Lolita: In Its Purest Form
In a sense, all I want to say is ‘Read this book, it’s really brilliant’. As if it were that easy.
Is it possible to return to a book and push aside all the commentaries and exegeses that have developed over time? Is it possible to return to the untainted, fresh account of the original? Perhaps it cannot be done, because in many cases later comments have shaped perceptions and understandings. Every year we read yet another explanation of the ‘meaning’ of Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, Animal Farm or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Novels by Jane Austen, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Gabriel Garcia Marquez appear to be continuously re-examined and interpreted to us. Given this, I suspect it is close to impossible to get back to an original text, the ‘ur-text’, and read it without being influenced by all those subsequent commentaries.
Of the many books on my list of ‘great and compelling’, I suspect one by Valdimir Nabokov, Lolita, might have suffered the most. Vilified, tossed aside and often banned, it is an extraordinary novel, less read than criticised. Many would know of the story through cinema representations, especially Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version with Jeremy Irons as Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze. Unlike a previous version, Lyne’s film is close to the novel’s darker elements. Although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov’s narrative and the performances of Irons and Swain, the film received a mixed critical reception in the United States. However well done, the film is not the book.
Given its place in popular culture, can we return to the novel in its purest form, as if it had never been read and criticised before? Claire Messud in the 3 April 2025 edition of the L A Review of Books offers an insightful commentary. Here are few observations of my own.
Before turning to the text, it might be helpful to remember something of the author. Vladimir Nabokov was born in Russia in 1899, then lived in Cambridge from 1919 to 1922, Berlin 1922 to 1937, Paris from 1937 to 1940, and finally arrived in the USA in where he lived for just over two decades before returning the Europe, settling in Montreux from 1961 until his death in 1977. His first nine novels were written in Russian , but he achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, then choosing to write in English.
It was during the time between 1948 to 1959 that Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. While he was there, his 1955 novel, Lolita, appeared. Lolita is ranked fourth on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best 20th Century Novels, which appeared in 1998 and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature, (his Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list). His memoir, Speak Memory, 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century. Commentaries on his approach suggest Nabokov was a proponent of individualism, rejecting concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression.
Nabokov produced his own translations into Russian two books he originally wrote in English: Conclusive Evidence andLolita. The ‘translation’ of Conclusive Evidence was made because Nabokov felt that the English version was imperfect. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English and to spend time explaining things that are well known in Russia; he decided to rewrite the book in his native language before completing the final version, Speak Memory.
As for the task of translating Lolita, Nabokov wrote, “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” (this was revealed in an interview with Alvin Toffler, Playboy, January 1964).
Nabokov’s creative processes involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards, which he expanded into paragraphs and chapters and rearranged to form the structure of his novels, a process screenwriters have enthusiastically adopted since then. He published under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin in the 1920s to 1940s, sometimes 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. His complex plots relied on clever word play, with daring metaphors, and a prose style often described as ‘capable of both parody and intense lyricism’.
Lolita was where he addressed the controversial subject of paedophilia. It is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray explains he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym ‘Humbert Humbert’, who had recently died of heart disease while in jail awaiting trial for an unspecified crime. The underlying approach of the book itself is one of a memoir, which addresses the readers as his jury, and begins with Humbert’s birth in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and Swiss father.
Offering a perspective far more complex than the film versions, in the novel Humbert Humbert spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel’s premature death from typhus, which leads him to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, those aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as “nymphets”.
So, now we face a dilemma, Should I reveal more of the plot, or should I say; ‘you have to read it for yourself’. The first of these options precludes useful comment; the latter can make it hard to draw conclusions for yourself, without any helpful exegesis. To be clear, this is a detailed, carefully constructed novel, full of ambiguities and subtle hints and suggestions. At around 336 pages, (but the length varies according to type face and type size). At same time, the complexity is a function of allusions, suggestions, some things that appear to be facts, and others might more likely be fantasies. I suggest the web he is weaving is, in large part, a function of how Humbert wants the story to read. The overall plot is important, and so this is adapted from the Wikipedia summary, which makes clear the key elements of the story.
After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time. He is briefly married to a woman named Valeria before she leaves him for another man. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Humbert emigrates to the United States. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town where he works on his book. However, his new home is burnt down, and he’s approached by a widow, Charlotte Haze, who’s looking for a lodger. Humbert visits Charlotte’s home and was about to decline her offer when he goes into the garden and there meets Charlotte’s 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lo, and Lola), who is sunbathing. For Humbert Dolores, (whom he calls Lolita), is the perfect nymphet. He quickly decides to move in.
