In Vladimir Nabokov's book "Lolita", what is Lolita's real name?
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Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (;  ,, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; c - 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955), his most famous novel in English, was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels;   Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction.  He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.

Nabokov, like his wife, his son and several characters in his novels, was a synesthete. He was also an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems.

Life and career

Russia

Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old Style), in Saint Petersburg,b to a wealthy and prominent family of the Russian nobility. His father was the liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870–1922) and his mother was the heiress Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova, the granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner. His father was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party and authored numerous books and articles about criminal law and politics.  His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov. His paternal grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov (1827–1904), had been Russia's Justice Minister in the reign of Alexander II. His paternal grandmother was the Baltic German Baroness Maria von Korff (1842–1926).

Vladimir was the family's eldest and favorite child, with four younger siblings: Sergey (1900–45); Olga (1903–78); Elena (1906–2000) and Kiril (1912–64). Sergey would be killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, after he spoke out publicly denouncing Hitler's regime.  Olga is recalled by Ayn Rand (her close friend at Stoiunina Gymnasium) as having been a supporter of constitutional monarchy who had first awakened Rand's interest in politics.   The youngest daughter Elena, who would in later years become Vladimir's favourite sibling, published her correspondence with her brother in 1985 and would become an important living source for later biographers of Nabokov.

Nabokov spent his childhood and youth in Saint Petersburg and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya, to the south of the city. His childhood, which he had called "perfect" and "cosmopolitan," was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. He relates that the first English book his mother read to him was Misunderstood (1869) by Florence Montgomery. In fact, much to his patriotic father's chagrin, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, and it provided a theme that echoes from his first book Mary to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. While the family was nominally Orthodox, they felt no religious fervor, and Vladimir was not forced to attend church after he lost interest. In 1916, Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno, next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov ("Uncle Ruka" in Speak, Memory), but lost it in the October Revolution one year later; this was the only house he ever owned.

Nabokov's adolescence was also the period in which his first serious literary endeavors were made. In 1916, Nabokov had his first collection of poetry published, Stikhi ("Poems"), a collection of 68 Russian poems. At the time, Nabokov was attending Tenishev school in Saint Petersburg, where his literature teacher Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius had been critical toward his literary accomplishments. Some time after the publication of Stikhi, Zinaida Gippius, renowned poet and first cousin of Vladimir Gippius, told Nabokov's father at a social event, "Please tell your son that he will never be a writer." 

Emigration

After the 1917 February Revolution, Nabokov's father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government and, after the Bolshevik (October) Revolution, the family was forced to flee the city for Crimea, not expecting to be away for very long. They lived at a friend's estate and in September 1918 moved to Livadiya, at the time part of the Ukrainian Republic; Nabokov's father became a minister of justice in the Crimean Regional Government.

After the withdrawal of the German Army (November 1918) and the defeat of the White Army (early 1919), the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe. They settled briefly in England and Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, first studying zoology, then Slavic and Romance languages. His examination results on the first part of the Tripos, taken at the end of second year, were a starred first.  He sat the second part of the exam in his third year, just after his father's death.  Nabokov feared that he might fail the exam, but his script was marked second-class.  His final examination result was second-class, and his BA conferred in 1922. Nabokov later drew on his Cambridge experiences to write several works, including the novels Glory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

In 1920, Nabokov's family moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul ("Rudder"). Nabokov followed them to Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge.

Berlin years (1922–37)

In March 1922, Nabokov's father was fatally shot in Berlin by the Russian monarchist Piotr Shabelsky-Bork as he was trying to shield the real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in Nabokov's fiction, where characters would meet their deaths under accidental terms. (In Pale Fire, for example, one interpretation of the novel has an assassin mistakenly kill the poet John Shade, when his actual target is a fugitive European monarch.) Shortly after his father's death, Nabokov's mother and sister moved to Prague.

Nabokov stayed in Berlin, where he had become a recognised poet and writer within the émigré community and published under the nom de plume V. Sirin (a reference to the fabulous bird of Russian folklore). To supplement his scant writing income, he taught languages and gave tennis and boxing lessons. Of his fifteen Berlin years, Dieter E. Zimmer wrote: "He never became fond of Berlin, and at the end intensely disliked it.  He lived within the lively Russian community of Berlin that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated because he had nowhere else to go to. He knew little German. He knew few Germans except for landladies, shopkeepers, the petty immigration officials at the police headquarters." 

In 1922 Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; she broke off the engagement in early 1923, her parents worrying that he could not provide for her.  In May 1923 he met a Russian-Jewish woman, Véra Evseyevna Slonim, at a charity ball in Berlin. and married her in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

In 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly anti-Semitic environment; also in that year the assassin of Nabokov's father was appointed second-in-command of the Russian émigré group. In the same year Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. In 1937 he left Germany for France, where he had a short affair with Russian émigrée Irina Guadanini; his family followed, making their last visit to Prague en route. They settled in Paris, but also spent time in Cannes, Menton, Cap d'Antibes, and Fréjus. In May 1940 the Nabokov family fled from the advancing German troops to the United States on board the SS Champlain, with the exception of Nabokov's brother Sergei, who died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on 9 January 1945. 

United States

The Nabokovs settled in Manhattan and Vladimir began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. 

Nabokov joined the staff of Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department.
The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts, during the 1941–42 academic year. In September 1942 they moved to Cambridge where they lived until June 1948.
Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was the de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology.  After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where he taught until 1959. Among his students at Cornell was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later identified Nabokov as a major influence on her development as a writer. 

Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy"; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, it was Véra who stopped him. He called her the best-humored woman he had ever known. 

In June 1953 Nabokov and his family went to Ashland, Oregon. There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem called Lines Written in Oregon. On 1 October 1953, he and his family returned to Ithaca, New York, where he would later teach the young writer Thomas Pynchon. 

Montreux and death

After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. His son had obtained a position as an operatic bass at Reggio Emilia. On 1 October 1961, he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland; he stayed there until the end of his life.[http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov Herbert Gold (Summer-Fall 1967). "Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40"]. The Paris Review. From his sixth-floor quarters he conducted his business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt butterflies. In 1976 he was hospitalised with a fever doctors were unable to diagnose. He was rehospitalised in Lausanne in 1977 suffering from severe bronchial congestion. He died on 2 July in Montreux surrounded by his family and, according to his son, Dmitri, "with a triple moan of descending pitch".  His remains were cremated and are buried at the Clarens cemetery in Montreux.  

