Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22 [O.S. April 10] 1899, Saint Petersburg July 2,
1977, Montreux) was a Russian-American novelist and short story writer.
Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master
English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to entomology and had an interest in
chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his
most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that
characterised all his works.. Nabokov himself regarded his four-volume translation of Aleksandr
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as his other major achievement.
The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife, ne Elena Ivanovna
Rukavishnikova, he was born to a rich and prominent Orthodox family of the untitled nobility of
Saint Petersburg. He spent his childhood and youth there and at the country estate Vyra near
Siverskaya. Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The
family spoke Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from
an early age. In fact, much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English
before he could 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, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book, Mary, all the
way to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In 1916 Nabokov inherited the
estate Rozhestveno, next to Vyra, from his uncle Ruka, but lost it in the revolution one year later;
this was the only house he ever would own.
The Nabokov family left Saint Petersburg in the wake of the 1917 Revolution for a friend's estate in
the Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. The family did not expect to be out of Saint
Petersburg for very long, but in fact they would never return. Following the defeat of the White
Army in 1919, the Nabokovs left for exile in western Europe. The family settled briefly in England,
where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge and studied Slavic and Romance languages.
His Cambridge experiences would later help him in the writing of the novel Glory.

In 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried to shelter
their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This
episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's fiction, where
characters would meet their deaths under mistaken terms. In Pale Fire, for example, the poet
Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered.
In 1923 Nabokov graduated from Cambridge and using a Nansen passport relocated to Berlin,
where he gained a reputation within the colony of Russian migrs as a novelist and poet, writing
under the pseudonym 'V. V. Sirin'. Sirin refers to an owl as well as to a mythological bird, and he
apparently used the pseudonym as to not to be confused with his father. He married Vra
Evseyevna Slonim in Berlin in 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.
Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing
German troops to the United States. It was here that he met Edmund Wilson, who introduced
Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his recognition.
Nabokov came to 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. His lecture series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as
"funny," "learned," and "brilliantly satirical." The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts
during the 1941-42 academic year; they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in September, 1942
and lived there until June, 1948. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov
returned to Wellesley for the 194445 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. 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 curator of lepidoptery at
Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov
left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University. In 1945, he
became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his homosexual brother, Sergei (b.
1900,) who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, had died in a Nazi concentration
camp at Neuengamme, Germany, shortly before Germany's final collapse.

Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while travelling in the western United States. In June, 1953 he and
his family came to Ashland, Oregon, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head
of the Southern Oregon College Department of Social Science. There he finished Lolita and began
writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem
Lines Written in Oregon. On October 1, 1953, he and his family left for Ithaca, New York.
After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote
himself exclusively to writing. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived at the Montreux Palace
Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland.
Birth date
Nabokov was born on April 10, 1899 according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia at that time.
The Gregorian equivalent is April 22, which is achieved by adding 12 days to the Julian date. Some
sources have incorrectly calculated a date of April 23, by inappropriately using the 13-day
difference in the calendars that applied only after February 28, 1900. In Speak, Memory Nabokov
explains the cause of the error and confirms the correct date of April 22. But he himself celebrated
his birthday on April 23, and stated in an interview with The New York Times, "That is also
Shakespeares and Shirley Temples, so I have nothing to lose by saying I was born on the 23d."
Work
Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to his greatest distinction in the English
language. For this achievement, he has been compared with Joseph Conrad; yet some view this as
a dubious comparison, as Conrad composed only in English, never in his native Polish. (Nabokov
himself disdained the comparison for aesthetic reasons, declaring, "I differ from Joseph
Conradically.") 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. He has metaphorically described the transition from one language to another as the slow
journey at night from one village to another with only a candle for illumination. Nabokov himself
translated two books which he wrote in English into Russian, Conclusive Evidence, and Lolita.
The first "translation" was made because of Nabokov's feeling of imperfection of 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 which 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 is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use of alliteration. 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 its 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 of and
commentary on Aleksandr Pushkin's epic of the Russian soul, Eugene Onegin. 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 littlein 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 translation was the focus of a bitter polemic with Edmund Wilson and others; he had
rendered the very precisely metered and rhyming novel in verse to (by his own admission)
stumbling, non-rhymed prose. He argued that all verse translations of Onegin fatally betrayed the
author's use of language; critics replied that failure to make the translation as beautifully styled as
the original was a much greater betrayal.
Nabokov's Lectures on Literature also reveals 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.
Nabokov's detractors fault him for being an aesthete and for his over-attention to language and
detail rather than character development. In his essay "Nabokov, or Nostalgia," Danilo Ki wrote
that Nabokov's is "a magnificent, complex, and sterile art."
Not until glasnost did Nabokov's work become officially available in his native country.
Gorbachev authorized a five-volume edition of his writing in 1988.
Nabokov's synesthesia
Nabokov was a synesthete and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his
memoir Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her
mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait,
and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his
parents' hues"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".
Vladimir Nabokov's case of synesthesia can be described in more detail than merely the
association of colors with particular letters. For a synesthete letters are not simply associated with
certain colors; they are 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
His career as an entomologist was equally distinguished. Throughout an extensive career of collecting he
never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Vra to bring 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
identified 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 of the genera Madeleinea and Pseudolucia).
The paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in an essay
reprinted in his book I Have Landed. Gould notes that Nabokov was occasionally a scientific "stickin-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 differentby looking at their genitalia under a
microscope six hours a day, seven days a week, until his eyesight was permanently impaired."
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 logical 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 migr press, Poems and Problems (18 chess
compositions) and Speak, Memory ( 1 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 consciousnesss..." To him, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity,
and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar as in any other art.

