Lolita is a controversial 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov about an aging literature professor, Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he calls “Lolita”. The story follows his manipulative pursuit, which includes marrying her mother to be near her, and a subsequent cross-country journey as he kidnaps and abuses her, all narrated through his unreliable and poetic voice. The book explores themes of obsession, lust, and delusion, and is famous for its complex wordplay and literary style, despite its disturbing subject matter.
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Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita
Spellchecked by M. Avrekh, 21 Dec 1999
FOREWORD
"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," such were the
two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange
pages it preambulates. "Humbert Humbert," their author, had died in legal
captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before
his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation,
Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking
me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client's
will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters
pertaining to the preparation of "Lolita" for print. Mr. Clark's decision
may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just
been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work ("Do the Senses make
Sense?") wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the
correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious
details that despite "H.H."'s own efforts still subsisted in his text as
signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would
conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact.
Its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this
mask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unlifted
in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the
heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the
inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will
perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References
to "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers
for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to
come under my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the
destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be
given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires his
identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and sordid
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business" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His
daughter, "Louise," is by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a student
in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida.
Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn
girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotest
Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be
publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her
best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no
ghosts walk.
Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotions
that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression
been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single
obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine
who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a
lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by
their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an
editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might
call "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered
December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably
more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of "Lolita"
altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of
sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in
the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than
a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the
same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that "H.H."'s impassioned
confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult
males--a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann
(verbal communication)--enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special
experience "H.H." describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist
gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there
would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this
book.
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in
his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a
synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original,
and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.
I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, is is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and
jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to
attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on
the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty
that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of
diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically
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his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that
makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, "Lolita" will become, no doubt, a classic in
psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects;
and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary
worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for
in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward
child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac--these are not only vivid
characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point
out potent evils. "Lolita" should make all of us--parents, social workers,
educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the
task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Widworth, Mass
* PART ONE *
1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one
sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on
the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as
many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always
count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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.
2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going
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