At the time of his death, he was working on a novel titled The Original of Laura. His wife Véra and son Dmitri were entrusted with Nabokov's literary executorship, and though he asked them to burn the manuscript,  they chose not to destroy his final work. The incomplete manuscript, around 125 handwritten index cards long,  remained in a Swiss bank vault where only two people, Dmitri Nabokov and an unknown person, had access. Portions of the manuscript were shown to Nabokov scholars. In April 2008, Dmitri announced that he would publish the novel. 

Prior to the incomplete novel's publication, several short excerpts of The Original of Laura were made public: German weekly Die Zeit, reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards obtained by its reporter Malte Herwig in its 14 August 2008 issue. In the accompanying article Herwig concludes that Laura, although fragmentary, is "vintage Nabokov". 

In July 2009, Playboy magazine acquired the rights to print a 5,000-word excerpt from The Original of Laura. It was printed in the December issue. 

The Original of Laura was published on 17 November 2009.

Work

Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he achieved his greatest fame with the novels he wrote in the English language. As a bilingual master, he has been compared to Joseph Conrad; Nabokov, however, disliked both the comparison and Conrad's work. He lamented to the critic Edmund Wilson, "I am too old to change Conradically" – which John Updike later called, "itself a jest of genius".  Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri. His trilingual upbringing had a profound influence on his artistry.

Nabokov himself translated into Russian two books that he had originally written in English, Conclusive Evidence and Lolita. The "translation" of Conclusive Evidence was made because of Nabokov's feeling of imperfection in the English version. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English, and to spend a lot of time explaining things that are well known in Russia; then he decided to re-write the book once again, in his first native language, and after that he made the final version, Speak, Memory (Nabokov first wanted to name it "Speak, Mnemosyne"). Nabokov was a proponent of individualism, and rejected concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression, such as totalitarianism in its various forms, as well as Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.  Poshlost, or as he transcribed it, poshlust, is disdained and frequently mocked in his works.  On translating Lolita, Nabokov writes, "I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate it myself." 

Nabokov's writing process involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards, which he expands into paragraphs and chapters, and rearranges to form the structure of his novels. 

Nabokov published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" in the 1920s to 1940s, occasionally to mask his identity from critics.  He also makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character "Vivian Darkbloom" (an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"), who appears in both Lolita and Ada, or Ardor," and the character Blavdak Vinomori (another anagram of Nabokov's name) in "King, Queen, Knave."

Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, daring metaphors, and prose style capable of both parody and intense lyricism. He gained both fame and notoriety with his novel Lolita (1955), which tells of a grown man's devouring passion for a twelve-year-old girl. This and his other novels, particularly Pale Fire (1962), won him a place among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His longest novel, which met with a mixed response, is Ada (1969). He devoted more time to the composition of this novel than any of his others. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by linguistic playfulness. For example, his short story "The Vane Sisters" is famous in part for its acrostic final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a message from beyond the grave.

Nabokov's stature as a literary critic is founded largely on his four-volume translation and commentary for Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, published in 1964. That commentary ended with an appendix titled Notes on Prosody, which has developed a reputation of its own. It stemmed from his observation that while Pushkin's iambic tetrameters had been a part of Russian literature for a fairly short two centuries, they were clearly understood by the Russian prosodists. On the other hand, he viewed the much older English iambic tetrameters as muddled and poorly documented. In his own words:I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very little—in comparison to the forced preliminaries—namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular.

Nabokov's lectures at Cornell University, as collected in Lectures on Literature, reveal his controversial ideas concerning art.  He firmly believed that novels should not aim to teach and that readers should not merely empathise with characters but that a 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. He detested what he saw as 'general ideas' in novels, and so when teaching Ulysses, for example, he would insist students keep an eye on where the characters were in Dublin (with the aid of a map) rather than teaching the complex Irish history that many critics see as being essential to an understanding of the novel.  In 2010, Kitsch magazine, a student publication at Cornell, published a piece that focused on student reflections on his lectures and also explored Nabokov's long relationship with Playboy. 

Synesthesia

Nabokov was a self-described synesthete, who at a young age equated the number five with the colour red.  Aspects of synesthesia can be found in several of his works. His wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colours with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colours he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle". 

For some synesthetes, letters are not simply associated with certain colors, they are themselves colored. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar gift. In Bend Sinister Krug comments on his perception of the word "loyalty" as being like a golden fork lying out in the sun. In The Defense, Nabokov mentioned briefly how the main character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated storyline by "starting with colors".  Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia. 

Entomology

Nabokov's interest in entomology had been
inspired by books of Maria Sibylla Merian he had found in the attic of his family's country home in Vyra.  Throughout an extensive career of collecting he never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Véra to take him to collecting sites. During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology, he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His writings in this area were highly technical. This, combined with his specialty in the relatively unspectacular tribe Polyommatini of the family Lycaenidae, has left this facet of his life little explored by most admirers of his literary works. He described the Karner blue. The genus Nabokovia was named after him in honor of this work, as were a number of butterfly and moth species (e.g. many species in the genera Madeleinea and Pseudolucia bear epithets alluding to Nabokov or names from his novels).  In 1967, Nabokov commented: "The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all."

The palaeontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in his essay, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov" (reprinted in I Have Landed). Gould notes that Nabokov was occasionally a scientific "stick-in-the-mud". For example, Nabokov never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, and relied on the traditional (for lepidopterists) microscopic comparison of their genitalia.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History, which now contains the Museum of Comparative Zoology, still possesses Nabokov's "genitalia cabinet", where the author stored his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia.   "Nabokov was a serious taxonomist," according to the museum staff writer Nancy Pick, author of The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. "He actually did quite a good job at distinguishing species that you would not think were different—by looking at their genitalia under a microscope six hours a day, seven days a week, until his eyesight was permanently impaired."  The rest of his collection, about 4,300 specimens, was given to the Lausanne's Museum of Zoology in Switzerland.

Though his work was not taken seriously by professional lepidopterists during his life, new genetic research supports Nabokov's hypothesis that a group of butterfly species, called the Polyommatus blues, came to the New World over the Bering Strait in five waves, eventually reaching Chile. 

Many of Nabokov's fans have tried to ascribe literary value to his scientific papers, Gould notes. Conversely, others have claimed that his scientific work enriched his literary output. Gould advocates a third view, holding that the other two positions are examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Rather than assuming that either side of Nabokov's work caused or stimulated the other, Gould proposes that both stemmed from Nabokov's love of detail, contemplation, and symmetry.

Chess problems

Nabokov spent considerable time during his exile on the composition of chess problems. Such compositions he published in the Russian émigré press, Poems and Problems (18 chess compositions) and Speak, Memory (one problem). He describes the process of composing and constructing in his memoir: "The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness". To him, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar to that in any other art.

