Lolita (Paperback)

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
 
Annotation:
Vladimir Nabokov's notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. Humbert's cross-country flight with his adored nymphet ends with her betrayal of him with his rival, the evil Quilty, who pursues Lolita not out of love but out of lust and selfishness, and who functions as a kind of double for the more pure-hearted (if perverse) Humbert. Some critics see Humbert (who, like Nabokov, was a European migr) and Lolita (the quintessentially vulgar American) as personifications of the Old and New Worlds, one corrupting the other (but which?). One of the astonishing aspects of Nabokov's masterpiece is his dazzling command of English, including puns and wordplay worthy of Joyce. Another is the novel's famously checkered publishing history: LOLITA was rejected, banned, censored, and published underground, and it remained unpublished in the US until 1958.

Nabokov was born into a privileged Russian family, in a house with 50 servants where three languages were spoken. His childhood (brilliantly recreated in his richly evocative memoir, SPEAK, MEMORY), was idyllic, but he fled Russia at 20 after the Bolshevik revolution, losing his $2 million inheritance. He studied at Cambridge, graduating with honors, and lived for many years in a Berlin community of Russian migrs, where his father was killed at a political rally. He began writing novels there, and later in Paris, where he lived with his wife Vera and their son. In 1940, the Nabokovs moved to the U.S.; he taught at Wellesley, and then became a professor of Russian literature at Cornell, where he is remembered for his colorful, idiosyncratic, and illuminating lectures. It was at Cornell that Nabokov wrote his most famous novel, LOLITA, the success of which enabled him to give up teaching and move to Switzerland, where he lived until his death. Nabokov saw his main theme as that of the writer as exile. His dazzling novels assure his place as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was also a beloved teacher, a more than competent lepidopterist, and a translator of many works of literature, including his own.