seller, many libraries refused to keep it on the shelves. The 1962 film version, directed by Stanley Kubrick, retreated from the novel’s most disturbing aspects. Later adaptations—a musical comedy by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry and a dramatic version by Edward Albee—failed promptly.

The elegant first-person narrative of an émigré professor writing under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert is still often mistaken for an endorsement of pedophilia, particularly by those who have not actually read it. In the book, Nabokov mocks the moralizing smugness and pretensions to family values of the 1950’s United States, and parodies his own difficulties in coming to terms with American culture. Lolita is comic, tragic, and, ultimately, highly moral, not because it carries a simplistic message, but because it painfully evokes, as Humbert notes, that “the moral sense is the duty mortals have to pay, on the mortal sense of beauty.”

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Lolita. Edgemont, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1993. Contains nine essays on such topics as the effect of America on Humbert, necrophilia, the attacks on Freud, the parodic elements, the treatment of women, and Humbert as a writer.

Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Explains how Lolita grew out of an unsuccessful short story Nabokov wrote in 1939. Also finds similarities to other Nabokov works in Russian. Excellent analysis of how Humbert and Quilty are psychological doubles.

Maddox, Lucy. Nabokov’s Novels in English. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. Interprets the novel as an anatomy of an obsession, with Humbert romanticizing Lolita and America and discovering that both are flawed yet still endearing.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. The text of the novel, followed by notes explaining the allusions and translating the French passages, with occasional comments by Nabokov.

Proffer, Carl. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Argues that Nabokov’s works require especially close readings because of the elaborate linguistic and literary games. Identifies allusions and stylistic devices, such as alliteration, rhyme, puns, and image patterns.

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