Politics and views

Russian politics 

Nabokov was a classical liberal, in the tradition of his father, a liberal statesman who served in the Provisional Government following the February Revolution of 1917.  Nabokov was a self-proclaimed "White Russian", and was, from its inception, a strong opponent of the Soviet government that came to power following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.  In a poem he wrote as a teenager in 1917, he described Lenin's Bolsheviks as "grey rag-tag people". 

Throughout his life, Nabokov would remain committed to the classical liberal political philosophy of his father, and equally opposed Tsarist autocracy, communism and fascism. 

Nabokov's father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was the most outspoken defender of Jewish rights in the Russian Empire, continuing in a family tradition that had been led by his own father, Dmitry Nabokov, who as Justice Minister under Tsar Alexander II had successfully blocked anti-semitic measures from being passed by the Interior Minister.  That family strain would continue in Vladimir Nabokov, who fiercely denounced anti-semitism in his writings, and in the 1930s Nabokov was able to escape Hitler's Germany only with the help of Russian Jewish émigrés who still had grateful memories of his family's defense of Jews in Tsarist times. 

When asked, in 1969, whether he would like to revisit the land he had fled in 1918, now the Soviet Union, he replied: "There's nothing to look at.  New tenement houses and old churches do not interest me.  The hotels there are terrible. I detest the Soviet theater. Any palace in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the Tsars.  The village huts in the forbidden hinterland are as dismally poor as ever, and the wretched peasant flogs his wretched cart horse with the same wretched zest.  As to my special northern landscape and the haunts of my childhood – well, I would not wish to contaminate their images preserved in my mind." 

American politics 

Later, during his American period, he expressed contempt for student activism, and all collective movements. In both letters and interviews, he reveals a profound contempt for the New Left movements of the 1960s, describing the protestors as "conformists" and "goofy hoodlums".   Nabokov supported the Vietnam War effort and voiced admiration for President Richard Nixon.    On his religious views, Nabokov was an agnostic. 

Views on women writers 

Nabokov admitted to having a "prejudice" against women writers. He wrote to Edmund Wilson, who had been making suggestions for his lectures: "I dislike Jane Austen, and am prejudiced, in fact against all women writers. They are in another class."   However, on rereading Mansfield Park he soon changed his mind and taught it in his literature course; he also praised the work of Mary McCarthy.  Although his wife Véra Nabokov worked as his personal translator and secretary, he made publicly known that his ideal translator was a male, and particularly not a "Russian-born female".   In the first chapter of Glory he attributes the protagonist's similar prejudice to the impressions made by children's writers like Lidiya Charski,  and in the short story "The Admiralty Spire" deplores the posturing, snobbery, antisemitism, and cutesiness he considered characteristic of Russian women authors.

Influence

The Russian literary critic Yuly Aykhenvald was an early admirer of Nabokov, citing in particular his ability to imbue objects with life: "he saturates trivial things with life, sense and psychology and gives a mind to objects; his refined senses notice colorations and nuances, smells and sounds, and everything acquires an unexpected meaning and truth under his gaze and through his words." The critic James Wood argued that Nabokov's use of descriptive detail proved an "overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him", including authors such as Martin Amis and John Updike.  While a student at Cornell in the 1950s, Thomas Pynchon attended several of Nabokov's lectures  and went on to make a direct allusion to Lolita in chapter six of his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) in which Serge, counter-tenor in the band the Paranoids, sings:
What chance has a lonely surfer boy
For the love of a surfer chick,
With all these Humbert Humbert cats
Coming on so big and sick?
For me, my baby was a woman,
For him she's just another nymphet.

It has also been argued that Pynchon's prose style is influenced by Nabokov's preference for actualism over realism.  Of the authors who came to prominence during Nabokov's lifetime, John Banville,  Don DeLillo,  Salman Rushdie,  and Edmund White  were all influenced by him.

Several authors who came to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s have also cited Nabokov's work as a literary influence. Aleksandar Hemon, whose high-wire wordplay and sense of the absurd are often compared to Nabokov's, has acknowledged the latter's impact on his writing. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon listed Lolita and Pale Fire among the "books that, I thought, changed my life when I read them,"  and stated that "Nabokov's English combines aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of schmaltz or soggy language".  Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides said that "Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers. He's able to juggle ten balls where most people can juggle three or four."  T. Coraghessan Boyle said that "Nabokov's playfulness and the ravishing beauty of his prose are ongoing influences" on his writing,  and Jhumpa Lahiri,  Marisha Pessl,  Maxim D. Shrayer,  Zadie Smith,  and Ki Longfellow  have also acknowledged Nabokov's influence.
Nabokov is featured both as an individual character and implicitly in W. G. Sebald's 1993 novel The Emigrants.  The song cycle "Sing, Poetry" on the 2011 contemporary classical album Troika comprises settings of Russian and English versions of three of Nabokov's poems by such composers as Jay Greenberg, Michael Schelle and Lev Zhurbin. 

List of works

Works about Nabokov

Biography

* Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-691-06794-5 (hardback) 1997. ISBN 0-691-02470-7 (paperback). London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. ISBN 0-7011-3700-2 (hardback)
* Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-691-06797-X (hardback) 1993. 0-691-02471-5 (paperback). London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 0-7011-3701-0 (hardback)
*Ch'ien, Evelyn. See chapter, "A Shuttlecock Over the Atlantic" in "Weird English."  Harvard University Press, 2004.
* Field, Andrew. VN The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown Publishers. 1986. ISBN 0-517-56113-1
* Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Vladimir Nabokov. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1987. 978-0872494954.
* Proffer, Elendea, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1991. ISBN 0-87501-078-4 (a collection of photographs)
* Rivers, J.E., and Nicol, Charles.  Nabokov's Fifth Arc.  Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-292-75522-2.
* Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).  New York, NY.: Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-679-44790-3.