Wracked with passion, Humbert seeks discreet ways to fulfil his sexual urges, usually via small moments of physical contact with Dolores. When Dolores is sent to summer camp, Charlotte writes to Humbert. She confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum: either marry her or move out immediately. Stunned, Humbert realises the advantages of being Dolores’ stepfather, and so he marries Charlotte. Humbert experiments with drugging Charlotte with sleeping pills, planning to sedate both her and Dolores so that he can sexually assault Dolores. But Charlotte discovers Humbert’s diary, learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust he feels towards her. She announces her plan to leave, taking Dolores with her, and writes a number of letters to her friends warning them about Humbert and his intentions. Disbelieving his false assurance that the diary is only a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is hit and killed by a swerving car.
Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp, claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended, where he tricks her into taking a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert’s plan for Dolores. Humbert returns to the hotel room where he discovers that he has been fobbed off with a milder drug, and Dolores is merely drowsy. He dares not risk sexual contact with her that night.
The next morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at camp that summer. Humbert is furious and rapes her. Leaving the hotel, he tells Dolores her mother is dead, and they start travelling across the country, driving all day and staying each night in motels along the way. They finally settle in a small New England town, where Humbert adopts the role of Dolores’ father and enrols her in a local private school for girls. He controls all of Dolores’ social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties. He does agree to Dolores’ participation in the school play, but the day before the premiere, Dolores runs out of the house. He finds her in a drugstore and she tells him she wants to leave town for another road trip. He’s delighted, but as they travel, he becomes increasingly suspicious, feeling they are being followed by someone Dolores knows.
As Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, certain that he and Dolores are being trailed. Dolores falls ill, and Humbert checks her into a local hospital, but from where she’s discharged by an ‘uncle’. For the next two years, Humbert keeps searching for her until, unexpectedly, he receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores, telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert tracks her down and finds out that her abductor was the famous playwright Clare Quilty, who had crossed paths with Humbert and Dolores several times when they were travelling. Quilty had tracked the pair with Dolores assistance, but later kicked her out when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films.
Humbert claims to the reader that it was at this moment he realized that he had been in love with Dolores all along and implores her to leave with him, but she refuses. Accepting her decision, he gives her the money she is owed from her inheritance and then goes to the drug-addled Quilty’s mansion and shoots him dead. Soon after, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and in prison asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death. The Foreword to the story has already told us that Humbert died shortly after the beginning of his imprisonment, as did Dolores in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952.
Variously described as erotic, lewd, and even pornographic, Lolita has been a constant target for criticism and praise, with many writers observing how popular culture accounts bear little relationship to the book. Author Lance Olsen described Lolita in 1995 as a “Janus text”:
“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 noted in the novel’s afterword that a few readers were “misled [by the opening] … 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.”
Inevitably Nabokov was constantly questioned – and criticised – about the novel. In a 1967 Paris Review interview we read: “Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry—to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing”. He added “No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert–Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita. Humbert was fond of “little girls”—not simply “young girls”. Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets or ‘sex kittens’. Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his ‘aging mistress’”.
When asked in the same review about coming up with Humbert’s doubled name, he described it as “a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.” Critics noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, there is very little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book’s narrator. Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes: “Not only is Lolita’s voice silenced, her point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader … since it is Humbert who tells the story … throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in Humbert’s feelings.” (in Ellen Pifer’s OUP book, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).
Does Nabokov objectify Lolita? It’s a challenging question. Brian Cox, who played Nabokov in a stage monologue based on the novel commented it wasn’t “about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It’s Lolita as a memory.” Elizabeth Janeway 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.” (quoted by Erica Jong in The New York Times in 1988).
I could keep on quoting those for and against the novel. 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” (in The Bostone Globe, February 2011). That year 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.” Perhaps a final comment comes from literary critic Wayne Booth, who trusts that ‘skilful and mature’ readers will repudiate ‘Humbert’s blandishments’, picking up on Nabokov’s ironies, clues and ‘dead giveaway’ style, but warns many readers “will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends”, given all of the “seductive self-justification of skilful rhetoric.” Yes, indeed.