Lolita
Lolita (1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was first written in English and
published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1967 in
New York. The novel is both internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its
controversial subject: the book's narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert becoming sexually
obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.
After its publication, the novel attained a classic status, becoming one of the best known and most
controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to
describe a sexually precocious young girl.
The novel has been adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick starring James Mason
as Humbert Humbert, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons.
Plot summary
Lolita is a novel narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literature scholar born in 1910 in Paris, France,
who is obsessed by what he refers to as 'nymphets' (sexually desirable pre-pubescent girls). This
obsession with young girls appears to have been a result of his failure to consummate an affair
with a childhood seaside sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, before her premature death from typhus.
Shortly before the start of World War II, Humbert leaves Paris for New York. In 1947 he moves to
Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. One of the rooms he's considering renting is in
the home of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who appears to be sexually interested in him, offering him
an "ominously low" rate. As the two make their way through Mrs. Haze's tour of the house,
Humbert rehearses different ways of turning her down, but then, being led out into the garden,
spies Haze's twelve-year-old daughter Dolores (variously referred to in the novel as Dolly, Lolita,
Lola, Lo, L), sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, seeing the Annabel Leigh in her, is instantly
attracted to the daughter, and eagerly agrees to rent the room.
Charlotte becomes his unwitting pawn in his quest to make Lolita a part of his living fantasy.
When Mrs. Haze drives Lolita off to summer camp, she leaves an ultimatum for Humbert, saying
that he must marry her (for she has fallen madly in love with him) or move out. Humbert chooses
the former for the sole reason of making Lolita his stepdaughter, intending to use heavy sedatives
on both her and her mother so he can molest Lolita in her sleep, although we never learn
specifically what he plans to do.