Criticism

* Alexandrov, Vladimir. Nabokov's Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
* Bader, Julia. Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. California: University of California Press, 1972. 
* Barabtarlo, Gennadi. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin. New York: Ardis Publishing, 1989. 
* Blackwell, Stephen.  The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2009.
* Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
* Connolly, Julian W. A Reader's Guide to Nabokov's Lolita. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009.
* Foster, John Burt. Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
* Hardy Jr., James D. and Martin, Ann. "Light of My Life": Love, Time and Memory in Nabokov's Lolita. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.
* Johnson, Donald Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985.
* Livry, Anatoly. [http://www.editions-hermann.fr/ficheproduit.php?langfr&menu
&refCritiques+litt%E9raire+Nabokov+le+nietszch%E9en&prodid
892 «Nabokov le Nietzschéen»], HERMANN, Paris, 2010 
* Ливри, Анатолий. Физиология Сверхчеловека. Введение в третье тысячелетие. СПб.: Алетейя, 2011. – 312 с. http://exlibris.ng.ru/non-fiction/2011-06-02/6_game.html
* Meyer, Priscilla. Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
* Nicol, Charles and Barabtarlo, Gennady. A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction. London, Garland, 1993. ISBN 978-0-8153-0857-7.
* Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
* Rutledge, David. Nabokov's Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.
* Schuman, Samuel. Nabokov's Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
* Shrayer, Maxim D. The World of Nabokov's Stories. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1998.
*Shrayer, Maxim D. "Jewish Questions in Nabokov's Life and Art." In: Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives.  Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. PP. 73–91.
* Toker, Leona. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
* Trousdale, Rachel. Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
* Wood, Michael. The Magician's Doubts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
*Zanganeh, Lila Azam. The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-07992-0

Bibliography

* Alexandrov, Vladimir E., ed. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. ISBN 0-8153-0354-8.
* Funke, Sarah. Véra's Butterflies: First Editions by Vladimir Nabokov Inscribed to his Wife. New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1999. ISBN 0-9654020-1-0
* Juliar, Michael. Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1986. ISBN 0-8240-8590-6.

Media adaptations

*Peter Medak's short television film Nabokov on Kafka is a dramatisation of Nabokov's lectures on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The part of Nabokov is played by Christopher Plummer.
*Nabokov makes three cameo appearances, at widely scattered points in his life, in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
*See Lolita.
*In 1972 the novel King, Queen, Knave was released as a movie directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring Gina Lollobrigida, David Niven and John Moulder-Brown.
*In 1978 the novel Despair was adapted by Tom Stoppard for the movie directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
*In 1986 his first novel Mary (in Russian Maschenka) was loosely adapted for the movie Maschenka, starring Cary Elwes.
*The novel The Defense was adapted as a feature film, The Luzhin Defence, in 2000 by director Marleen Gorris.  The film starred John Turturro and Emily Watson.

Entomology

* Johnson, Kurt, and Steve Coates. Nabokov's blues: The scientific odyssey of a literary genius. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-137330-6 (very accessibly written)
* Sartori, Michel, ed. Les Papillons de Nabokov [The butterflies of Nabokov]. Lausanne: Musée cantonal de Zoologie, 1993. ISBN 2-9700051-0-7 (exhibition catalogue, primarily in English)
* Zimmer, Dieter E. A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths. Privately published, 2001. ISBN 3-00-007609-3 (web page)

Notes

* Note a: Note b: Note c:
Confusion over his birth date was generated by some people misunderstanding the relationship between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. At the time of Nabokov's birth, the offset between the calendars was 12 days. His date of birth in the Julian calendar was 10 April 1899;  in the Gregorian, 22 April 1899. The fact that the offset increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900 was always irrelevant to earlier dates, and hence a 13-day offset should never have been applied to Nabokov's date of birth. Nevertheless, it was so misapplied by some writers, and 23 April came to be erroneously shown in many places as his birthday. In his memoirs Speak, Memory Nabokov indicates that 22 April was the correct date but that he nevertheless preferred to celebrate his birthday "with diminishing pomp" on 23 April (p. 6). As he happily pointed out on several occasions during interviews, this meant he also shared a birthday with William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple (see, for example, his New York Times interview with Alden Whitman on 23 April 1969, p. 20; see also Brian Boyd's biography).

Citations Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, in 1958 in New York City, and in 1959 in London. Nabokov's own translation of the book into Russian was published by Phaedra Publishers in New York in 1967. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor called Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. "Lolita" is his private nickname for Dolores.

Lolita quickly attained a classic status; it is today regarded as one of the prime achievements in 20th century literature, though also among the most controversial. The novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. 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.

Lolita is included on TIME magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels  published from 1923 to 2005. It is also fourth on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, and holds a place in the Bokklubben World Library, a 2002 collection of the most celebrated books in history.

Plot summary 

Humbert Humbert, a European literary scholar, describes the premature death of his childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh. He suggests his unconsummated love for her caused his fixation with nymphets (girls aged 9–14) and indulges in his sexual fantasies by pretending to read a book in a public park and being aroused by nymphets playing near him, as well as by visiting a prostitute who he believes is 16 or 17, and imagining her to be three years younger.  After a misadventure when he requests a nymphet-aged girl from a pimp, Humbert marries an adult woman with childish mannerisms, Valeria, to allay suspicion. His marriage with Valeria dissolves, after she admits to having an affair with a Russian taxi driver. Humbert wants to kill her, but Valeria and the taxi driver leave before he gets the chance. After another visit to a psychiatric ward after a mental breakdown, he moves to the small New England town of Ramsdale to write.

Humbert fantasizes about meeting and eventually molesting the 12-year-old daughter of an impoverished family, the McCoos, from whom he agreed to rent an apartment. Upon his arrival in Ramsdale, however, he discovers that their house has burned down. A landlady named Mrs. Charlotte Haze offers to accommodate him instead, and Humbert visits her residence out of politeness. Humbert plans to decline Charlotte's offer until he sees her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (born 1935 ), known as "Lo," "Lola," or "Dolly". He becomes infatuated with her, in part because of her uncanny resemblance to Annabel, and agrees to stay at Charlotte's house only to be near her daughter, whom he privately nicknames "Lolita."

Humbert starts a diary in which he keeps detailed descriptions of Lolita's characteristics, along with moments that they spend together. The diary also contains hateful comments about Charlotte, along with a description of a picture in a magazine of a playwright (Clare Quilty ), who Lolita has a crush on and who Humbert resembles.

Charlotte, Lolita, her friend Mary, and Humbert plan to go to Hourglass Lake for a picnic one Sunday. However, Mary's mother phones to tell them that Mary is running a fever and that she can't go. Mrs. Haze postpones the picnic and, as a result, Lolita refuses to go to church with her. Mrs. Haze leaves for church and Humbert and Lolita are left alone. While the two sing a song, Humbert secretly ejaculates in his pants as Lolita sits on his lap. She does not notice and leaves for the movies. After returning from a lunch in town, Charlotte tells Humbert that Lolita is going to camp Thursday and she won't return until the next school year.

That Thursday, before getting in the car, Lolita runs back into the house and kisses Humbert goodbye. As Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, drives Lolita to summer camp, the housemaid delivers a letter to Humbert from Charlotte telling him that he must either marry her or move out to avoid embarrassment. To continue living near Lolita, Humbert agrees to marry Charlotte. After finding Humbert's diary and learning his true feelings, Charlotte confronts him, calling him a "detestable, abominable, criminal fraud." As Humbert goes into the kitchen to get them drinks, Charlotte runs out of the house with the letters that she had just written, but is killed by a passing car before she can mail them. A little girl gives Humbert the letters, and he later examines them: one was to Lolita telling her they were moving, another to a boarding school in which Lolita was to be enlisted, and a third to Humbert that suggested a possible reuniting between him and Charlotte in the future.

Humbert retrieves Lolita from camp, lying that Charlotte has been hospitalized, and takes Lolita to a hotel, where he plans to use a sleeping pill on Lolita and rape her while she is unconscious. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a man (Quilty ) who inquires about Lolita. Humbert excuses himself from the strange conversation and returns to the hotel room. There, he finds that the sedative was too mild after seeing Lolita drifting in and out of sleep. He lies next to her all night, fantasizing about him and her together. However, it is she who initiates sex in the morning, showing him what she had learned at summer camp. On their way to the fake hospital that Charlotte was supposed to be staying at, Humbert tells Lolita that her mother is dead. Thereafter Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. To keep Lolita from going to the police, Humbert tells her that if he is arrested, she will become a ward of the state and lose all her clothes and belongings. He also bribes her with food, money, or permission to attend fun events in return for sexual favors. After a year of touring North America, the two settle in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in a girls' school. Humbert becomes very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys. The headmistress of the school sees his strictness as the concern of a loving, though old-fashioned, parent. Humbert reluctantly grants Lolita permission to join the school play in exchange for more sexual favors. The play she joins is written by Mr. Clare Quilty, but Humbert doesn't know it. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, and Lolita runs away. Humbert searches frantically until he finds her bike next to the phone booth she was using. She brushes the phone call off and reconciles with him, saying she wants to go on another road trip with him, only this time she gets to choose where they go.

As Lolita and Humbert drive westward again, Humbert becomes suspicious that someone is following them, first thinking it's a cop and then later one of Lolita's admirers from school. Lolita falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital, while Humbert stays in a nearby motel. The hospital staff tells Humbert in the morning that her uncle checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, retracing his steps to every hotel that they'd been to thus far, but fails to track them. During his search, Humbert has a two-year relationship (ending in 1952) with a woman named Rita, whom he describes as a "kind, good sport" who "solemnly approve[s]" of his search for Lolita, while knowing none of the details.

Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert tracks down the address and finds Lolita, but her husband is not the man that kidnapped her. He promises to give her money in exchange for the name of the man who abducted her. She reveals that Clare Quilty checked her out of the hospital and tried to make her star in one of his pornographic films; but expelled her upon refusal because she only wanted to be with Quilty. She worked odd jobs before meeting and marrying her husband, Dick, who knows nothing about her past. Although she looks much older now, Humbert realizes that he still loves Lolita and repeatedly asks her to leave Dick and go with him, which she refuses. He gives her $4,000, which is much more than what she asked for, and then leaves.  As he leaves, she smiles and shouts goodbye as if he was her own father. Humbert tracks down the dentist who knows where to find Quilty, and later kills Quilty in his own mansion. Shortly afterwards, he is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and running a red light. The narrative closes with Humbert's final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the novel in its metafiction to be the memoirs of his life, only to be published after he and Lolita have both died. The novel's fictional foreword states that Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis after completing the manuscript, just one or two months after getting arrested. It also states that "Mrs. Richard F. Schiller" (Lolita) died giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952, at the age of 17, a month after Humbert's death on November 16, 1952.