Humbert starts to write a diary recording his life in Ramsdale, and more specifically his relationship with
Lolita. He locks the diary in a drawer. While Humbert is in town and Lolita is away at camp, Charlotte
(who expresses a morbid jealousy of, and interest in, her new husband's past love life) manages to open
the drawer and finds his diary, which details his lack of interest in Charlotte and impassioned lust for her
daughter. Horrified and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with her daughter. Before doing so, she
writes three lettersto Humbert, Lolita, and a strict boarding school for young ladies to which she
apparently intended to send her daughter. Charlotte confronts Humbert when he returns home.
Retreating to the kitchen, he tells her that the diary entries are just notes for a novel. But Charlotte has
already bolted from the house to post the letters. Crossing the street, she is struck and killed by a passing
motorist. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, telling her that her mother is desperately ill in a hospital, and
takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel of regional repute (where he meets a strange man
who seems to know who he is, later revealed to be Quilty), intending to use the sleeping pills on
her. They have little effect on her, however. She instead seduces Humbert (the first of only two
times she is recorded as doing so)and he discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had a
sexual affair at summer camp with the camp mistress' son. After leaving the hotel, Humbert tells
the now-troublesome Lolita that her mother is dead. Alone and frightened, Lolita has no choice
but to accept Humbert into her life on his terms. Driving Lolita around the country in Charlotte's
car, moving from state to state and motel to motel, Humbert bribes Lolita for sexual favours.
Eventually they settle down in another New England town, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father
and Lolita enrolled in a private girls' school where the headmistress sees Humbert's possessive
supervision as that of a strict old-world European parent.
Humbert nevertheless is persuaded to allow Lolita to take part in a school theatrical club
(extracting additional sexual favours from her in exchange for his permission). Ominously, the
title of the playThe Enchanted Huntersis similar to the name of the hotel where they
technically became lovers. Lolita is enthusiastic about the play and is said to have impressed the
playwright, who attended a rehearsal, but before opening night she and Humbert have a ferocious
argument and she bolts from the house. Found by Humbert a few minutes later, Lolita declares
that she wants to immediately leave town and resume their travels. Humbert is delighted, but
increasingly guarded as they again drive westward, nagged by a feeling that they are being
followed and that Lolita knows who the follower is. He is right: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of
Charlotte's, nephew to the local dentist in Ramsdale, and the author of the play being performed
at Lolita's school, himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer, is tailing the couple in

accordance with a secret plan of escape devised together with Lolita. While Humbert becomes
increasingly paranoid about being tailed, Lolita becomes ill and recuperates in a nearby hospital.
One night she checks out with her "uncle", who has paid the hospital bill. Humbert, still clueless
as to the identity of Lolita's abductor, makes farcical and frantic attempts to find them by
inspecting various motel-register aliases, laced by Quilty with insults and jokes flavored with
literary allusions.
During this period Humbert has a chaotic, two-year love-affair with a petite alcoholic named Rita,
who at thirty is ten years younger than himself and a passable physical substitute for Lolita. By
1952 Humbert has settled down as a scholar at a small academic institute. One day he receives a
letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of
funds. Armed with a gun, Humbert, still driving Charlotte's car, sees Lolita again. She tells him
that her husband, a nearly deaf war-veteran and the father of her unborn child, was not her
abductor. Humbert offers to give Lolita his entire financial worth if she will reveal his identity.
Lolita complies, saying that she really loved Quilty but the affair ended when he threw her out
after she refused to perform in a pornographic film that he was making.
Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert surprises Quilty at his mansion. Quilty begins to go insane when
he sees Humbert's gun. After a mutually exhausting struggle for it, Quilty, now fully mad with
fear, merely responds politely as Humbert shoots him repeatedly. He finally dies with comical
disinterest. Humbert is exhausted and disoriented. Arrested for murder, he writes the book he
entitles Lolita, or The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. Upon
finishing, he dies of coronary thrombosis. He is thus unaware that Lolita leaves with her husband
to the remote Northwest where she too dies, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, 1952.
Style and interpretation
The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay 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 word play, 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". Nabokov's Lolita is far
from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's
obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel
wretch" and "a hateful person" (quoted in Levine, 1967).

Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European migr, as is Nabokov. But

Humbert is also extraordinarily handsome, and he asks the reader to bear that fact in mind. He
fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells
the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to listen to the
actual girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous
interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".
Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. 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".
Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an
ironist. Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, 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. "All of Nabokov's
books are about tyranny," he says, "even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all".
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a
covert women's reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of
Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both
public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Although rejecting a too-easy identification of Lolita's
captivity with that of her students ("...we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert...")
Nafisi writes of her students' strong emotional connection with the book: "what linked us so
closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer" and "like Lolita we tried to escape and
create our own little pockets of freedom".
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

10

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".
Publication and reception
Due to its subject matter, Nabokov was unable to find an American publisher for Lolita. After four
refused, he finally resorted to the Olympia Press in Paris. Although the first printing of 5,000 copies
sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the end of 1954, Graham Greene, in an
interview with the (London) Times, called it one of the best novels of 1954. This statement
provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express whose editor 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 the French followed suit and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita (the ban
lasted for two years). Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson caused a scandal
which contributed to the end of the political career of one of the publishers, Nigel Nicolson.
By complete contrast, American officials were initially nervous, but the first American edition
was issued without problems by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1958, and was a bestseller, the first book
since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication.
Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it
was named the fourth greatest English language novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
Nabokov rated the book highly himself. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962 he said,
Lolita is a special favourite of mine. It was my most difficult bookthe book that treated of a
theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special
pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
Two years later, in 1964's interview for Playboy he said,
I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzleits composition
and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way
you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other worksat least those I wrote in English:
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I
cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.

11

At the same year, in the interview for Life Nabokov was asked, "Which of your writings has
pleased you most?". He answered,
I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglowperhaps
because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible
for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of
young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
The Enchanter and other precursors
In 1985, The Enchanter, an English translation of a Nabokov novella originally titled Volshebnik
() was published posthumously. Volshebnik was written in Russian, while Nabokov
was living in France in 1939. It can be seen as an early version of Lolita but with significant
differences: the action takes place in central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate
his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide.
In chapter 3 of earlier novel The Gift (written in Russian in 19351937) the similar gist of Lolita's
first chapter is outlined to the protagonist Fyodor Cherdyntsev by Zina's obnoxious father-in-law
named Schegolev as an idea of novel he would like to write. According to Schegolev the episode
took place "in reality" and involved one of his acquaintances.
In early April of 1947 Nabokov has written to Edmund Wilson: "I am writing ... a short novel
about a man who liked little girlsand it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea ...". The
latter work eventually was expanded into Lolita in course of eight following years.
Allusions/references to other works

Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the woman in the poem
"Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases
borrowed from Poe's poem. 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. The part of the beginning of chapter one"Ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged
seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."is also a reference to the poem. ("With a
love that the winged seraphs in heaven / Coveted her and me.")

12

Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main
character is haunted by his doppelgnger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own
doppelgnger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen
pseudonym.

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, Franois Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mrime, Remy Belleau
and Pierre de Ronsard.

In chapter 17 of Part I, Humbert Humbert quotes "to hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and
print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

In chapter 35 of Part II, Humbert's "death sentence" on Clare Quilty parodies the rhythm
and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday.

The line "I cannot get out, said the starling" from Humbert's poem is taken from a
passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "The
Passport, the Hotel De Paris".

Possible real-life prototype

According to Alexander Dolinin,the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner,
kidnapped in 1948 by a 50-year-old pedophile mechanic, Frank La Salle, who had caught her
stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle travelled with her over various states for 21 months and is
believed to have had sex with 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 adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.
The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic ideathat of a
child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughterin his then-unpublished
1939 work Volshebnik (). This not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have
drawn on some details of the Florence Horner case in writing Lolita, and the La Salle case is
mentioned explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II:

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"(Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to
eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?)"
Heinz von Eschwege's "Lolita"
German academic Michael Maar's book The Two Lolitas (describes his recent discovery of a 1916
German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man travelling abroad who 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.[4][5] 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 in Harper's Magazine on this story.
Nabokov's afterword
In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included
in every subsequent edition of the book.
In the afterword, Nabokov wrote 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 wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic
novel' would make this elegant formula more correct.
Nabokov concluded 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

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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 tongue for a second-rate brand of English."
Russian translation
Nabokov translated Lolita into Russian; the translation was published by Phaedra in New York in 1967.
The translation includes a "Postscriptum" in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his
native tongue. Referring to the statement regarding the "infinitely docile Russian tongue" and "a
second-rate brand of English" that he had made in 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."

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