Character descriptions 

* Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. - Humbert’s lawyer and cousin of John Ray, Jr., now working in the District of Columbia. He's mentioned in the Foreword.
* John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. - Narrator of the Foreword of Lolita. He's the cousin of Clarence Clark, who asked him to edit the memoir of Humbert Humbert. He was recently awarded the Poling Prize for the book, “Do the Senses make Sense?” Ray doesn't want to glorify HH, but believes that Lolita can be described by the word “offensive" which is "a synonym for ‘unusual’; and a great work of art is of course always original.”
* Humbert Humbert (H.H.) - Lolita's protagonist and narrator. He was born in Paris 1910 and died November 16, 1952 of heart failure, a few days before his trial. His father was French and Austrian, a Swiss citizen, and owner of a hotel on the Riviera. His mother was English and died at a picnic by lightning when he was three. He fell in love in his teens with a girl named Annabel and her death scarred, cursing him to always love girls in that age group. After many women, he finally finds the 12-year-old girl that he loves, Lolita. He doesn't become self-aware of his crimes until the end of the novel. He writes his memoir, Lolita, in a prison cell, while awaiting his trial for murdering Clare Quilty.
* Annabel Leigh - Humbert's first love when he was 13. She was half-English, half-Dutch. She stayed at Humbert's father's hotel during one summer with her strict parents. She and Humbert almost had intercourse on two separate occasions, but both were interrupted. At the end of the summer, she left with her family and four months later she died of Typhus in Corfu.
* Monique - H.H.’s 16 to 17-year-old prostitute that had intercourse with Humbert three times. Out of all the sexual events with prostitutes in his life, she brought him the most pleasure, due to her nymphic echo. He canceled their last encounter because she seemed to be getting older each time he saw her, and he wanted to preserve his memory of her in that state.
* Valeria - Daughter of a Polish doctor, who treats H.H. for dizziness and tachycardia. Valeria is in her late twenties to early thirties (Humbert's not particularly sure due to a bad passport). Humbert decides to marry her because he feels like a wife would flower within him morals that he lacks and keep his sex drive under control. She acts like a little girl, which Humbert likes, however, she is still a woman and he doesn't like having sex with her unless there is an extreme need. Their marriage lasts from 1935-1939. After Humbert tells Valeria they're moving to America, Valeria admits that she was having an affair with a taxi driver, who she runs off with. She dies in 1945 while giving childbirth.
* Maximovich - A taxi driver and Valeria’s fling. He's a "stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut," says Humbert, “short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron.” He is very courteous and polite to Humbert as he takes Valeria away. Much later in life, he and Valeria move to California and participate in a well-paid, year-long experiment conducted by an American ethnologist, where they, along with other participants, had to eat bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. Humbert was pleased by this news.
* The McCoo Family - Humbert's cousins who were going to let Humbert live with them in America after he got out of rehab to relax. Humbert was also excited to get to know their nymphet daughter. When he arrived in their small town of Ramsdale, however, he found that the McCoo's house had been burned down and that he'd have to live with a neighbor, Mrs. Haze.
* Louise - The Haze's housemaid.
* Mrs. Haze or Charlotte Haze - Lolita's mom. A woman in her mid-thirties with simple but not unattractive features, who resembles Marlene Dietrich and also smokes like her. She and Lolita have only lived in Ramsdale for about two years. She's very strict with Lolita and doesn't seem to like her around the house, especially with Humbert there. She sends Lolita to summer camp and proposes boarding school. Charlotte falls in love with Humbert because of his European charm, and they get married after she gives him the ultimatum to either staying and getting married or leave and never come back. She also wants to know every woman that H.H. has ever been with because she is jealous. Even after finding out Humbert is a pedophile, Charlotte explains in one of three letters that she might consider reuniting with him one day. As she runs across the road to send these letters, she is killed by a car. Charlotte appears to have always wanted to be a sophisticated European, but she was stuck in an American body and mind.
* Frederick Beale, Jr. - The man that hit Charlotte with his car and killed her. He explains to Humbert that it was all her fault because she ran in front of him.
* Dolores Haze (Lolita) - The object of Humbert's obsession. She's a 12-year-old nymphet, daughter of Charlotte Haze, flirty, and playful. Humbert falls in love with her at first sight in the Haze's piazza, where she's half-naked wearing sunglasses. She initially has a crush on Humbert. However, she goes to summer camp and almost forgets about Humbert while fooling around with a boy named Charlie. She also has a huge crush on a playwright, Clare Quilty. After Humbert picks her up from camp, she seduces Humbert at a hotel called The Enchanted Hunters. When she finds out her mother has died, she realizes she's trapped with Humbert and goes on a road trip around the country with him. She can't tell the authorities about Humbert because Humbert says they'd put her in foster home. Humbert eventually enrolls her into an all girls school to give her an education. As time goes by, she gets to know girls her own age and starts to act out, asking for more money and more freedoms in exchange for sexual favors for Humbert. She eventually escapes Humbert with Quilty, and then later marries Dick Schiller, who she gets pregnant with at the age of 17. She dies on Christmas Day of 1952 during childbirth. Her child is a stillborn.
* Mona Dahl - Another girl that goes to Lolita's Beardsely School for Girls and is also in the play with Lolita. She appears to have a crush on Humbert whenever they interact and is said to have already been with a marine. She never gives away Lolita's secrets to Humbert. In the Foreword, it's revealed that many years later she is a student in Paris.
* Mrs. Pratt - The Beardsely School for Girls headmistress. She explains to Humbert that Lolita appears to not be sexually developing correctly and asks that he informs her and lets her join the school's play.
* Gaston Godin - He's a well-liked French professor at Beardsley College. He plays chess with Humbert in his room full of pictures of little boys. No one seems to notice the boys except for Humbert. Humbert doesn't think he's very smart.
* Clare Quilty - He's an American dramatist, born in Ocean City, New Jersey, 1911. Lolita has had a crush on him for a while. His family knows her family. He is also a pornographer and asks Lolita to participate after stealing her away from Humbert. He is murdered by Humbert in his own mansion. He is known to be H.H.'s doppelganger, sophisticated and a nymphet lover alike. His importance is not revealed until the end of the book.
* Rita - Humbert meets her after losing Lolita. She is a drinker and very self-conscious. She believe that one day Humbert will leave her like all men do, and after two years, he does. It says in the Foreword that she later married a proprietor of a hotel in Florida.
* Ivor Quilty - Clare Quilty’s uncle, and a dentist. He's always known the Haze family, which is how Clare Quilty got to know Lolita at such a young age. Humbert tricks Ivor by engaging him in small talk while appearing to be getting dental work done and immediately leaves after Ivor tells him where Clare lives.

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.  The Great Soviet Encyclopedia called Lolita "an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners".  The same description of the novel is found in Desmond Morris's reference work The Book of Ages.  A survey of books for Women's Studies courses describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek erotic novel".  Books focused on the history of erotic literature such as Michael Perkins' The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature also so classify Lolita. 

More cautious classifications have included a "novel with erotic motifs"  or one of "a number of works of classical erotic literature and art, and to novels that contain elements of eroticism, like ... Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover". 

However, 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."  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." 

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."  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." 

Style and interpretation 

The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot.  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". The name of one of the novel's characters, "Vivian Darkbloom", is an anagram of the author's name.

Several times, the narrator begs the reader to understand that he is not proud of his rape of Lolita and is filled with remorse.  At one point he listens to the sounds of children playing outdoors and is stricken with guilt at the realization that he robbed Lolita of her childhood. When he is reunited with the 17-year-old Lolita, he realizes that he still desires her, even though she no longer is the nymphet of his dreams.

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"  and "a hateful person." 

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 personally like, 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".  Similarly Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar write that the novel silences and objectifies Lolita.  Christine Clegg notes that this is a recurring theme in criticism of the novel in the 1990s.  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.  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". 

Clegg sees the novel's non-disclosure of Lolita's feelings as directly linked to the fact that her "real" name is Dolores and (in the novel but not the film) only Humbert refers to her as Lolita.  Humbert also states he has effectively "solipsized" Lolita early in the novel.  Eric Lemay of Northwestern University writes:

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". 

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." 

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." 

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".  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." 

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.  Because of its subject matter, Nabokov intended to publish it pseudonymously (although the anagrammatic character Vivian Darkbloom would tip off the alert reader).  The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday.  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".  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. 

Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors".  Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, 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.  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".  British Customs officers were then instructed by a panicked Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom.  In December 1956, France followed suit, and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita;  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. 

The novel then appeared in Danish and Dutch translations.  Two editions of a Swedish translation were withdrawn at the author's request.  

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. 

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".  In this book one author urges teachers to note that Lolita's 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,  though in a survey of critics David Larmour notes that other interpreters of the novel have been reluctant to use that term.  Near the end of the novel, Humbert accuses himself of rape; however, after noting this, Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tries to let Humbert off the hook on the grounds that Dolores was not a virgin and seduced Humbert in the morning of their hotel stay.  This perspective is vigorously disputed by Peter Rabinowitz in his essay "Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?". 

In 1998, Lolita came fourth in a list by the Modern Library of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century. 

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.  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 hebophilia 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 becomes attracted to her.

In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–37) the similar gist of Lolitas 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".  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 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.  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). Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea,  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. 

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.

Chapter 26 of Part One contains a parody of Joyce's stream of consciousness. 

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, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre de Ronsard.

Vladimir Nabokov was fond of Lewis Carroll and had translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He even called Carroll the "first Humbert Humbert".  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 Alaskan town of Grey 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. 

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 James 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 mentioned above in Allusions, Alexander Dolinin suggests  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:

Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita" 

German academic Michael Maar's book The Two Lolitas  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 (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) 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.   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. 

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. 

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. 

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".  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". 

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". 

Estimation 

Nabokov rated the book highly. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962, he said:

Over a year later, in an interview for Playboy, he said:

In the same year, in an interview with Life, Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased him. He answered:

Russian translation 

The Russian translation includes a "Postscriptum"  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."

Adaptations 

Lolita has been filmed twice, been a musical, four stage-plays, one completed opera, and two ballets. There is also Nabokov's unfilmed (and re-edited) screenplay, an uncompleted opera based on the work, and an "imagined opera" which combines elements of opera and dance.

* Lolita was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon as Lolita; Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on this film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen; Stanley Kubrick and James Harris substantially rewrote Nabokov's script, though neither took credit. The film greatly expanded the character of Clare Quilty, and removed all references to Humbert's obsession with young girls before meeting Dolores. Veteran arranger Nelson Riddle composed the music for the film, whose soundtrack includes the hit single, "Lolita Ya Ya." 
* The book was adapted into a musical in 1971 by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry under the title Lolita, My Love. Critics praised the play for sensitively translating the story to the stage, but it nonetheless closed before it opened in New York. 
* Nabokov's own re-edited and condensed version of the screenplay (revised December 1973) he originally submitted for Kubrick's film (before its extensive rewrite by Kubrick and Harris) was published by McGraw-Hill in 1974. One new element is that Quilty's play The Hunted Enchanter, staged at Dolores' high school, contains a scene that is an exact duplicate of a painting in the front lobby of the hotel, The Enchanted Hunter, at which Humbert allows Lolita to seduce him. 
* In 1982 Edward Albee adapted the book into a play, Lolita. It was savaged by critics, Frank Rich notably predicting fatal damage to Albee's career.  Rich noted that the play's reading of the character of Quilty seemed to be taken from the Kubrick film.
* In 1992 Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin adapted Lolita into a Russian-language opera Lolita, which premiered in Swedish in 1994 at the Royal Swedish Opera. The first performance in Russian was in Moscow in 2004. The opera was nominated for Russia's Golden Mask award.  Its first performance in German was on 30 April at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden as the opening night of the Internationale Maifestspiele Wiesbaden in 2011. The German version was shortened from four hours to three, but noted Lolita's death at the conclusion, which had been omitted from the earlier longer version. It was considered well-staged but musically monotonous.  In 2001, Shchedrin extracted "symphonic fragments" for orchestra from the opera score, which were published as Lolita-Serenade.
* The 1997 film Lolita was directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. It received mixed reviews. It was delayed for more than a year because of its controversial subject matter, and was not released in Australia until 1999. Multiple critics noted that this film removed all elements of dark comedy from the story. In Salon, Charles Taylor wrote that it "replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism." 
* In 1999, the Boston-based composer John Harbison began an opera of Lolita, which he abandoned in the wake of the clergy child abuse scandal in Boston. He abandoned it by 2005, but fragments were woven into a seven-minute piece, "Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera". Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is a character in Lolita. 
* In 2003, Russian director Victor Sobchak wrote a second non-musical stage adaptation, which played at the Lion and Unicorn fringe theater in London. It drops the character of Quilty and updates the story to modern England, and includes long passages of Nabokov's prose in voiceover.Suellen Stringer-Hye, [http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/vncol26.htm "VN collation #26"], Zembla, 2003. Retrieved 13 March 2008.
* Also in 2003, a stage adaptation of Nabokov's unused screenplay was performed in Dublin adapted by Michael West. It was described by Karina Buckley (in the Sunday Times of London) as playing more like Italian commedia dell'arte than a dark drama about paedophilia. Hiroko Mikami notes that the initial sexual encounter between Lolita and Humbert was staged in a way that left this adaptation particularly open to the charge of placing the blame for initiating the relationship on Lolita and normalizing child sexual abuse; however, Mikami challenged this reading of the production,  noting that the ultimate devastation of events on Lolita's life is duly noted in the play.
* In 2003, Italian choreographer Davide Bombana created a ballet based on Lolita that ran 70 minutes. It used music by Dmitri Shostakovich, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke and Salvatore Sciarrino. It was performed by the Grand Ballet de Génève in Switzerland in November 2003. It earned him the award Premio Danza E Danza in 2004 as "Best Italian Choreographer Abroad". 
* American composer Joshua Fineberg and choreographer Johanne Saunier created an "imagined opera" of Lolita. Running 70 minutes, it premiered in Montclair, New Jersey in April 2009. While other characters silently dance, Humbert narrates, often with his back to the audience as his image is projected onto video screens. Writing in The New York Times, Steve Smith noted that it stressed Humbert as a moral monster and madman, rather than as a suave seducer, and that it does nothing to "suggest sympathy" on any level of Humbert.  Smith also described it as "less an opera in any conventional sense than a multimedia monodrama". The composer described Humbert as "deeply seductive but deeply evil". He expressed his desire to ignore the plot and the novel's elements of parody, and instead to put the audience "in the mind of a madman". He regarded himself as duplicating Nabokov's effect of putting something on the surface and undermining it, an effect for which he thought music was especially suited. 
* In 2009 Richard Nelson created a one-man drama, the only character onstage being Humbert speaking from his jail cell. It premiered in London with Brian Cox as Humbert. Cox believes that this is truer to the spirit of the book than other stage or film adaptations, since the story is not about Lolita herself but about Humbert's flawed memories of her. 
* Four Humors created and staged a Minnesota Fringe Festival version called "Four Humors Lolita: a Three-Man Show," August 2013. The show was billed as "A one hour stage play, based on the two and a half hour movie by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 5 hour screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on the 300 page novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as told by 3 idiots." 

Derivative literary works 

* The Italian novelist and scholar  Umberto Eco published a short parody of Nabokov's novel called "Granita" in 1959.  It presents the story of Umberto Umberto (Umberto being both the author's first name and the Italian form of "Humbert") and his illicit obsession with the elderly "Granita". 
* Published in 1992, Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita by Kim Morrissey contains poems which purport to be written by Lolita herself, reflecting on the events in the story, a sort of diary in poetry form. Morrissey portrays Lolita as an innocent, wounded soul. In Lolita Unclothed, a documentary by Camille Paglia, Morrisey complains that in the novel Lolita has "no voice".  Morrisey's retelling was adapted into an opera by composer Sid Rabinovitch, and performed at the New Music Festival in Winnipeg in 1993. 
* The 1995 novel Lo's Diary by Pia Pera retells the story from Lolita's point of view, making a few modifications to the story and names. (For example, Lolita does not die, and her last name is now "Maze".) The estate of Nabokov attempted to stop publication of the English translation (Lo's Diary), but it was protected by the court as "parody".  "There are only two reasons for such a book: gossip and style", writes Richard Corliss, adding that Lo's Diary "fails both ways". 
* Steve Martin wrote the short story "Lolita at Fifty," included in his collection Pure Drivel of 1999, which is a gently humorous look at how Dolores Haze's life might have turned out. She has gone through many husbands. Richard Corliss writes that: "In six pages Martin deftly sketches a woman who has known and used her allure for so long—ever since she was 11 and met Humbert Humbert—that it has become her career."
* Emily Prager states in the foreword to her novel Roger Fishbite that she wrote it mainly as a literary parody of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, partly as a "reply both to the book and to the icon that the character Lolita has become".  Prager's novel, set in the 1990s, is narrated by the Lolita character, thirteen-year-old Lucky Lady Linderhoff.

References in media 

Literary memoir

*Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir about teaching government-banned Western literary classics to women in the world of an Islamic Iran, which author Azar Nafisi describes as dominated in the 1980s by fundamentalist "morality squads".  Stories about the lives of her book club members are interspersed with critical commentary on Lolita and three other Western novels. Lolita in particular is dubbed the ultimate "forbidden" novel and becomes a metaphor for life in Iran. Although Nafasi states that the metaphor is not allegorical (p. 35), she does want to draw parallels between "victim and jailer" (p. 37). She implies that, like the principal character in Lolita, the regime in Iran imposes their "dream upon our reality, turning us into his figments of imagination." In both cases, the protagonist commits the "crime of solipsizing another person's life." February 2011 saw the premiere of a concert performance of an opera based on Reading Lolita in Tehran at the University of Maryland School of Music with music by doctoral student Elisabeth Mehl Greene and a libretto co-written by Iranian-American poet Mitra Motlagh. Azar Nafasi was closely involved in the development of the project and participated in an audience Q&A session after the premiere. 

Film

*In "The Missing Page", one of the most popular episodes (from 1960) of the British sitcom Hancock's Half Hour, Tony Hancock has read virtually every book in the library except Lolita, which is always out on loan. He repeatedly asks if it has been returned. When it is eventually returned, there is a commotion amongst the library users who all want the book. This specific incident in the episode is discussed in a 2003 article on the decline of the use of public libraries in Britain by G. K. Peatling. 
* In the movie Irma la Douce (1963), perky Parisian streetwalker Irma has a co-worker named Lolita, who is middle-aged. A  throwaway gag has Lolita running down the street wearing the heart-shaped sunglasses worn by her film counterpart.
* In the movie The Last of Sheila (1973), James Mason (who played Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962)) plays washed-up director Philip Dexter. There is a scene in the beginning of the film where he is shown on set for a commercial surrounded by little blonde girls in white frock dresses. There is also a party game later in which the host Clinton Greene (James Coburn) has written the secrets of his six guests on typewritten cards - one of which reads "Little Child Molester".       
* In the Woody Allen film Manhattan (1979), when Mary (Diane Keaton) discovers Isaac Davis (Allen) is dating a 17-year-old (Mariel Hemingway), she says, "Somewhere Nabokov is smiling". Alan A. Stone speculates that Lolita had inspired Manhattan.  Graham Vickers describes the female lead in Allen's movie as "a Lolita that is allowed to express her own point of view" and emerges from the relationship "graceful, generous, and optimistic". 
* In the 1999 film American Beauty, the name of protagonist Lester Burnham—a middle-age man with a crush on his daughter's best friend—is an anagram of "Humbert learns". The girl's surname is Hays, which recalls Haze. Tracy Lemaster sees many parallels between the two stories including their references to rose petals and sports, arguing that Beautys cheerleading scene is directly derived from the tennis scene in Lolita. 
* In the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, Bill Murray's character comes across an overtly sexualized girl named Lolita. Although Murray's character says it's an "interesting choice of name", Roger Ebert notes that "Neither daughter nor mother seems to know that the name Lolita has literary associations." 

Television

* A January 2012 episode of the television series Pretty Little Liars revealed that the character of Alison (who has read Lolita) has an alter-ego named Vivian Darkbloom (slightly older and with different hair), named after a character in Lolita (and also Nabokov's Ada). TV Fanatic reviewer suggests this casts an eerie light on several of the pairings of older men and younger women in the series, in particular Ali's relationship with Ian.  Huffington Post has described the show as generally having a strong Lolita theme, noting that the novel became a plot point in one major episode. 

Popular music about the novel

* "Moi... Lolita" (English: "Me... Lolita") is the debut single of the famous French singer Alizée, which was released on her debut album Gourmandises (2000) when she was 15. It was popular in France, Spain, Belgium, Georgia, Austria, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and many other countries, in the media the singer is called the most famous of the Lolitas.[http://lescharts.com/showitem.asp?interpretAliz%E9e&titel
Moi%2E%2E%2E+Lolita&cat=s lescharts.com – Alizée – Moi... Lolita]
*In The Police song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" about a schoolgirl's crush on her teacher in the final verse, the teacher "starts to shake and cough/just like that old man in that book by Nabokov", a direct reference to the male protagonist in Lolita. 
*In the title song of her mainstream debut album, One of the Boys, Katy Perry says that she "studied Lolita religiously", and the cover-shot of the album references Lolita's appearance in the earlier Stanley Kubrick film. Perry has admitted on multiple occasions to a fascination and identification with the Lolita character and concept. 
*Marilyn Manson's song "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)" was indirectly inspired by the novel and the heart-shaped glasses worn by Lolita in the poster for Stanley Kubrick's film. In a BBC Radio One interview, Manson said he had been reading the novel as a consequence of now having a much younger girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood. She consequently showed up to meet him one day wearing heart-shaped glasses (which she also wears in the music video of the song). 
*Mexican singer Belinda released in 2010 a homonymous song, extracted from Carpe Diem. The song refers to the novel in the line "Sin duda Nabokov fue el que me escribió", which literally translates as "Without a doubt, Nabokov was the one who wrote me." It became a moderate hit at Venezuelan charts. 
*IAMX – Lolita
*Rolling Stone has noted that Lana Del Rey's 2012 album Born to Die has "loads of Lolita references",  and it has a bonus track entitled "Lolita". She has herself described the album's persona to a reviewer from The New Yorker as a combination of a "gangster Nancy Sinatra" and "Lolita lost in the hood." Their reviewer notes that "Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks" and that one of the album's singles, "Off to the Races", repeatedly quotes from the novel's opening sentence: "light of my life, fire of my loins."  Many of Del Rey's unreleased demos also refer to the novel, such as "Put Me in a Movie" and "1949".
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Dolores HAZE
 In Lambda and a book of Spock, Leda, what is Leda's real name? 

 In the S Spock's L is the L L L L L L-L L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S